StephenKMackSD's Blog

When it comes to ‘catch phrases’ Mr Luce has a talent to invent and or appropriate them, axis-of-adults, or to recite them as place holders for actual thought, “cognitive dissonance”  provides a kind of intellectual gloss to his essay.
Mr. Luce’s argument  here  leaves this reader in no doubt as to the Luce’s advanced case of political myopia:

This undercut Ms Haley’s efforts to retain some semblance of conventional US foreign policy, notably support for other democracies and tough words for autocracies.

America’s record on supporting Political Monsters of all kinds is easily verified: Netnayahu?  Only in a political present occupied by a center dominated by the alliance of New Democrats and Neo-Conservatives could the very reliably reactionary Ms. Haley be confused with political rationality in any way! ‘ Some semblance of conventional US foreign policy,’ is again the place holder for actual thought. Haley as representative of political rationalism? What of Brent Scowcroft or James Baker III  and their coterie of Foreign Policy ‘Realists’,  or even the political opportunism of the McConnell/Ryan alliance, and their bungling attempts , yet in retrospect, that had the semblance of the ‘rational’ ? The New Party Line is that Haley held the line against Trump’s America First irrationalism.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/13805a96-cbd4-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD/creators

There is nothing in Mr. Ganesh’s essay of real note except the lingering mephitic aroma of Kavanaugh pseudo-apologetics. The Democrats and their attempt to impugn the integrity of Party Boy Kavanaugh. Who has an uncanny resemblance to Bush The Younger, with a pronounced priapism, exacerbated by the ingestion of large amounts of alcohol. If I chose to I could have easily gone to Rich Lowry at the National Review, here by way of The Salt Lake Tribune.
Mr. Lowry’s inauspicious opening three paragraphs, in ‘defense’ of Kavanaugh, don’t even approach Mr. Ganesh ability to write with a certain panache.

The media is now engaged in a full-court press to establish that Kavanaugh drank to excess — when he admitted in his testimony that he drank to excess.

Headline: I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge

Sub-headline: Yes, I was emotional last Thursday. I hope everyone can understand I was there as a son, husband and dad.

Going forward, you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good. As a judge, I have always treated colleagues and litigants with the utmost respect. I have been known for my courtesy on and off the bench. I have not changed. I will continue to be the same kind of judge I have been for the last 12 years. And I will continue to contribute to our country as a coach, volunteer, and teacher. Every day I will try to be the best husband, dad, and friend I can be. I will remain optimistic, on the sunrise side of the mountain. I will continue to see the day that is coming, not the day that is gone.

I revere the Constitution. I believe that an independent and impartial judiciary is essential to our constitutional republic. If confirmed by the Senate to serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep an open mind in every case and always strive to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the American rule of law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-am-an-independent-impartial-judge-1538695822

Also read Prof. Robert Post’s essay at Politico here:

Headline: Brett Kavanaugh Cannot Have It Both Ways

Sub-headline: As the former dean of Yale Law School, I’m shocked by the judge’s partisan turn.

With calculation and skill, Kavanaugh stoked the fires of partisan rage and male entitlement. He had apparently concluded that the only way he could rally Republican support was by painting himself as the victim of a political hit job. He therefore offered a witches’ brew of vicious unfounded charges, alleging that Democratic members of the Senate Judicial Committee were pursuing a vendetta on behalf of the Clintons. If we expect judges to reach conclusions based solely on reliable evidence, Kavanaugh’s savage and bitter attack demonstrated exactly the opposite sensibility.

I was shell-shocked. This was not the Brett Kavanaugh I thought I knew. Having come so close to confirmation, Kavanaugh apparently cared more about his promotion than about preserving the dignity of the Supreme Court he aspired to join. Even if he sought to defend his honor as a husband and father, his unbalanced rantings about political persecution were so utterly inconsistent with the dispassionate temperament we expect from judges that one had to conclude that he had chosen ambition over professionalism.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/06/kavanaugh-confirmation-temperament-yale-dean-221086

See my comment on Prof. Post’s essay here:

https://stephenkmacksd.com/2018/10/07/robert-postyale-edu-kavanaugh-is-unsuitable-publius-comments/

The final paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s essay that places Anthony Kennedy into a political category that resembles ‘political rationalism‘ , ‘centrism’ and other such descriptors, is a measure of the myopia of not just Mr. Ganesh, but nearly the whole of America’s political class. His husbanding of the Citizens United decision, as directed by John Roberts, demonstrates that Kennedy wasn’t just a fellow traveler of the Neo-Confederate /Originalist clique, no matter his vote on Gay Marriage, but a member of the Brotherhood!

The under-analysed figure in all this is the man Mr Kavanaugh is due to replace. Anthony Kennedy was the court’s swing vote. Neither predictably liberal nor conservative, he was hard for partisans to place. As he goes, something of value goes with him.

Publius

https://www.ft.com/content/5938e4d0-c8ec-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9

Is there a more self-serving, mendacious political/civic actors than lawyers,in or out of Judicial robes? What citizen, a presiding judge,  declares to his civic equals that the American Law Court is above Morality, as if it were a trivial matter?

Prof. Post’s hand-wringing essay on Kavanaugh is a-historical, not to speak of crouched in the search for bourgeois political respectability. The lawyers first order of business!  He forgets that the rise of the Neo-Confederate /Originalists, and their fellow travelers, started with Brown v. Board I and II, in the last half of the 20th Century. In the establishment of the Federalist Society, an historical  recrudescence of ‘The White Citizens Councils’ that metastasized quickly.

The nominations of Rehnquist, Scalia , Thomas , Alito and Gorsuch are about the rise of these American Political Romantics, and their unslakable racism, misogyny and strong embrace of a Corporatist ethos.Where does that place Justice Kennedy in the pecking order of this motley crew? Citizens United is all we need to know of this fellow traveler!

In sum, the Plantation Mentality of  the Antebellum era is Mr. Kavanaugh’s métier. He is the final vote that will enable the end of Roe v. Wade, and other impediments to the re-ascendant Patriarchy! Will the Court, as in the case of Citizens United, aided by the mendacious Justice Roberts, go slow?  or will the Court be radicalized i.e. Trumpified?

Publius

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/06/kavanaugh-confirmation-temperament-yale-dean-221086

Reading Andy Divine’s review of four books on Trump at the TLS is experiencing him in a more rational key. His political hysterics sometimes muted, and sometimes argued at a frenetic pace, hint at paranoia. As this review is quite long, I will highlight what I think is most relevant.

The first book: Amy Siskind’s THE LIST: A week-by-week reckoning of Trump’s first year:

So which is it – an extinction level event for liberal democracy or business as usual? The truth is: we just don’t know for sure. The case for catastrophe, given what Trump promised and what he has delivered, and how he has reshaped American politics thus far, is a strong one. Amy Siskind’s list of horribles, The List, sadly, is a weak attempt to chronicle this. It is an endless summary of everything she doesn’t like about the administration, from the environment to immigration. The rationale is provided in the dust jacket blurb: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember”. And such a list, focusing on the signs of emergent strongman rule, would be helpful. Siskind’s, alas, has no such coherence or consistency.

The second book: by David Frum is TRUMPOCRACY: The corruption of the American Republic

On all this, David Frum’s Trumpocracy is immeasurably better. Frum, a Bush speech-writer who coined the term “axis of evil”, is a member of a small group of Republicans who describe themselves as Never Trumpers, and whose opposition to Trump’s foreign policy instincts, authoritarian impulses and outright kleptocratic gall has been rock solid from the beginning. He’s perhaps best when dealing with his conservative peers’ willingness to prostrate themselves before their tangerine tribune of the plebs: “Trump has contaminated thousands of careers and millions of minds. He has ripped the conscience out of half the political spectrum and left a moral void where American conservatism used to be”.

…

Frum also rightly worries about the leaks from the intelligence agencies pushing back against Trump, because some obviously compromised US secrets, and because intelligence agencies at war with their own president is a dangerous precedent. Yes, Trump was the first offender. But he is the duly elected president.

That Mr. Frum and Mr. Divine were, at one point, ardent supporters of the Iraq War, and members of the Neo-Conservative coterie, offers some credible proof that they share a certain World View.

The third book is Hall Gardner’s WORLD WAR TRUMP: The risks of America’s new nationalism

World War Trump is a rather cranky realist meditation on the dangers of Trump’s assault on America’s traditional alliances. But it suffers, as it must, from being written too soon. Hall Gardner assumes a coherent realism from Trump, which would mean the withdrawal of the US from enforcing the rules of the international system, the collapse of NATO and the emergence of a potential anti-Western alliance of Russia and China. Full of conjecture, and worst case scenarios, Gardner could not foresee the astonishing fecklessness of this White House. Trump vowed to get tough on China, then swooned for President Xi, then launched a limited trade war, and now seeks to expand it further, even as it is wrecking the economies of several heartland states.

Full of conjecture, and worst case scenarios, this sentence fragment might well be used to describe Mr. Divine’s operative strategy that he uses in his regular New York Magazine essays.

The fourth book is Seth Hettena’s TRUMP/RUSSIA :A definitive history

Hettena writes that Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in Manhattan to allow buyers to conceal their true identities. Money-launderers flocked to it. Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was found to have “willfully violated” anti-money laundering rules of the Bank Secrecy Act, was subject to four separate investigations by the Internal Revenue Service for “repeated and significant” deviations from money-laundering laws, and was forced to pay what was then the largest ever money-laundering fine filed against a casino. The Trump World Tower, by the UN head­quarters in New York, had a large number of investors connected to Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen, was found by a Congressional Com­mit­tee to have “had a lot of connections to the former Soviet Union and . . . seemed to have associations with Russian organized crime figures in New York and Florida”. His campaign manager for a while – Paul Manafort – made a fortune channelling Kremlin propaganda in Ukraine. Trump’s new towers in Southern Florida were also humming with Russian buyers. Over a third of all the apartments in the seven Trump towers were connected either directly to Russian passports or to companies designed to conceal the owners. Hettena finds a prosecutor who spelled it out: “his towers were built specifically for the Russian middle class criminal”.

That Trump and Manafort were involved with money laundering and other form of graft and corruption, not surprising, but there is the most tenuous, even non-existent   connection with Russian Meddling in the US election! The cases of the ‘Russian Trolls’ has yet to come to court,  nor will the two separate indictments of the GRU operatives ever reach a Court of Law. Mueller will not invest his time and reputation in two meaningless Show Trials. These indictments have propaganda value for Mueller!

If these investigations yield nothing, and if Mueller’s report doesn’t have the goods, then the United States will have dodged a consti­tutional crisis. But if Trump is revealed as a businessman who consistently violated the laws, and if Mueller fully exposes a conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016, the President will be shown to be both criminal and treasonous. Impeachment is the only legal recourse against a president, and it was designed by the Founders precisely for this occasion: to get rid of presidents who were in league with foreign powers. They were understandably paranoid that their fledgling republic could be corrupted by far more powerful countries, such as Britain and France. And that’s why it will be difficult for the House of Representatives to give Trump a pass in these circumstances, especially if the Democrats regain it in November. There’s no question, it seems to me, that Trump will fight this, rally his base and propaganda outlets, like Fox News, and put extraordinary pressure on Republican senators to acquit him. If the Republican base retains its cultish worship of Trump, those senators would have to be true patriots to do the right thing. And we now know, after more than a year of total capitulation, that they aren’t. And, as Trump enjoys overwhelming support from a shrinking Republican Party, they won’t. Even now, senators like Bob Corker or Ben Sasse, who publicly lament the President’s unfitness and mental instability, have not cast a single vote against him.

The reader is back to the charge that Mr. Divine makes against Hall Gardner’s book , Full of conjecture, and worst case scenarios! If ,if, ifs don’t just litter the closing paragraphs of this essay. Conjecture is the very animating rhetorical force of these preceding and remaining labored paragraphs!

…

If these investigations yield nothing, and if Mueller’s report doesn’t have the goods, then the United States will have dodged a consti­tutional crisis.

..
If Trump avoids impeachment, he may turn on his prosecutors, and appoint a new attorney general who dutifully shuts down the Mueller investigation and launches others against the Clintons
…
If the Republican base retains its cultish worship of Trump, those senators would have to be true patriots to do the right thing.

Political Observer

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/genius-of-destruction-trump-administration/

Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

Perry Anderson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

In the third paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s recent essay, call it puzzling or just his usual  pretentious chatter?  he demonstrates that the broad brush approach to history is  ill fated, at best. Or more pointedly that the feuilleton form, a Ganesh specialty, is unsuited to a political context!

This point of contrast remained a viable basis for national togetherness well into the 20th century.

The careful reader of American history will note that the Progressive Woodrow Wilson segregated Washington D.C. in 1912, the year of my mother’s birth.

In increments, it has weakened, less through the US’s own failures than progress elsewhere. The first world war immolated some of the autocracies in opposition to which the US found its identity.

The First World War under Wilson’s leadership imprisoned Eugene V. Debs on ten counts of ‘sedition’ !

From the cinders of the second world war rose the modern, rational European state.

Those cinders of the second world war were, in part, the work of Harry Truman and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

After empire came post-colonial migration.

Would the mention of the Windrush Generation be out of place in the British political context?

And after 1989 came, if not an absolute win for democratic capitalism as the terminal point of human affairs, then its territorial spread.

This win for ‘democratic capitalism’ is really about the rise of both Thatcher and Reagan in the ‘West’ ,Gorbachev’s perestroika, and most importantly, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of the amenable and manipulable drunkard Boris Yeltsin. This project aided and abetted by the demonstrably incompetent Strobe Talbott, as the Capitalist Viceroy, who supervised the transition from Command to Market Economy: the question that should be asked ‘why do the Russians hate us’ finds its answer in Western Meddling in the internal affairs of the Russian State!

Godfrey Hodgson in his book The Myth of American Exceptionalism offers something that Mr. Ganesh cannot!

Book Details

Old Socialist

Headline: David Frum: The Republican Party Needs to Embrace  Liberal Values

Sub-headline: Classical liberal values have disappeared from the right and are now disappearing from the left. Someone needs to adopt them. Why not the GOP?

David Frum like the ‘good’ Neo-Conservative engages in the methodology used by Leo Strauss: fill the rhetorical space with an overload of ‘information’ that seems but does not have relevance to the topic addressed. Its a key exercise of the Straussian Method of obfuscation, as opposed to explication, as the sine qua non of the rational argumentative endeavor.

Earlier this year, Patrick J. Deneen of Notre Dame University published a short, fierce polemic titled Why Liberalism Failed. The book, which gained respectful attention across the political spectrum, argued that liberalism had not delivered on its central promises:

The liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life while citizens regard government as a distant and uncontrollable power … relentlessly advancing the project of “globalization.” The only rights that seem secure today belong to those with sufficient wealth and position to protect them … The economy favors a new “meritocracy” that perpetuates its advantages through generational succession … A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.You can read those words, appreciate why somebody might believe them—and still categorically reject them as false and dangerous. The advanced democracies have built the freest, most just, and best societies in human history. Those societies demand many improvements, for sure—incremental, practical reforms, with careful attention to unintended consequences. But not revolution. Not the burn-it-all-down fantasies of the new populists.

That ‘respectful attention’ that Mr. Frum makes reference to proves to be a function of the pervasive Frum myopia:

Headline: The anti-democratic thinker inspiring America’s Conservative elites

Sub-headline: In his new book, the Catholic writer Patrick Deneen launches an attack on pluralism – and the Conservative establishment is cheering

Since the election of Trump, writers of all stripes have been lining up to pen liberalism’s epitaph.

On the left, the pernicious effects of neo-liberal economics has been denounced, while on the right, liberalism’s cosmopolitanism, which has no apparent regard for nation, religion or family, has been decried.

The left’s answer has been to demand more social democracy to combat galloping inequality, while the right has called for the return to traditional values, anchored in the “community”.

American conservatives, especially among the country’s powerful Catholic minority (which includes six of the nine supreme court justices), have found a new champion for their cause in the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen. His latest book, Why Liberalism Failed, has been critically acclaimed throughout the conservative press, with the prominent Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, himself a recent convert to Catholicism, declaring it a “triumph”.

Rising inequality, the degradation of the environment, decreasing living standards, increasing loneliness, the destructive polarisation of our political world – Deneen blames liberalism for all the ills currently afflicting society. Surprisingly, he does not attribute these ills to the failures of liberalism, but to its success.

Like many conservatives, Deneen sees liberalism not simply as a theory about how to conduct politics, but as an all-encompassing ideology, like fascism and communism, that extends to philosophy, society and the economy. And it is an ideology that has won – which is why, in Deneen’s view, everything that is wrong with the world can be blamed on it. If liberalism is the cause of all our troubles, then the answer, according to Deneen, is to get rid of it altogether.

To make this argument work, Deneen lumps together all the various ideas and movements that have been associated with the term “liberalism”, whether they are compatible or not – from classical “check-and-balances” liberalism to New Deal progressivism, from neo-liberal economics to liberal identity politics. What ultimately unites all these strands, in Deneen’s eyes, is rampant individualism, which has been a bugbear for conservatives dating back to the French revolution.

Instead of individualism, Deneen says the future lies with radically decentralised, local communities where the true meaning of culture might be found again. By culture, he means “a set of generational customs, practices, and rituals that are grounded in local and particular settings”.

Deneen never spells out exactly what these local communities might look like, but it’s clear that what he wants, in reality, is a return to “updated Benedictine forms” of Catholic monastic communities. Like many who share his worldview, Deneen believes that if people returned to such communities they would get back on a moral path that includes the rejection of gay marriage and premarital sex, two of Deneen’s pet peeves.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/21/patrick-deneen-book-why-liberalism-failed-catholic

Then look to the cast of Republican  characters, and their fellow travelers, that meet the standard of ‘Liberals’ as defined by Frum: Ben Shapiro and  Jordan B. Peterson, who attacks the Marxist Post-Moderns, and their legatees, the Student Left of the present. Who  then frames the whole of his politicized pseudo- psychology in the archetypes of Carl Jung! Not to speak of Randian Paul Ryan as a self-proclaimed Liberal.

What follows this is more of the political cliches,  of this political moment,  as refracted through the ubiquitous Frum self-serving myopia, or is he ,more pointedly, the natural inheritor of the Straussian mythomania?

Old Socialist

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/the-case-for-liberal-republicanism/570790/

Headline: Mauricio Macri’s failure to plan has put Argentina in a tight spot

Sub-headline: Discontent will grow as the government tries to meet the terms of its IMF bailout

Here is one of the key sentences in Mr. Kerner opinion piece:

While many blame the strategy of gradual adjustments adopted by the government of President Mauricio Macri, the real problem was the lack of a comprehensive plan.

Mr. Kerner credentials are not just excellent, but can only be described as providential ,at least to the select readership of The Financial Times?

The writer is managing director of Latin America for the Eurasia Group

A ‘Political Risk Consultancy’ headed by the technocrat supreme Ian Bremmer. What exactly does the highfalutin notion of ‘Political Risk Consultancy’ mean? The ability to see into the not yet actual? Call it ‘Technocratic Metaphysics’? Or does crystal ball gazing cover the territory?

According to Mr. Kerner’s reckoning it isn’t the policy of Austerity that is at fault, but Macri’s ‘lack of a comprehensive plan’  that he questions.  Its been ten years since the Depression of 2008, and the World Laboratory has produced the ineluctable evidence, that it is the very practice of ‘Austerity’ that lacks any viability! Although the Greek situation is is not analogous to Argentina, what is striking is that the Austerity practiced there has produced human misery in abundance.

Headline: After seven years of bailouts, Greeks sink yet deeper in poverty

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-greece-poverty-idUSKBN15Z1NM

The tutelary spirit of Herman Kahn rules the amoral contemplator, the technocrat! Thinking the ‘unthinkable‘. The divorce of policy from the ethical, action and consequence, of thought and ‘policy’ is the territory of the technocrat.

I have foreshortened Mr. Kerner’s presentation of key points:

For this reason, it decided to embark on a gradual adjustment programme.

Mr Macri took advantage of the enormous appetite for Argentine assets among financial investors. And, after settling with holdout creditors, he began an aggressive process of debt issuance.

This hit agricultural production and reduced exports, while globally, investor sentiment towards emerging markets soured. A currency crisis left the country facing a deep recession and high inflation.

This seemed to vindicate the critics of gradualism.

The absence of a comprehensive stabilisation plan led to uncoordinated policies. A decentralised economic management system, better suited to a more stable economy, made matters worse.

The IMF agreement announced last week looks more like a proper stabilisation plan, and the adjustment is happening fast and painfully — precisely what Mr Macri wanted to avoid.

The next several months will be difficult as the recession deepens, however.

Before then, the government will have to cut spending and keep monetary conditions tight in order to comply with the terms of the IMF bailout.

The president would do well to learn from previous mistakes.

https://www.ft.com/content/de2e52ae-c24a-11e8-84cd-9e601db069b8

The Party Line of Neo-Liberalism is repeated, and the imperative that Austerity is only viable, in its most brutal form. Previous mistakes does not only equal the the failure of Macri’s Austerity Lite , but the historically established record of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its political/economic crime of Austerity: as the-in-order-too of rescuing The Market from its own inherent opportunistic criminality. The Market isn’t just a function of political/economic actors, but shares a commonality with Hegel’s ‘Spirit’?

Old Socialist

Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

Oh, Andy! your essay of September 28, 2018  was worth the wait! On the continuing Kavanaugh Nightmare.  Andy assumes the role of the natural successor to Agnes Nixon, the great chronicler of American Life, on Day-Time Television. Andy discards his usual role of Political/Moral Inquisitor, for the the role of providing a national analgesic, in the wake of the wreckage of the bruising Kavanaugh Hearings. The first three riveting paragraphs of his essay set the stage, for the whole of his indispensable analysis of a utterly fractured American politics! Will we recover? the burning question of the moment!

Yesterday was a spectacle I hope we do not have to experience again. We watched two human beings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, exposed in the rawest possible fashion to the entire world, over the gravest of accusations, with no definitive evidence apart from personal testimony to draw on, 36 years after an alleged crime took place. It was a grotesque political drama, in which everyone lost.

Both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have been traumatized and ill-served by the process. At the all-day Senate hearing, there was no real sifting of evidence about her allegation that he sexually assaulted her, because nothing but memories were on the table. (We still don’t even know when or where the alleged attack happened.) Other witnesses were not called to testify, which they obviously should have been, if only to say (as they all have) that they had no memory of the event. So we were left to judge the credibility of two individuals, who both said they were 100 percent certain.

Christine Blasey Ford was not just credible, her account of her assault and trauma was deeply affecting. She was understandably anxious in such a setting, but kept her shit together, made her case poignantly and calmly — her moments of humor, her need for caffeine, her hair framing her glasses like wisteria were all thoroughly human. In her dignity and restraint and precision, she helped me and I’m sure many others better understand what sexual trauma is.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/kavanaugh-ford-hearings-everyone-lost-andrew-sullivan.html

There are two victims of this bruising political process,namely Kavanaugh and Ford, as Andy constructs his narrative. A function of Andy’s usual self-serving myopia, disingenuousness allied to his misogyny? Or perhaps the rhetorical strategy of duel victim-hood act as his pseudo-apologetic, for the natural successor to Andy’s ideal of the Jurisprudential Conservatism of Anthony Kennedy? The reader can come to her own conclusion! We live now in the age of Trump’s cultivated political crises-is Andy Divine that strong clear voice of reason, that can rescue our politics, our civic fate, from this nihilist?

Myra Breckenridge

The only ‘Moderate Republican’ that this newspaper could produce, on short notice, is Corporatist Christine Todd Whitman?

‘Whitman is also co-chair of the CASEnergy Coalition, and in 2007, voiced support for a stronger future role of nuclear power in the United States.[‘

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Todd_Whitman#Corporate_activity

There is indeed a rush to confirm Mr. Kavanaugh and the measure of the political desperation of the Republicans is this hysterical outburst by Dixiecrat Lindsey Graham:

Some have speculated that this is the senator’s audition for the seat of Attorney General, now occupied by fellow Dixiecrat Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions , who now enjoys the continuing displeasure of the erratic autocrat Trump!

Lindsey Graham gives a bungling performance, but it just demonstrates the comedy lurking beneath the outbursts of Kavanaugh, and his Republican sponsors and New Democratic antagonists. In sum, an utterly corrupt political class and their collective nihilism.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/f6cb4864-c33d-11e8-84cd-9e601db069b8

Mr. Luce, from your column of today:

Headline The deluge of vitriol swamping American politics

Sub-headline: The constitution has become a plaything of two increasingly venomous parties

…

In practice, the US system is dissolving in vitriol. The constitution was designed to discourage organised factions. History has turned full circle. That body of laws is now a plaything of two increasingly venomous parties. One deserves more of the blame. But the other is catching up.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/857b91c4-c229-11e8-8d55-54197280d3f7

Not quite a preposterous charade, but awash in Posh Boys hand·wringing over political vitriol. A riff on the lack of civility, that really meant not paying proper deference to the Political Elites.  In sum, both parties are guilty! This Party line is defended by respectable bourgeois pundits like yourself, of a past, that has morphed into a more nihilistic form, in the toxic political present. Yet for all your historical references, you are yet moored in that present, garnished by politically convenient history made to measure.

You ,of course, don’t look at the inconvenient historical fact of the collapse of institutionalized Neo-Liberalism,  that both Parties unstintingly praised as the necessary point of arrival at a New Utopia. That mirrored the State Capitalism, that was the end point of the October Revolution and its betrayers Lenin and Stalin.

Among the bad actors of the present political melodrama: Grassley, Feinstein, and the sclerotic Dixiecrat Orrin Hatch. The particulars are here, as reported in the America’s Political Gossip sheet Politico.

Headline: Feinstein and Grassley spar as hearing kicks off

Sub-headline: It’s considered a make-or-break moment for the embattled Supreme Court nominee.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-ford-hearing-supreme-court-847090

But the last three paragraphs of your intervention are worthy of due consideration. Has shopworn politically, not to speak of pseudo-histrionically framed moralizing, had a more adept  practitioner?

Will America rediscover its better angels? Therapists say a failing marriage passes the point of no return when contempt becomes routine.

America has suffered divorce before — in the civil war of the 1860s. No one expects history to repeat itself. But it is hard to shake the fear that the past remains highly relevant.

As William Faulkner once wrote: The past is not dead. It is not even past.

Political Observer