StephenKMackSD's Blog

‘He has faced continued questions over his handling of anti-Semitism complaints within the party.’

The Great Lie of Corbyn’s mythical antisemitism, has been the hysterical accusation made by the New Labour faction, since Mr. Freedland’s Guardian column . With the help of Labour Friends of Israel and Ms Hodge, among the bad political actors selling this lie.  The Blairites refuse to see that their Thatcherism Lite is an abject failure . But this faction is greedy and self-serving, although Neo-Liberalism as a ideology and political system has collapsed.

Any lie might do, but Antisemitism offers so much as a functional lie in service to maintaining the political viability of New Labour, as  being on the ‘right side of history’ in its support for the Zionist State, and the lie of the EU as the savoir of ‘Europe’ . That myth began with Monnet’s Coal and Steel Cartel now weighted down with the ersatz trapping of Federalism.

From the sneeringly arrogant Posh Boy Cameron,to the always dyspeptic May , to the buffoonery of Johnson resembles a combination of ‘Beyond The Fringe’ ,‘Benny Hill’ and ‘Monty Python‘ : to pass through three generations!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/fc7b26d2-b9e4-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c

In one sentence Mr. Ganesh sums up his utter ignorance of ‘Race’ in America!

A feeling of racial dispossession animated at least the fringes of the Tea Party movement a decade ago.

The existence of slavery, named The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stamp as a form of academic pseudo-apologetics, has escaped Mr. Ganesh’s moral/political attention! A partial list of America’s record on a political culture steeped in racism.

1. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393
2. Reconstruction’s de facto end with the murder of Lincoln
3. The Rise of the KKK terror, and Jim Crow Laws
4. KKK membership once 3 million
5. D. W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ based on ‘The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan’ a novel published in 1905.
6. Brown v. Board I & II
7. The birth of the Federalist Society & its ‘Originalism’
8. The mass migration of ‘Dixiecrats’ into the Republican Party in ’64-’65 in response of the passage of the Civil Rights & Voting Right Acts
9. The Southern Strategy of Nixon
10. Reagan’s ’76 campaign against ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’
11. Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech: ‘I believe in States Rights’
12. Bush The Elder & Lee Atwater’s ‘Willie Horton’
13. The Republican attack on Obama as ‘not one of us’
14. Tea Party and its Permanent Revolution :Brat defeats Cantor.

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Headline: Trump calls for nationwide ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy

…

“I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically,” Trump told the questioner. “You understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.”

The practice, carried out most famously in New York but also by other police departments, is frequently criticized as an avenue for officers commit acts of racial profiling. Others tout it as responsible for a dramatic drop in New York City’s crime rate, although former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said in 2015 that the practice is “not a significant factor in the crime rate of this city.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-stop-and-frisk-228486

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Headline:Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case

…

In the interviews, Judge Scheindlin defended her handling of the stop-and-frisk case and cited the drop in the number of recorded street stops, to about 24,000 last year from 685,000 in 2011.

“Think of the lives that that has changed, the lives that that has touched,” she said, “the lives of people who were stopped for no good reason and how intrusive that is.” The policy had “bred nothing but distrust,” she added.

Judge Scheindlin said that, in her view, Mr. Bloomberg was “one of our best mayors,” but he “really never appreciated what was wrong with stopping 700,000 overwhelmingly innocent people as they went about their daily lives.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/nyregion/departing-judge-offers-blunt-defense-of-ruling-that-ended-stop-and-frisk.html

Mr . Ganesh’s historical ignorance, as expressed in his rhetoric, serves the purpose of not offending this publication’s Conservative readership. The term pentimento: ‘a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas’ is much too highfalutin a term, for what, in vulgar parlance, might be called a maladroit attempt at ‘whitewash’ ?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a6f54234-b8e9-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203

Given his impressive CV, as a Doctor of Philosophy and other impressive academic accomplishes, Mr. Ferguson has, what can only be described, as dubious political standards:

Academic career[edit]

In 1989, Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. From 1990 to 1992 he was an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history. In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and since 2004 he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics.^[18] In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard ^[19] to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.

Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham (UK), Macquarie University (Australia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). In May 2010, Michael Gove, education secretary, asked Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be entitled “history as a connected narrative”, for schools in England and Wales.^[20][21] In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[22]

…

In 2018, Ferguson apologized after fellow historians criticized him for only inviting white men as speakers to a Stanford conference on applied history.^[23]

Also in 2018, emails documenting Ferguson’s attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson’s choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative were released to the public and University administrators.^[24] He teamed with a Republican student group to find information that might discredit the student. Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.^[24][25] Ferguson responded in his column^[26] saying, “Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. “A famous victory,” I wrote the morning after the Murray event. “Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Then I added: “Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile” — a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on “Mr O”. The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down.”

…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson

Given Ferguson’s record of political dishonesty, manipulation and maladroit attempted cover up, the reader can only approach Mr. Ferguson’s latest essay on Trump as crazy-fox ,with the critical spirit as it confronts propaganda.

Given that America’s economy is still growing at a reasonable 2.1% and has the lowest unemployment rate since December 1969, the decision took a bit of explaining.

The American government’s measures of the economy is so steeped in self-serving mendacity, that if Ferguson, if he were given to the exercise of honesty, might engage in unmasking.

Here is the paragraph where Ferguson begins his attack on his fellow Posh Boys employing his straw-man of ‘ Ivy League types’.

…

New York and Washington are full of commentators who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton (which Powell attended) and consider themselves much smarter than Trump. They snigger when he calls himself a “stable genius”. But this president is crazy like a fox — an old American phrase that I never fully understood until last week. His behaviour may seem nuts or just plain dumb, but it is in fact calculated to outsmart the Ivy League types.

…

How is it possible that a self-proclaimed billionaire and Game Show Host can ‘outsmart’ those technocrats? The most apt descriptor of Ferguson’s ‘methodology‘ is a strategic deployment of anti-intellectualism, as a instance of a self-serving but carefully circumscribed pragmatism.

The question of what could or might be a break in the ‘populist trend’ : ‘a large-scale war’. Ferguson follows this with a warning that the fate of  Neo-Conservative ‘eggheads’  as cautionary: the ‘as if’ here is that Ferguson stood apart from this  ‘another set of eggheads’, instead of his actual part, as enthusiastic fellow traveler.

…

Could anything break this trend, whereby falling interest rates and painless deficits help populists stay in power? One answer I can think of is a large-scale war, which has tended to be the thing, historically, that drives inflation expectations and interest rates upwards. But that, too, is something the populists have pretty much ruled out. They saw what became of another set of eggheads — the neoconservatives — when they decided to revive war as an instrument of policy after September 11.

Another game-changer would be an election surprise. Markets seem to love a right-wing government unconstrained by monetary and fiscal rules. They may feel differently if a left-wing government inherits this lack of constraint. The difference between technocracy and democracy is that there’s always more than one game in town. And not all crazy foxes are on the right.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/donald-trumps-crazy-tariffs-have-outfoxed-the-federal-reserve-3h23xwsbl

Note that the specter of ‘a left-wing government’ : Corbyn in Great Britain or Bernie Sanders in America are of equal danger. Note that ‘Crazy foxes’ is rhetorically transmogrified into a descriptor, that now expresses an equal danger, or at least broadly hints at that concept , if I’m reading Ferguson with complete comprehension? The thought occurs, in terms of another ‘as if’: is Ferguson a sub rosa Deconstructionist?

Old Socialist

@Paul A. Myers

Thank you for your well presented,  not to speak of  politically sophisticated arguments. In reply I would offer this: The collapse of the Neo-Liberal swindle in 2008 and its issue ‘The Gig Economy’ made Trump, or someone like him possible. Not to speak of the Republican Party as the captive of American Jacobins: The Tea Party. Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ, looks elsewhere for that Beast, she is ideologically blind to the Radicals in the Party of her beloved Reagan. How did Our Peggy react to the recent leak of Ronny’s conversation with Nixon? The political present seems to be brimming with digressions! Yet the political crisis in America is described by these seeming digressions. The collapse of the legitimacy of America’s Class is verified by the rise and victory of Trump.

Obama was an almost believable ‘Progressive’, an appellation favored by one of his early enthusiasts Arianna Huffington, yet he was and is Neo-Liberal, to his core. His unstinting support for the TTP, even as his term ended, and look at the defeat of Merrick Garland due to McConnell’s utterly dishonest maneuvering. Yet Obama looked politically passive, like Gore, he was not even capable of a bit of political fisticuffs. Too much Harvard?

Concerning the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, he let NATO,the EU, FDD, Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland run the show. His was a politics steeped in the cultivation of bourgeois political respectability.
One need only look to Hillary Clinton, and a Party fully in control of her mendacious political operatives, the machinery that got Obama elected, to see that for all your praise for Pelosi, as some kind of legislative master, makes this observer of the American political scene grateful, that she might be ending her career, as servant to the Free Market Myth, depending on the 2020 election results. Her attacks on AOC, Omar, Pressley, Tlaib demonstrate, without doubt, that Pelosi is a political dinosaur, in the era that in which Left-Wing Social Democrats are in the ascent.

A more than interesting occurrence, after the debate, is the defensiveness of the New Democrats on the question of the Obama’s Legacy. Read this from Politico essay by Noland D. MCCaskell and Marc Caputo:

Headline: ‘Stay away from Barack’: Dems seethe over criticism of Obama

Sub-headline: Party officials are frustrated that the former president’s record was collateral damage in the debate attacks on Joe Biden. 

The disparagement of aspects of Obama’s record led to stern warnings that the tactic could backfire on the presidential candidates themselves — and perhaps arm Republicans with ammunition to attack the eventual Democratic nominee next fall.

“Stay away from Barack Obama,” advised Steve Elmendorf, a well-known Democratic lobbyist who worked on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

“I don’t know why you would attack Barack Obama or his record or any part of him when he’s the most popular person in the party,” he added. “And I don’t think it helps for the general election voters, either. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

Republicans have already seized on the division. Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump’s eldest son, tweeted Thursday morning how nice it was “to see Democrats finally go after Obama’s failed policies very aggressively.”

“The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically,” he said. “This morning, that’s all the fake news was talking about.“

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/01/democratic-debate-obama-biden-1444825

Note the extensive quotation of ‘ Steve Elmendorf, a well-known Democratic lobbyist’ that opens the essay. This is why Politico is America’s favorite Political Gossip Sheet, it presents political partisans, as if they are nearly ‘objective sources’ .

Regards

StephenKMackSD

https://on.ft.com/2Kfsm7N

The salient fact that Neo-Liberal Obama has been discarded by the New Democrats, seeking to unseat Trump, is hardly a surprise, except for the prisoners of Corporate Journalism: political scribblers still in thrall to Obama’s almost political ‘charisma’. Obama’s tenure was really the Clinton Administration in its 3rd and 4th iteration.

It is one thing for Donald Trump to reverse everything Barack Obama did. His quest is nearing completion. From the Iran nuclear deal to the Paris climate agreement, Mr Trump is stamping on anything with his predecessor’s name on it. The unfinished task is Obamacare, which Republicans have only partially disabled. It is thus ironic that most Democrats vying to replace Mr Trump would finish the job for him. Very few are promising to restore Obamacare. The main exception is Joe Biden, who, as Mr Obama’s number two, helped enact the Affordable Care Act. Even Mr Biden, however, is conflicted about whether to boast of his Obama association, or change the subject.

For comic relief,if any were needed, here is Mr. Luce’s quote from George Packer:

As the writer, George Packer, put it: “Obama was a technocrat disguised as a visionary.”

https://www.ft.com/content/4dc46204-b406-11e9-8cb2-799a3a8cf37b

Better to call Obama what he is, and remains, a Neo-Liberal, with cheerleaders like Oprah Winfrey,  and the now disappeared Arianna Huffington, acolyte of Milton Friedman. You can tell who a man is by the company he keeps? The Affordable Care Act, that monument to Obama as ‘Progressive’, an appellation favored by Huffington, as technocrat/visionary was/is Heritage Foundation Health Care. How inconvenient to the Obama coterie! Medicare for All was the clear winner in the debate!

P. S. It was a wonderful moment, in the debate, to see Tulsi Gabbard confront Kamala Harris, and her execrable record as Attorney General of California:

Political Observer

Alexander Zaitchik essay in The New Republic, is steeped in a modified form of  journalistic kitsch, but offers this, in conclusion to his essay on Sen. Josh Hawley.

…
Nobody is accusing the post-liberals of being Hitler-style fascists. It’s enough that they often sound like the people who prepped the ground for later authoritarian or fascist movements. Much of the language, sensibility, and obsessions of the post-liberals—the modern university, cosmopolitan elites, social cohesion and order—echoes the anti-modern rumblings in Fritz Stern’s study of post-liberalism in Wilhelmine Germany, The Politics of Cultural Despair. One of Stern’s subjects, the nineteenth-century German biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde, liked to imagine the Literat and the liberal political system that he believed inseparable from it as a “poisonous weed” that “must be extirpated from our streams and seas” before the “ancient gods [could] reemerge from the depths.” The idea of avenging gods is echoed in the title of R.R. Reno’s forthcoming post-liberal treatise, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.

Nobody knows how the gosh-golly, Ivy League–educated senator from Missouri will figure into all this in five or ten years. But if Josh Hawley seems too smooth, too educated, and too thoughtful to worry about, well, that is precisely what makes him worth worrying about. He was the only elected official to address the Burke Foundation last week for a reason. And he didn’t launch a PAC after one month in the Senate to teach Sunday School on a commune with Rod Dreher. He aspires to be a transformational figure, in more ways than one, and has the support of both the post-liberals and the billionaires. If it’s premature to say what, exactly, this portends, it’s not too early to know it isn’t anything good.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154526/josh-hawley-real?utm_content=buffer8c198&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Sen. Hawley shows his hand when he identifies the ‘enemies’ of his re-imagined American Republican Virtue:

…

That work begins with a clear assessment of where we stand.
For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities.
This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.
And they subscribe to a set of values held by similar elites in other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.
Call it the cosmopolitan consensus.

On economics, this consensus favors globalization—closer & closer economic union, more immigration, more movement of capital, more trade on whatever terms. The boundaries between America and the rest of the world should fade and eventually vanish.
The goal is to build a global consumer economy, one that will provide an endless supply of cheap goods, most of them made with cheap labor overseas, and funded by American dollars.
But it’s about more than economics. According to the cosmopolitan consensus, globalization is a moral imperative. That’s because our elites distrust patriotism and dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.
The nation’s leading academics will gladly say this for the record.

MIT Professor Emeritus Leo Marx has said that the “planet would be a better place to live if more people gave [their] primary allegiance ‘to the community of human beings in the entire world.’”
NYU’s Richard Sennett has denounced what he called “the evil of shared national identity.”
The late Lloyd Rudolph of the University of Chicago said patriotism “excludes difference and speaks the language of hate and violence.”
And then there’s Martha Nussbaum, who wrote that it is wrong and morally dangerous to teach students that they are “above all, citizens of the United States.” Instead, they should be educated for “world citizenship.”
You get the idea. The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.
They regard our inherited traditions as oppressive and our shared institutions—like family and neighborhood and church—as backwards..
What they offer instead is a progressive agenda of social liberation in tune with the priorities of their wealthy and well-educated counterparts around the world.
And all of this—the economic globalizing, the social liberationism—has worked quite well. For some. For the cosmopolitan class.

…

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-josh-hawleys-speech-national-conservatism-conference

Does it startle the reader that Marx , Sennett and Nussbaum are ‘Liberals’ in the largest sense of that descriptor? Or that this Cosmopolitan Class in to blame for the nation’s economic ills. What remains off stage, in Sen. Hawley’s narrative, is the brutal fact that Neo-Liberalism and its Free Market Ideology collapsed in 2008: the politics, the economics of America, has yet to fully come to terms with, or to emancipate itself from this economic theology of greed. The Senator is the conscious agent of that failed political/economic system, in his project of re-description.  As a Public Moralist Sen. Hawley is an abject failure, in sum , he’s another political grifter reciting the New Party Line: the Cosmopolitan Elite becomes his scapegoat.

Mr. Zaitchik mentions in his essay the ‘Post-Liberal’ thinker Yoram Hazony.

Stated simply, the post-liberals—represented foremost by the right-wing Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony, but also by more mainstream writers like The New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari—reject universal reason as a basis for laws and government

For additional insights, into ‘Post-Liberalism’ / ‘National Conservatism’  read Daniel Luban’s July 26 ,2019 essay on Mr. Harzony in the New Republic:

Headline: The Man Behind National Conservatism

Sub-headline: Yoram Hazony has written the closest thing to a manifesto for intellectuals on the right

…

Media coverage of Hazony in the United States has tended to refer to him simply as an “Israeli political philosopher,” but the label doesn’t really do justice to his interesting and highly illustrative career. Born in Israel in 1964, but raised and educated in the United States, he described being “mesmerized” by an encounter as a Princeton undergraduate with the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a few years before Kahane’s party was banned in Israel for anti-Arab racism. Going on to earn a doctorate in political theory, Hazony chose not to pursue an academic career, instead moving to Israel with Princeton friends to found the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank based in Jerusalem. Hazony was an early member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle, and Shalem would remain closely aligned with the Likud Party. It would also serve as a nexus for the Israeli and American right; funding came from American billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, while the roster of fellows tended to feature Israeli political figures who played well inside the Beltway. Hazony and others in the Shalem leadership spent the 1990s living in Eli, an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank, until security concerns following the Second Intifada convinced them to relocate to East Jerusalem.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154531/man-behind-national-conservatism

Daniel Luban also provides a valuable link to a 2007  Haaretz essay on Hazony. Thank you to Mr. Luban!

https://www.haaretz.com/1.4961409

Old Socialist

Headline: How to tame China’s rogue state capitalism

Sub-headline: The west must focus on the scale and scope of Beijing’s industrial subsidies

How to define ‘China’s rogue state capitalism’ ? Meaning just State Capitalism minus the the hysterical descriptor ‘rouge’? The fact that China is totalitarian regime, and that its workers are slaves to that state, is to be addressed how? What pressure can the ‘West’ ,still in the watershed of an utterly failed/collapsed Neo-Liberal experiment, go about such a campaign? Mr Katz studiously avoids the Human Rights question:

Headline:Suicide at Chinese iPhone factory reignites concern over working conditions

US-based Chinese workers’ rights organisation has claimed that a factory worker at a firm that produces Apple’s iPhones in China, died after jumping from a building on Saturday.

China Labor Watch (CLW) said that Li Ming, 31, jumped to his death from a building in the city of Zhengzhou, in the east-central Chinese Henan province, where he had been working for Foxconn.

The death has triggered comparisons with a wave of suicides in 2010 and 2011 at Foxconn factories in China amid concerns over working conditions.

CLW posted video footage that it said showed Mr Li, who the organisation claimed was was working for Foxconn through an agency, lying lifelessly on the ground after his leap. The footage, seemingly filmed from a nearby high-rise building, shows a body lying in the snowy ground, as four people stand nearby.

CLW said that it had spoken to Mr Li’s father, but that it was still not clear why he had jumped from the building. The organisation told The Telegraph that he had been working for Foxconn for two months and lived in factory dormitories.

Foxconn’s spokesperson did not respond to messages asking for further information about the incident.

2009

In July 2009 a 25 year-old male Foxconn communications department worker named Sun Danyong committs suicide by jumping from his apartment building. He allegedly lost a prototype iPhone and was beaten up by security guards.

2010

Foxconn’s annus horribilis for employee suicides. The company, embroiled in accusations of “sweatshop” conditions, disputes some cases, but it is been estimated that at least 14 company employees took their own lives during the year, most throwing themselves from buildings. The iPhone 4 is released in June.

2011

In May 2011 Foxconn erects nets around its Shenzhen factory buildings, designed to prevent suicide jumps. A PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, is hired to deal with negative publicity. The nets seem to work, with fewer suicides reported after they go up, but at least four employees die by throwing themselves from buildings.

2012-2013

In January 2012 Foxconn factory workers protest about conditions in Wuhan. September 2012 sees the release of the iPhone 5. Three Foxconn employees, all in their early 20s, are report as having killed themselves by throwing themselves from buildings during the two-year period.

2017

The year of the iPhone X: Apple’s first $1,000 smartphone. On January 6 Li Ming dies after falling from a building in Zhengzhou, where the X is manufactured.

…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/07/suicide-chinese-iphone-factory-reignites-concern-working-conditions/

From @BretStephenNYT:

Headline: Why I’m Rooting for Boris Johnson

Sub-headline: Britain’s new prime minister has proved he can win people over. He’ll need to now.

Boris Johnson has been Britain’s prime minister for not quite a day, and the reviews are in. He’s a disaster! A fraud! A Trumpy toff and shameless showman whose ego is inversely correlated to his merit and whose tenure of office won’t just be bad for the United Kingdom, but very possibly the death of it.

Johnson might be half-inclined to agree. As he once said of himself: “You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there lurks a blithering idiot.”

I’ve always had a vague distaste for Johnson, based mainly on his history as a journalistic fabulist, as well as the unflattering testimony of friends who’ve dealt with him personally. Also, I opposed Brexit, which Johnson recklessly championed in 2016 and which he now promises to see through, one way or another, by the end of October.

But I’m rooting for him, hard, as you should, too. And there’s reason to suspect that, this time, the man might be suited for the challenge and the hour.

…

As between (a) an anti-Semitic bigot and (c) an anti-immigrant bigot, I’ll choose (b): Boris, who has even called for amnesty for some illegal immigrants.

Mr. Stephens’ ‘enthusiasm’ is tempered with a bit of political realism, as Boris is given to outbursts of Islamophobia, and other prejudices shared by ‘Conservatives’ .

Mr. Stephen offers a negative:

And yet I have an inkling that he isn’t going to fail. His mistakes are many, but many of them are venial: He was sacked by The Times of London, for instance, for making up a quote concerning the love life of King Edward II (1284-1327).

Mr. Stephens offers some positives:

He has charisma. He’s eloquent and disarming. He is capable of winning people over.

Stephens repeats the lie that Corbyn is an Anti-Semite, an integral part of the mythology confected by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian newspaper. Stephens’ near enthusiasm just might have its root in the political propinquity between Posh Boys.

Watch Mr. Corbyn well articulated challenge to Mr. Johnson in the house of Commons. Note Johnson’s stuttering, blustering reply that simply reaffirms his status as political nihilist, in the guise of a Comic Opera Prime Minister. Yet Stephens finds Johnson’s  reply to Corbyn, steeped in Free Market advocacy/apologetics, that Johnson presents as the sine qua non of Democracy,  somehow meets the standard of being compellingly argued.

______________________________________________________________

From Niall Ferguson:

Headline: Boris, the Churchill of Brexit, has Corbyn on the ropes

Sub-headline: The PM’s road out of the EU is still paved with rocks and hard places

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,” wrote Karl Marx in a justly famous passage from his essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Marx had in mind the immense discrepancy between Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, later Napoleon III. A latter-day Marx might make precisely the same point about Sir Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson, except that Johnson pre-emptively published his own biography of Churchill, insisting on a parallel that could only be unflattering to himself.

So here I sit, unable to shake off the sinking feeling that we are about to witness the Monty Python remake of the film Darkest Hour.

Ms. Noonan begins her essay by describing the French Revolution, based not in history, political history or its various expressions, but as a ‘a nationwide psychotic break’ ,that denies the very context of that revolution. Since the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ is a dead letter, call Noonan’s maladroit psychologization of that revolution a propaganda methodology: to render the political, into a trivialized modality, suited to the needs of  propaganda, against the contemporary ‘American Jacobins’.  That revolution marks the end of the  Ancien Régime, praised by both Kant and Hegel before the ‘Terror’. That ushers in the Age of Democratic Revolution to borrow from R.R. Palmer.

We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.

We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-were-robespierres-pronouns-11564095088

Any surprise here? Noonan is a political propagandist whose quoted text is and will be a touchstone for her political allies in the American Political Center, now defined as the alliance between the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservatives. The choice of Simon Schama whose ‘history’ of that revolution meets the demand for an historian who is   ‘heroically nonideological’ : consider this claim to be awash in ideology!

That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.

To move ahead in Noonan’s  psycholigizing polemic:

It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched. As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

For counterpoint to Noonan’s propaganda, read Hillary Mantel’s revelatory, not to speak of evocative essay on Robespierre:

…

The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The revolution speaks through him its most tragic and purest discourse.’ It does not matter where he lived or what he was like, or that he walked through this gate the day before his horrible death. His temperament is of no consequence, nor the will that drove his punitively controlled body through the all-night sittings. But this abstract Robespierre is not the one that interests you, as you stand inside the passage, sheltered from the street. After all, you keep his portrait on your wall; if Furet’s formulation convinced you, you would not feel so desolate, and almost panic-stricken. The passage itself is confined and dark. Your throat constricts a little, and you remember what Michelet said: ‘Robespierre strangles and stifles.’ There are closed doors on your left. You glance up to the first floor. The windows are dirty. You say: ‘it is only a metaphysical space.’ Metaphysical wild horses would not drag you into Robespierre’s room or any space that might have been occupied by it. You lean against the wall, expecting something to happen.

…

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/hilary-mantel/what-a-man-this-is-with-his-crowd-of-women-around-him

Now, from the French Revolution and its sociopaths, framed in her a-historical psycholigizing we come to Noonan’s idee fixe:  The reader can’t escape from the Party Line, so clearly enunciated by propagandists Jordan Peterson, Andrew Sullivan among other political hysterics !

So here is our parallel, our hiccup. I thought of all this this week because I’ve been thinking about the language and behavioral directives that have been coming at us from the social and sexual justice warriors who are renaming things and attempting to control the language in America.

The ‘enemy’ as defined by Noonan, exists in a political space, that shares a commonality with her psycholigizing: ‘ social and sexual justice warriors’ and their ‘speech codes’ that does not apply to Robespierre and the Jacobins. Who were purged/executed  from their own ranks in the Thermidorian Reaction. These political actors that are Noonan’s propaganda Straw-Men: sociopaths  . Noonan’s public shaming of American Jacobins ,who have not engaged in politically motivated violence. But are the subject of Noonan’s invidious comparison, that  has no merit on its face. Propaganda is simply about producing a politically exploitable negative emotion. Noonan’s next political target will be Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib?

Political Observer

The opening paragraphs, of Andy’s latest hysterical diatribe, is a list of the betrayers of America , while not mentioning himself , as one of the many Midwives of Trump, who helped to birth this political monstrosity!

‘The Mueller hearings told us almost nothing that we didn’t know already. We knew that the president welcomed assistance from a foreign power in order to win an election, and has fawned over his political patron in this endeavor, Vladimir Putin, since he became president. We knew that though he was not competent enough to construct a conspiracy, he was eager to collude with a foreign foe to defeat his domestic one. And we knew that he then lied about it as baldly as he lies about almost everything, and tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into the affair. His attorney general then blatantly lied about the key conclusions of the Mueller report, distorting the public debate for weeks as he kept the contents under wraps, and then bet that Americans, with our gnat-like attention spans, would simply move on.

We also knew that in contemporary America, none of these facts matter in the slightest. The notion that the average citizen should care deeply about the rule of law and constitutional norms — and even actively defend them — has become terribly passé. Now, all that truly matters is whether we are entertained by someone who can command televisual excitement the way Trump does on a daily, hourly basis. If he can’t, whatever the underlying facts, no one gives a damn.

American political elites are no better. The president’s assault on the Constitution has merely revealed the Democratic Party as the lame farce we knew it was. Its ancient, pusillanimous congressional leadership was never going to do what duty, rather than politics, requires. The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, moreover, has set an extraordinary precedent: that clear evidence, meticulously collected, that a president has committed what she calls “crimes against the Constitution” does not constitute sufficient grounds for impeachment, even when those crimes were designed to cover up an alliance with a foreign power. If more than that is needed, the impeachment power has effectively been nullified.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/andrew-sullivan-the-american-system-is-already-failing.html

Mr. Divine’s hysterical political melodrama reaches its crescendo, awash in doom saying, with his last two paragraphs:

The awful truth is that the American constitutional system is failing on almost every level. The system, it turns out, is not even strong enough to withstand one Trump term, let alone two. Trump intuited this in 2016, and if he wins reelection, as he now has a good chance of doing, what’s left of liberal democracy will be under acute duress.

The “extinction-level event” that I feared in the spring of 2016 is already here. Look around you. And it wasn’t even a fight.

Is he playing Tiresias or Cassandra ?

Political Observer

P.S. Is it possible that Andy missed much of Mueller’s testimony, or was just not paying close attention? The answer appears to be no, as Andy characterizes Mueller being ‘the somewhat out of it Mueller’. Mueller’s problems appeared to be more serious than simply being ‘somewhat out of it’ !

Biden, who is beginning to resemble the somewhat out-of-it Robert Mueller, backs Pelosi’s lameness, and says he doesn’t think anyone expected Trump to turn out as badly as he has, revealing just how clueless and smug the Democrats really were in 2016

P.O.