StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: America is still waiting for a true populist

Sub-headline: The marginal voter wants universal healthcare and higher taxes, but also tighter borders

Mr. Ganesh is a bit late in posting  his Anti-Sanders essay. although not quite as crude, not to speak of less hysterical, than Lowry’s, or as dull-witted as David Brooks’ entry.
Rich Lowry’s essay in the National Review:

Headline: ‘Bernie Is Not Normal’

‘Sanders does indeed have his charms. He’s sincere, consistent, and inarguably himself. He now has a step on frenemy Elizabeth Warren in the leftist lane in the primaries because he’s not as painfully calculating as she is. But make no mistake: Sanders is a socialist continuing his takeover attempt of the Democratic party to forge what he aptly calls a political revolution. He may be more polite than Trump, but he’s wildly outside the mainstream and a clear and present danger to the public welfare.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/bernie-sanders-would-fundamentally-change-america/

And ends with this, that resorts to a concept utterly alien to ‘Conservatism’ ‘the public welfare’ :

‘Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator’ what better credential for this hatched-job on Harry ? Its shameless a-historicism, a monument to the publishers David and Frederick Barclay commitment to the Royals, as the subject of a necessary Feudal Nostalgia, that holds together this former Empire?
Its as if the arresting object lesson of Diana had been subject to a maladroit Stalinist erasure? Or should I resort to my own childhood remembrance of  Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend romance , as a story of the failed aspiration to freedom of a Royal, who lacked the courage to marry for love? My remembrance steeped in American newspaper/television melodrama of the time?

Princess Margaret became a Jet-Setter who spent a life , not unlike the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, in utter aimlessness, allied to cynical bitterness, expressed as anger over being treated as if she were not Royalty, by the lesser beings who dared to address her as an equal! Keeping company with Movie Stars like Jack Nicholson, and Patrician Rebel Gore Vidal, were her paltry compensation for her lack of courage.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/148df920-3b81-11ea-b84f-a62c46f39bc2

In a week in which Rich Lowry, editor of National Review opined on Bernie Sanders:

Headline: Bernie Is Not Normal
…
Sanders does indeed have his charms. He’s sincere, consistent, and inarguably himself. He now has a step on frenemy Elizabeth Warren in the leftist lane in the primaries because he’s not as painfully calculating as she is. But make no mistake: Sanders is a socialist continuing his takeover attempt of the Democratic party to forge what he aptly calls a political revolution. He may be more polite than Trump, but he’s wildly outside the mainstream and a clear and present danger to the public welfare.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/bernie-sanders-would-fundamentally-change-america/

I have skipped to the final paragraph, in which  Mr. Lowry resorts to the moral/political argument against Sanders, that cites him, as a  ‘a danger to the public welfare’ , which is utterly out of character, for an American Conservatism marinating in the ‘Free Market Ideology’. That scorns the very notion ‘the public welfare’ as an utter irrelevance: in fact the Trinity of Neo-Liberals Hayek/Mises/Friedman, assisted by Political Romantic and dull-witted pamphleteer Ayn Rand, are the natural enemies such bourgeois conventions.

David Brooks offers this refracted paranoia, as a legitimate critique of Sanders in The New York Times:

Headline: The Bernie Sanders Fallacy

Sub-headline: No, Virginia, there is no class war.

This is a golden age for “Theyism.” This is the belief that there is some malevolent, elite “they” out there and “they” are destroying life for the rest of us.

There is Donald Trump’s culture-war Theyism: The coastal cultural elites hate genuine Americans, undermining our values and opening our borders. And there is Bernie Sanders’s class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Note the puerile rhetorical framing of the sub-headline! Journalistic Kitsch!  From the Economic Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle in 2008, and its issue The Gig Economy. Readers don’t need self-proclaimed Political Prophet David Brooks, to revert to type as Capitalist Apologist: protege of Wm. F. Buckley Jr.! Nor to quote American Enterprise Institute hack Michael Strain, to provide tutelage to we lesser beings – That 2008 Collapse and that Gig Economy are the starkest of object lesson about Capitalist Greed!

As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more productive. If you improve worker bargaining power, that may help a bit, but over the long run people can’t earn what they don’t produce.

The final paragraphs of Mr. Brooks’ Capitalist Apologetics reverts to Public Moralizing in the manner of Mr. Lowry. With the caveat, that when all else fails, we must cede to the wisdom of ‘successful executives’.

But if you want to deal with our real problems, stop the us/them warfare and start dealing with productivity inequality.

Successful executives are doing what’s best for their companies, gathering as much talent as they can. This isn’t evil. It’s not exploitation.

The job of public policy is to make it easier for everybody to do what successful people are doing. Productivity is the key to national prosperity. Every time we increase productivity for one person, we all thrive a little more, together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/opinion/the-bernie-sanders-fallacy.html

Those successful executives: Tax Evader Tim Cook of Apple, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and a host of other thieves and liars: whose unslakable greed brought the Collapse of 2008 to fruition, and were ‘bailed out’ by the American People.  While millions lost their homes, and life saving to these thieves. Obama’s de facto pardon of these crooks establishes his status as a Neo-Liberal opportunist!  Mr. Lowry and Mr. Brooks are the political callobos, not to speak of  dull-witted apologists,  for these Plutocrats: who attack a Left-Wing Social Democrat Bernie Sanders as a political aberration!

Old Socialist

I always imagine Andy Divine as Waldo Lydecker in his bath, typing his latest column, while being interviewed by detective Mark McPherson, in that Preminger Hollywood kitsch, Laura! Preminger never made another ‘film’ that matched its melodramatic excesses. Waldo as a ‘straight man’ in love with Laura looks as comic as it is!
Andy is only mildly interesting when at full hysterical cry. This week’s set of political observations are a testament to Andy at his most jejune.

Political Observer

Headline: Beware Trump’s admiration for Putin, Xi and Erdogan

Sub-headline: The US president has made little attempt to hide his respect for strongman leaders

The fate of ‘The West’ was sealed with the ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan, that gave free reign to the Neo-Liberal Swindle! Too historically sophisticated an answer to Luce’s -the imperative of historical determinism is the natural enemy of the newspaperman confronting a deadline.

The water-shed of the 2008 ‘Economic Downturn’ was the ‘Gig Economy’ that institutionalized ‘worker insecurity’ i.e. the breeding ground for Trumpism, and other forms of political irrationalism. Is ‘The Decline of the West’ in full swing? Or is it just the decline of the once treasured Post-War Liberal Order?

Trump’s political victory has sealed ‘our fate’? All that is left is the hand-wringing of Pundits like Mr. Luce. He attempts to knit together a ‘rational explanation’ for such diverse political phenomenon: the cast of characters is at once small Xi Jinping and Putin, that experiences a kind of rhetorical bloat, to embrace  Modi,  Recep Tayyip Erdogan,  Viktor Orban,  Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. This by way of an exercise of political prescience? Or a self-serving riff on Ferguson’s Counter History before the fact?

The Democrats, under the leadership of Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler, and their  Show Trial of Trump will end in ignominious defeat in the Senate. No matter the histrionics of these political incompetents.  Not to forget the lackluster New Democratic candidates Biden, Warren, and Plutocrat Bloomberg. Where might a Pundit put the Socialist  Sanders in this political equation?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/28e1e7da-37fb-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4

Mr. Ferguson’s bellicosity is unslakable, and never a surprise. The Qassem Soleimani murder forces Ferguson to  resort to Walter Russel Mead’s Wall Street Journal celebration of ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’. And his ‘Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World’  This, part of the long tradition of a toxic American Exceptionalism.

Yet, as Walter Russell Mead explained in The Wall Street Journal, this is a quintessentially Jacksonian foreign policy move, in the spirit of Andrew Jackson, the president whom the former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon told his old boss to make his role model. Like his supporters in red-state America, Trump has no appetite for the “endless wars” they associate with George W Bush’s administration. But he and they also believe that the United States should retaliate against attacks on Americans. (Nawres Hamid, a naturalised US citizen, was killed by an Iranian-backed militia attack while working as an interpreter near Kirkuk on December 27.)

As Mead put it in his 2001 book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, a Jacksonian believes “that the most important goal of the US government in both foreign and domestic policy should be the physical security and the economic wellbeing of the American people”. Neoconservative nation-building or liberal interventionism are not on the Jacksonian menu. It’s all about “Don’t tread on me” — the rattlesnake’s warning on the American Revolutionary War battle flag.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/the-don-made-iran-an-offer-it-couldn-t-refuse-3ljvtn7m5

Next, as part of his weak rhetorical framing device, is the American Gangster film ‘The Godfather’ a celebration of terror, murder and thuggery, that is the perfect vulgar Pop Culture reference point of that ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’. The perfect blend of high and low?  Along with other Hollywood dreck: Bloodsport, Goodfellas, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Mr. Ferguson’s fascination with Hollywood kitsch is surprising for an Historian of some renown! Instead of actual history, the newspaper reader gets the Readymades of Hollywood, as reference points!

Note that ‘Jacksonian foreign policy’ had as its domestic corollary The Trail of Tears:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears

Mr. Ferguson’s special talent is to studiously ignore the crimes of the White Male Elites, that Colonized the World for profit. And its instruments of oppression: Sykes-Picot and Balfour Declaration- and now wonder at the active Rebellion, that has manifested itself since 1979, as The Islamic Republic of Iran!

Old Socialist

This vulgar melodrama from Hisham Melhem, newspaperman and hireling of the The Arab Gulf States Institute, headed by the son of the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner and financed by nearly 4 Million budget. This has CIA Front Group written all over it. Mr. Melhem follows the Party Line on the monster that was Soleimani :

‘The general and his men have the blood of hundreds of American soldiers on their hands and, more gruesomely, they inflicted tragedy and otherworldly pain on innumerable civilian victims in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Isis brought ruin on abandoned, if splendid, historic cities, but Soleimani’s marauders helped destroy Aleppo, a jewel of a modern-day metropolis in Syria.’

Should American readers think of the careers of Curtis LeMay , William Westmoreland or  David  Petraeus?

From Sykes-Picot, the Balfour Declaration, to the Coup of 1953, or to the present, The West and its cadre of Apologists deny that the Iranians can, and will make, their own history, without the tutelage of the superior White Male! There is the rub!
Where else but The Economist or Wall Street Journal  would readers find this brazenly incompetent propaganda?

Political Dissident

https://www.ft.com/content/3fa20ba4-320f-11ea-a329-0bcf87a328f2

Mr. Ganesh’s forgettable political chatter is rescued from the territory of the jejune by his attack on his literary/political better Gore Vidal . Not the ‘Sage of Amalfi’ but ‘The Patrician Rebel’ who was almost a big a snob as our Posh Boy!

Mr Pompeo this week said that “endless wars are the direct result of weakness”, unconsciously recalling Gore Vidal’s screed against militarists, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

Vidal was a polemicist, so ‘screed’ is the lowest form of insult to one its the masters of the genre

Pure isolationism, of the kind that still regrets US entry into the world wars, did not outlive Vidal, and did not deserve to either. It tended to pair easily with some distasteful views and the Sage of Amalfi was not above them.

Ganesh attributes ‘distasteful views’ to Vidal, while leaving this as free-floating, or even an instance of common knowledge, without the requisite examples-this passes for ‘argument’? Or call it what it is the purest kind of hyperbole. Mr. Ganesh is a writer whose acidulous commentaries can’t quite meet the standard set by Vidal’s Collected Essays!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/92fe41b8-3201-11ea-9703-eea0cae3f0de

After a quick search for the proper historical analogy for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Mr. Ferguson provides the ‘correct analogy’, and dismisses any notion that this will lead to WWIII. But note that Ferguson echos the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution, at its most shrill:

My response to the news that US forces had assassinated Qassem Soleimani was: “Good riddance. Now what?” No tears should be shed for Soleimani. As the mastermind of Iran’s numerous proxy wars beyond the Islamic Republic’s borders, he had the blood of countless people on his hands, including hundreds of American and coalition soldiers killed by the Shi’ite militias he helped to train and finance. Second only to the Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in personal power, Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit of the regime in Tehran.

Soleimani: the blood of countless people on his hands, Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit of the regime in Tehran.

Ferguson begins his attack on Obama as ‘squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war.’

This assassination does nothing to solve the problem created by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, when he decided to liquidate the US presence in Iraq in excessive haste, squandering all that had been achieved in the “surge” that ended the last Iraqi civil war.

Here is Stephen Walt on the “surge”

Headline: The myth of the “surge”

Sub-headline: With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 “surge” in Iraq was a success? The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. …

With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 “surge” in Iraq was a success?

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior “ethnic cleansing” that had separated the contending groups.

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded — that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam’s regime — and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

With the passage of time, the “surge” should be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to staunch the violence temporarily and let President Bush hand the problem off to his successor. Hawks will undoubtedly try to pin the blame on Obama by claiming that we were (finally) winning by the time Bush left office, in the hope that Americans have forgotten the strategic objectives that the “surge” was supposed to achieve. It’s a bogus argument, but what would you expect from the folks who got us in there in the first place?

The myth of the “surge”

 

Political Observer

Headline: Middle East braced for backlash after killing of Qassem Soleimani

Sub-headline: Fears grow that death of Iranian general will suck region into broader conflict

https://www.ft.com/content/52a2fce4-2e0f-11ea-a126-99756bd8f45e

 

The Financial Times ‘reports’ on the Soleimani killing with the aid of quotes from :  London School of Economics Middle East expert Toby Dodge, an anonymous Gulf official, Anwar Gargash, UAE’s minister of state and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Call this understatement?:

“No one in the Trump administration will have had a clear idea of its consequences so risk mitigation is almost impossible. Retaliation, in the first instance, is likely to be focused on Iraq,” said Toby Dodge, a Middle East expert at the London School of Economics Anwar Gargash and

The guarded comment of one anonymous Gulf official :

“There’s a great sense of relief,” said a former Gulf official. “However, Gulf states will be reserved in their official reaction given the fact that although everyone wants Iran to be contained within its borders, no one wants to see escalation.”

The statement of Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs:

“Rational engagement requires a calm and unemotional approach,” Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said in a tweet on Friday. Saudi Arabia also called for restraint after Soleimani’s killing.

The statement of Benjamin Netanyahu:

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, told Israeli reporters in Greece that Israel completely supported US actions. His office said he was cutting his trip short and would return to Israel to “follow developments” after the killing.

This reads almost like an actual news story!

Political Observer