StephenKMackSD's Blog

Thank you for your thought provoking comment.

Here is a are some thoughts : the Republicans welcomed, with open arms, the Dixiecrats in 64 & 65 , with the passage of the Civil Rights & Voting Rights Acts. These men became the backbone of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and ‘Silent Majority’ sloganeering political kitsch. Look to Reagan’s ‘I believe in States Rights’ declaration at the Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 campaign.

Look to Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ and then the rise of the ‘Tea Party’ Jacobins: recall that Eric Cantor was supplanted by the even more hysterical radicalism of Dave Brat? That Tea Party coterie became the Republican Party. But Trump takes the cake, the Republicans simply surrendered, in the slow stages of political cowardice, one by one: McConnell’s wife got an appointment to a Cabinet level post, while still maintaining her corporate ties! While Mitch opined about ‘mule piss’ , celebrated in the pages of this newspaper by Janan Ganesh? This a record of absolute surrender , exercised in halting stages, to political irrationalism. One question: where are the Eisenhower Republicans? Colin Powell come to mind, he voted for New Democrat Obama.

StephenKMackSD

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

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https://www.ft.com/content/64817db2-8961-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf-content=243654657:837641179

A well educated, white male immigrant to America, Andy Divine declares
‘What Democrats Can Learn From Steve Bannon’ in his latest encyclical. ‘Those Immigrants’ were/are the products of US Wars of Empire in the Eastern Hemisphere , Afghanistan, Iraq. In sum, at least 8 Fronts on The War On Terror, that we know of!  And  the active subversion , even wars, against the ‘Reform Movements’ in the  Western Hemisphere, in the many states south of America’s porous border. Don’t mention Andy’s enthusiastic support for these wars, expressed in this collection of his rhetorical interventions, on behalf of American murderous political adventurism based upon lies!

Click to access andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

What is America’s record on treating the Braceros, Mexican Migrant Workers that picked fruit and vegetables from  1942 to 1964, as guest workers during WWII, and after? America still owes these workers $500 million, the debt to these workers has increased since the original claims were filed. America has yet to pay them, hoping that time eliminates their claims, as the workers who brought those claims are dying from old age, still waiting for American fair play!

http://braceroarchive.org/about

Andy cultivates his historical ignorance of the plight of these workers, while he wrestles with the insights, that racist Steve Bannon can offer the Democrats. This ,sure to be welcome to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, whose animus to the lesser beings of the planet are well documented?

Here is the core political wisdom of Bannon, as presented by Andy as a conjecture, with the added garnish, in the following paragraph, with his perpetual hysterical Anti-Leftism:’stridently leftist cultural stances’ :

Think of how popular Trump would be now if he had done what Bannon advised: raised taxes on the superrich, lowered them for the middle classes, started the wall, ended mass immigration, and fought a trade war with China.

All of this framed by Andy’s political moralizing chatter,  about the coming apocalypse of the Nation State, in sum, the destiny of the American Nation State? His rhetoric steeped in Huntington’s Anti- Mestizo hysterics of  ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ , while  ‘we’ are  mired in the good intentions, of the less enlightened, but well meaning of an ‘honorable’ citizenry.

Andy presents himself as the representative of the Vital Center of the political spectrum, while Europe is engulphed in  the surge of the Populist Right. It escapes Andy’s attention that we are fully engulphed politically, in that toxic Populism. While the front runner of the New Democrats Joe Biden is the leading candidate, whose racism was codified in his notorious Crime Bill.

Old Socialist

*Blairite Ms. Cavendish in her assessment of The Trump Effect on British life and politics can’t resist the temptation to defame Mr. Corbyn with the charge of ‘whose core philosophy is anti-Americanism.’ Anti-Imperialism is and has been one of  the cornerstone of Corbyn’s politics. 

The president’s flaws are a gift to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose core philosophy is anti-Americanism.

Some further quotation from Posh Girl’s political observations on British politics are instructive, that never strays far from the Blairite Party Line. She simply engages in  a rhetorical  embroidery of same:

…
It suits extremists on both left and right to wilfully overestimate the UK’s clout in the world. That’s not defeatist, it’s just realpolitik — something the British used to be good at.

The Conservatives, once the party of business and common sense, are in the grip of an ideological virus.

…

A similar gambit in 1649 didn’t work too well for Charles I. But you say tomato, I say tomato. You say mount a coup against the legislature, I say “prorogue” — which sounds so much more quaint, ceremonial, nostalgic.

…

To prorogue parliament would be illegal, unconstitutional and undemocratic. But the new Tory party is as unpredictable and mercurial as the current White House.

…

Messrs Trump and Johnson have both flirted with Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, and both have borrowed techniques from the Bannon playbook — positioning themselves as honest straight talkers by making remarks calculated to provoke an outcry, then garnering support from the people outraged by the outcry.

…

For Mr Corbyn, it was just too tempting to shun this particular leader of the free world — and much easier than it might have been for him to have dismissed Barack Obama. Leaders who aspire to rule usually appreciate that in dealing with allies, it is the office which commands respect, not just the person.

But Labour’s politics are those of the sixth form.

…

I love the US more than any other country outside my own. It pains me to witness the stumbles of the presidential caravan. But Americans who dislike Mr Trump can take comfort in knowing that he will eventually be gone. Brexit, the greatest act of national self-harm since Suez, is irreversible.

As British soft power drains away, jobs vanish and investor confidence dwindles, I hope the special relationship with the US will endure. But on current showing, this little island looks likely to play a bigger part in America’s nostalgic past than its dynamic future.

https://www.ft.com/content/977318c2-887e-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

I have been selective in my quotation, as has Blairite Ms. Cavendish in her presentation: her unslakable Anti-Corbynism, her Anti-Brexitism (The EU, born of Monnet’s coal and steel cartel, named the Common Market tarted up with the trappings of Federation.)  comparing it to Suez, that was the death knell of British colonial power, that reified the fact of the power of the American Empire.

This polemic all  wrapped up in a supposed ‘love’ for both America and Britain, name it political kitsch! And ‘As British soft power drains away, jobs vanish…’  name this the watershed of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism, engineered by Thatcher and her epigone Tony Blair, of New Labour infamy.

*Mea culpa: I have misidentified Ms. Cavendish as a Blairite, she is or was a supporter of Cameron.

StephenKMackSD

Old Socialist

Who can resist the particular ‘brand’ of commentary that Mr. Ganesh offers, awash in a cynicism, that is his trade mark? In the present essay, the cast of characters is wide, within the very narrow spectrum of Pop Culture: he riffs on a Tradition inaugurated by American Dandy Tom Wolfe. But he extends this cast, in order to lend a much needed verisimilitude to his essay, with the inclusion of actual  philosophers Pinker and Dennett.

Peter Cook, Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey , Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris Daniel Dennett. With the addition of Gwyneth Paltrow and America’s Dr. Pangloss Steven Pinker, even his hair gets an honorable mention!

Mr. Ganesh, like his mentor Wolfe is fascinated with surfaces, so his polemic features, for the most part, Pop Culture Gurus or their epigones and fellow travelers.  And their penchant  for producing analgesic aphorisms. These rhetorical exercises are about the business of producing endorphins in the brains of its readers,  but produces in the brain of  Mr. Ganesh a withering contempt.

But note that in Wolfe’s 2016 book ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ , he takes aim at both Darwin and Chomsky. He doesn’t waste time with the note takers, and popularizes of these theorists, but confronts them with the misplaced gusto of a ‘thinker’ utterly out of his intellectual depth. Two reviews of Wolfe’s  ‘Kingdom’ are revelatory:

Headline: His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/his-white-suit-unsullied-by-research-tom-wolfe-tries-to-take-down-charles-darwin/2016/08/31/8ee6d4ee-4936-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.71ee20f858ae

Mr. Ganesh is a gifted polemicist of the Sunday Supplement variety, in the Europe of the 19th and the early 20th Century he would  be called a feuilletonist.

One final thought: it doesn’t occur to Mr. Ganesh, that these Pop Culture Gurus might just be very distantly related to Kant’s compelling notion of self-emancipation from tutelage?

American Skeptic

https://www.ft.com/content/3cb9f0b0-8787-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

Headline: US liberal over-reach on gender identity risks benefiting Trump

Sub-headline: Democrats’ embrace of transgender rights burnishes president’s everyman appeal

Never fear the Neo-Liberal Collapse of 2008, and its issue ‘The Gig Economy’ has precipitated an American Political/Moral De-Evolution. A bit hyperbolic, but none the less true. I like the Posh Boys, at @FT, am not above a bit of self-congratulation!
The reader could reply that the Civil Rights Era, and its various beneficiaries, has come to a close, or has slammed shut, in the political watershed of the post 2008 Crash World! While factoring into the political equation, the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, that removed the ‘pre-clearance clause’ from the Voting Rights Act. In sum, the rebirth of ‘The Solid South’. This decision codified the passing of that’ Era’!
Posh Boy Luce offers a warning to the New Democrats, who en masse abandoned ‘Liberalism’ for ‘Neo-Liberalism’,  about the issue of transgendered children. The reader can see that this issue will resonate with the Fundamentalist wing of the electorate, but it was the White Middle Class voter who put Trump in office, allied to the lazy, or should I say ‘overconfident’, Hillary Clinton? Who failed to actively campaign in three key states , that went to Trump in the Electoral College.
Luce’s fretting over this issue will prove to be a small ripple, as compared to the New Democrats and their growing talk of impeachment.
Trump honed his propaganda skills on fifteen seasons of ‘The Apprentice‘ , not to speak of establishing himself as ‘Leader’ in the frame of Mark Bennett’s crude Television Kitsch .
To somehow place Mr Biden on The Left is on its face preposterous! Joe is a New Democrat who authored the draconian Crime Bill using the notion of the ‘irredeemable predator’ that could not be checked by political amelioration, so implacable was his criminality.

While Mrs. Clinton preferred the use of Super-Predator:

The New Democrats will lose in 2020, because the Party structure is still in the thrall of the Neo-Liberal operatives . The Future of the Democratic Party, if it has any kind of future, will be with Ocasio-Cortez, Gabbard , Omar and Tlaib. With the active support of Senator Sanders.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/065210f0-87f2-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

Hillary Clinton and her confederates Brennan & Clapper and their CrowdStrike ‘evidence’ of Russian Tampering lie was the starting point of FBI stooge Mueller’s ‘investigation’: he never questioned it!

Never fear the New Democrats will pursue ‘impeachment’ ,while the Party, will again steal the nomination from Sanders, with the dull-witted Party Hack and Crime Bill author Joe Biden. Who took a weekend off of the campaign due to the fear of ‘over exposure’ by the Party Technocrats i.e. the Clinton coterie!

While Jerry Nadler pursues recalcitrant Trump confederates. Look for the nominee to be OneWest Bank and AIPAC minion Kamala Harris or Ambulance Chaser Corey Booker,if the utterly uninspiring Joe doesn’t pan out. Or look for the convention surprise, of Hillary offering herself as compromise candidate to a dead-locked convention: this is the stuff of Aaron Spelling Television Melodrama of the 80’s, but perfect for a television audience addled by how many ‘Seasons’ of the ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ merde? That catapulted Trump the Grifter into the American consciousness, as some kind of ‘Leader’ with First Daughter as part of his Brain Trust!

America’s political class is utterly bankrupt, so the spectacle of the New Democrats as Saviors of the Republic is awash in self-seeking fraudulence and might be comic if so much was not at stake!

Political Cynic

Thank you for your thought provoking comment on Ms. Rubin’s obsession with Sen. Sanders.  It led me to think about Ms. Rubin, as a member of The Podhoretz Clan, by marriage. She comes by her support for Biden because he represents the current political middle: defined as the alliance between the New Democrats & the Neo-Cons. Recall that the War Mongering Norman, the head of the Clan, made his literary mark with his ‘Making It’: a monument to his unslakable egotism, wedded to self-promotion:the whole of it devoted to braggadocio on a grand scale.
If Irving Kristol was first generation of the Neo-Cons, Norman is not quite the next generation, but he was a bridge to that next generation.Those City College Trotskyites devolved into Radical Nationalist, and found support across the political spectrum: Henry Jackson, and even the problematic ‘Liberal’  Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Title: Moynihan and the Neocons

By Greg Weiner

In his biography of Norman Podhoretz, Thomas Jeffers reports that one St. Patrick’s Day — Podhoretz could not recall the year — United States senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan alighted unannounced on his old friend’s Manhattan doorstep to offer an accounting of himself. The precise content of the conversation is unrecorded, but tension over Moynihan’s senatorial record — on policy toward the Soviets especially — was generally understood to have strained the men’s years-long friendship.

Today, more than a generation after that encounter, and more than a decade after the senator’s death, many neoconservatives still want an accounting from Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their dispositions are at once admiring and aggravated; the intellectual kinship is often celebrated, though sometimes mixed with accusations of ideological betrayal. I was at a recent conference of political scientists, presenting a paper on Moynihan, when one audience member, perfectly pleasant and seemingly admiringly disposed toward the scholar-statesman, exclaimed: “Reagan could have used Moynihan’s help, but he didn’t get it because Moynihan liked being a senator!” The accusation is not uncommon. Neither is the underlying assumption: Moynihan was one of us, but his politics trumped his principles.

Yet the veracity of the charge hinges on to whom the “us” refers. Some tenets of neoconservatism — at least as its “godfather,” Irving Kristol, elucidated it — reasonably describe Moynihan. But Moynihan always rejected “neoconservatism” as a label, and what neoconservatism eventually became, a political movement, never enticed him. He always felt that the goals that he did share with Kristol — what Kristol described as a “conservative welfare state” that rejected the Great Society model, for example, appears to be close to what Moynihan understood to be the ethic of the New Deal — were properly described as liberal.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/moynihan-and-the-neocons

Ms. Rubin is representative of a coterie of Ultra-Nationalists, who find Mr. Sanders Left-Wing Social Democracy a threat to their particular ‘brand’ of political nihilism, while finding Mr. Biden a companionable fellow traveler.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Andy Divine is or was an enthusiast for the Bell Curve and the Iraq War, and sundry other forms of political/moral nihilism. But the indefatigable Andy ,in his latest encyclical, instructs the reader about what ‘Real Conservatism’ looks like. His examples of Conservative Virtue are former FBI Director Robert Mueller and Congressman Justin Amash.

This Is What a Real Conservative Looks Like in 2019

This week, two eminent Republicans did something quite novel in 2019. They committed conservatism. By conservatism, I mean a philosophy of limited, constitutional government, individual rights, trust in tradition, love of country, prudence in foreign policy and restraint at home. Restraint means not doing something that you could. It means conceding the right of your opponents to run the country for a while — for the sake of the common good. It means admitting that sometimes you’re wrong. It means give as well as take. It often means compromise.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullivan-this-is-what-a-real-conservative-looks-like.html

This excerpt is almost comic, if weren’t for the fact that an apology, for his enthusiasm for the War on Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced cannot be taken back. It is part of Andy’s self-congratulatory rhetorical amnesia, the very cornerstone of his polemic:

It means conceding the right of your opponents to run the country for a while — for the sake of the common good. It means admitting that sometimes you’re wrong. It means give as well as take. It often means compromise.

Mueller record of political conformity and opportunism is easy to map: On the War on Iraq:

On February 11, 2003, one month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mueller gave testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mueller informed the American public that “[s]even countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea—remain active in the United States and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans. As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.”^[43][44] Highlighting this worry in February 2003, FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley wrote an open letter to Mueller in which she warned that “the bureau will [not] be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq”^[45][46] and encouraged Mueller to “share [her concerns] with the President and Attorney General.”^[46]

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

On the FBI Crime Lab scandal: Mueller was head of the FBI from on September 4, 2001 so he was an integral part of the active cover-up that the FBI engaged in. Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab which was published on June 2, 1998. Justice delayed is Justice denied!

And this report on the FBI Crime Scandal and the failures of other labs:

Headline: CSI Is a Lie

Sub-headline: America’s forensic-investigation system is overdue for sweeping reform.

Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”

The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.”

That link points back to 2012 coverage of problems with FBI forensic analysis, but the existence of shoddy forensics has been so clear for so long in so many different state and local jurisdictions that the following conclusion is difficult to avoid: Neither police agencies nor prosecutors are willing to call for the sorts of reforms that would prevent many innocents from being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, and neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party will force their hands.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/

The desperation of the Midwives of Trump, poor Andy among them , to find heroes like Mueller and Comey ,from one of the most corrupt and authoritarian institutions of the American National Security State, should not surprise. Andy adopts a self-serving ahistoricism at will.

Andy’s enthusiasm for Representative Amish is about his bravery in advocating the impeachment of Trump, in defiance of the Republican Party Line.

Old Socialist

Headline: Argentines should reject the return of Peronism

Sub-headline: President Mauricio Macri should stick to his guns on economic policy

What sector of the Argentine population will read your pro-Macri polemic? in the guise of a dire warning against Peronism, in the redoubtable person of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner? Yet the Editorial Board, read Posh Boys, prints this:

Mr. Macri’s austerity programme is broadly on track to deliver long-term economic gains for Argentina but the short-term pain of sharply falling living standards may be too much for voters. A new Ms Fernández, repackaged in more moderate colours, could offer quicker relief.

https://www.ft.com/content/68306374-82e5-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b

After Mr. Macri’s ‘Austerity Lite’ failed, as the peso went into almost free fall, less than a year and a half after his election.  Prat-Gay was fired at the one year mark of Macri’s ‘reforms’:

Headline: Prat-Gay Fired as Argentine Finance Minister After One Year

Alfonso Prat-Gay was fired as Argentina’s Finance Minister after just one year in the post as a long-heralded recovery in the economy fails to materialize.

The ministry he headed will now be split into two, with Luis Caputo, who was finance secretary, heading the new Finance Ministry and Nicolas Dujovne overseeing the Economy Ministry, Cabinet Chief Marcos Pena told a press conference in Buenos Aires on Monday. Prat-Gay plans to speaks to reporters at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Yael Bialostozky, the departing minister’s spokeswoman said in a text message.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-26/prat-gay-resigns-as-argentine-finance-minister-after-one-year

This verifiable failure of Macri’s economic policy was an invitation to the Peronist, in sum, the political rehabilitation of the ever-canny Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Macri’s resort to another IMF rescue is about Failure.

Should this crisis even surprise the most lackadaisical reader/spectator of Argentine politics? Is five years a long enough time, to file criminal charges against and convict a corrupt politician?

Yet Fernández de Kirchner chooses to run as vice-president, it expresses her being in tune with the political mood of the Argentine electorate?

Political Observer

Notice the monetary framing of the headline writers:

Elizabeth Warren is underpriced in the Democratic race

That is buried deep in the body of  the Ganesh chatter:

She is, if not the best candidate in this race, then certainly the most underpriced.

Mr. Ganesh’s ‘insights’ are, to be generous, shopworn! As for political insight the reader needs to look elsewhere. How about this essay from April 25, 2019, from corporate shill and ersatz Feminist Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Headline:  Political good girls are fighting a losing battle

Sub-headline: Female candidates still follow rules that their male competitors gleefully ignore

https://www.ft.com/content/fe6954ca-6690-11e9-b809-6f0d2f5705f6

This collection of ‘insights’ by Ms. Slaughter has escaped the male political gaze of Mr. Ganesh. For the interested reader Mr. Ganesh’s Wikipedia entry contains insights like these:

Ganesh was active in Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party, having been inspired to join when he was 19 by Tony Blair‘s 1999 annual Labour Party Conference speech. In an interview with The Guardian at the time Ganesh described himself as “essentially a Portillista”, comparing his politics to Michael Portillo’s, who was the then Conservative Party Shadow Chancellor. Ganesh opted not to attend his local constituency Labour Party meetings as they were “too dominated by Trots”.^[3]

For two years he was a Researcher at the Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based right-wing think tank set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude, and for five years he was political correspondent for The Economist.^[1] Ganesh co-authored Compassionate Conservatism (2006) with Jesse Norman, which received the T.E. UtleyMemorial Prize for young journalists.^[4]

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

When will Mr. Ganesh finally finish that novel, that is gathering dust, in that bottom desk drawer? Or should I say the neglected PDF at the bottom of his computer screen? It will be a contemporary political novel, like Vivian Grey, without the unnecessary digressions. This novel will  outdo the ‘Bonfire‘ of Tom Wolfe, as it will be etched in acid rather, than steeped in the racial/political paranoia, that was the essence of life in the Metropolis, and its greedy mendacious actors, of the Wolfe novel?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e068c4e6-8130-11e9-9935-ad75bb96c849