StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Ganesh is almost back to form, almost. As he describes the American political landscape of August 2018, it resembles the political present, yet his quick travelogue or just a history made to measure, lacks a complete description of the American political scene from Nixon to the present.  With a quick walk on by the Great Man Ronald Reagan, who was so admired by the ersatz ‘Progressive’ Obama, that he gave a speech about him. FDR was politically disappeared from Obama’s encomium, he is and remains to the New Democrats an impediment to the  Neo-Liberal Project.

Erased from Mr. Ganesh’s ‘history’ is Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’, an embrace of the Dixiecrat wing ,that migrated from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid 1960’s. And Reagan’s 1976 campaign against  ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’ and his first speech made at the Neshoba County Fair  of his 1980 campaign.

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15599

These ideological inspired lacunae of Mr. Ganesh’s ersatz history are verifiable by the absence of a reality based examination of the Republican Party. The case of the Central Park Five shows that Trump shared the racial animus demonstrated by both Nixon and Reagan:

There are no heroes in Mr. Ganesh’s political fable , neither the re-closeted Randian Paul Ryan, about to be employed by American Enterprise Institute or some other Corporatist Think Tank. And the Koch Brothers, minus one, who represent the Oligarchy in all their greed ridden mendacity.

Mr. Ganesh opines on the possible rise of ‘a coherent populist’ : the reader is somewhat dumbfounded by his myopia:  the political fact of Bernie Sanders, the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon,  Abdul El-Sayed and others: the fact that these candidates are part of a New Deal Tradition, that was once the very center of the Democratic Party, eludes his thought, that produced this  ideologically fueled polemic. 

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/afe1ec4c-94d9-11e8-b67b-b8205561c3fe

As a columnist for the New York Times Mr. Brooks writes two essays a week,regularly appears on television and writes books like ‘The Social Animal’, that reads like it was written by a Sociologist, who kept his manuscript hidden, because he lacked the talent and moral imagination of a fiction writer.
But the very notion of this intellectual poser, being a ‘Right Hegelian’ is ludicrous. Mr. Brooks scours a whole host of fields of inquiry, for plausible rhetorical frames for his chatter. But Hegel is beyond his ken, his intelligence, his comprehension. Mr. Brooks is a borrower, out of the necessity, of meeting his deadlines and maintaining his newly claimed status as an American Prophet.

But never fear, Mr. James McElroy makes Brooks seem like more that he is. Brooks is the protege of the Wm. F. Buckley Jr. , who looked and sounded like he stepped out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh. While Brooks looks and sounds like he stepped from the pages of the long forgotten American classic ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ . A fable about the Post-War children of The Depression, and their long hard climb to mediocrity.

Mr. McElroy dresses up Mr. Brooks in the ill fitting tuxedo of ‘Right Hegelian’, when his natural garb is Brooks Brothers grey flannel.

Political Observer

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/hegel-the-uninvited-guest-at-the-conservative-party/

Bob Woodward is America’s Saint-Simon, with the power to blackmail the subjects of his ‘reportage’ , which makes for riveting palace gossip! And this Politico ‘news story’ by Annie Karni is reliant on anonymous sources: a marriage made in The 9Th Circle of D.C. !
Not to speak of the comparisons of other authors, who supply both apologetics and criticism’s of Trump. Wolfe’s book being the ‘guttersnipe’s view’ of Trump, while Woodward’s will be the respectable bourgeois version of Anti-Trump hysteria.

With the added insight into the career of Mr. Woodward, who seems to have the ability to compel, blackmail politicians, and their retinue of retainers and hangers-on, to submit to interviews. In sum, Mr. Woodward has becomes a kind of Theodore H. White for the 21st Century, to speak in a wholly American political context.

Political Cynic

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/31/trump-woodward-book-white-house-reporters-press-753109

Financial Times ‘second stringer’ Robert Srimsley repeats the totally false, not to speak of defamatory Party Line on Corbyn, ANTI-ANTISEMITISM! All the top tier hacks are on vacation.  Do desperate times call for desperate measures : ‘guttersnipe journalism’ ?  Or do the really shitty jobs just naturally follow the pecking order?
All this inspired by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and the Tory/Blair faction, that wants to hold onto the power, that is ebbing away on an almost hourly basis. The level of political desperation, to check the rise of Corbyn, resulted in the Margaret Hodge’s  profane outburst.

Mr. Corbyn isn’t just a politician steeped in Anti-Semitism, and its fomentation of hatred against Jews, but has a record of support for the political aspirations of the Palestinians, and BDS: prima facae evidence of his status as moral/political heretic.

He is also  an opponent of  NATO and his ‘shadow chancellor John McDonnell raises the spectre of capital controls, we should take him seriously’  The Free Market thievery of the failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation is received wisdom to Mr.  Shrimsley and his employers,  the ultimate threat of Corbyn is the return of ‘Socialism’ . The ultimate thereat to Neo-Liberalism, in its  prolonged economic morbidity, is Left-Wing Social Democracy.

In the face of the political crimes of Corbyn , who would Mr. Shrimsley support the demonstrably failed leadership of Mrs. May ? Or will the Tories give Mrs. May a grand send-off in favor of a dependable male leader?

On the vexing question of Anti-Semitism read this from Mondoweiss:

Headline: Israel’s drift to authoritarianism: An illiberal ‘Jewish democracy’ embraces the populist nationalist model

…

As an ethnocratic settler-colonial state, Israel can no longer suppress or manage the contradictions that have accelerated its development into an apartheid state. These contradictions include its ethnocratic Zionist settler-colonial ideology, ethno-religious particularity in all its ambiguity (Jewish as a referent for both ethnic and religious identities), and the secular, egalitarian democratic ideals to which it has paid lip services for seven decades. Moreover, traditional liberal democracies are becoming an obstacle to the power realignments in the region and around the world, forcing the Israeli ethnocratic settler-colonial state to find new ways to fit into the structural changes that the neoliberal global capitalist system is currently undergoing. Indeed, Israel emerged as the only winner of the Helsinki summit.

In this context, the law inaugurates the Israeli ethnocratic settler-colonial state as an illiberal religious-based democracy and apartheid state, while Orban’s visit confers legitimacy on it within the global power shifts today especially, the rise of far right populist nationalist movements in Europe and the U.S. This calls for inventing new strategies for universalizing the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

…

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/07/authoritarianism-illiberal-nationalist/

What is the relevance of this essay, on the new Israeli Law, that declares itself to be a ‘Jewish State‘? Israel used to be a state of all its citizens , Jewish and non-Jewish, but now it passes a law that it is only a state for Jews alone. ‘The only democracy in the ‘Middle East’ is propaganda that now no longer has viability, in respectable bourgeois political discourse.  Mr. Shrimsley fails to even mention this. One of the cornerstones of the present definition of Anti-Semitism is that BDS is, by its opposition to the apartheid state of Israel, prima facae Anti-Semitic.  Mr. Shrimsley writes an ersatz history made to measure.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/297a0306-93da-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee64e

Like the ‘Liberals’ of another time, Schlesinger and Niebuhr being the most well known,  Mr. Chait is an active collaborator with the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan coterie, like Schlesinger and Niebuhr and their organization The ADA were to the McCarthy Witch Hunters. The whole of the ‘Intelligence Community’ , that has become the myth, the propaganda tool, that frames the charge of Russian Meddling in the American election. So weak is the Mueller case that a Russian Troll Farm and Russian state actors have been indited- will Show Trials in absentia be in the offing?

Mr. Chait doesn’t waste his time, he divides his attack on ‘The Left’ to the Heretics : Glenn Greenwald, Stephen F. Cohen, Aaron Maté. And the Fellow Travelers: Katherine Krueger, Seth Ackerman, Corey Robin , and Osita Nwanevu.

But here just might be, the verbosity and near complexity of Mr. Chait’s anti-left polemic renders argumentative clarity almost nil, what Mr. Chait is writing about is the self-serving political opportunism of ‘The Left’:

A theme of their skepticism is a sense of frustration with the way the Russia investigation cuts across the electorate, and especially the political intelligentsia, in a way that frustrates their ideological project. While some leftists have disdained the Mueller investigation, many centrists and even some conservatives have supported it. By expanding the Democratic coalition into the center, at least temporarily, the Russia issue runs counter to their goal of repositioning the party to the left. An undercurrent of frustration expresses itself in sniping at the commonality between liberal Russia skeptics and right-of-center Russia-hawks-turned-Trump-critics like David Frum, Max Boot, and Bill Kristol. What’s more, Trump’s Russia policy has produced a quiet struggle pitting the president against the mostly standard-issue hawkish Republicans who staff his administration. Trump is the enemy of the left’s enemy.

With further reading, what appears to be the motive of his attack on those on ‘The Left’, Heretics and Fellow Travelers,  is a reification of notion that Mr. Chait is the representative of the ‘Voice of Centrist Reason‘.  This Chait polemic, a vulgar melodrama, that deserves the ludicrous title of the  ‘Clash of Pundits’.  While the compelling, revelatory contributions to this debate of Ray McGovern and Bill Binney, remain beyond the ken of a journalistic hack regurgitating the current Party Line.

Old Socialist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/why-are-so-many-leftists-skeptical-of-the-russia-probe.html

Headline: Macron, the bodyguard and the May Day scandal

Sub-headline: French president battles biggest political crisis of his tenure

The latest Macron Scandal is told by Harriet Agnew of the Financial Times:

At the centre of the incident is Mr Benalla, who was caught on camera almost three months ago punching a male protester and tackling a young woman during the May Day riots. Mr Macron and his team were aware of the incident but failed to inform judicial authorities. Mr Benalla was initially suspended for two weeks but was kept on the payroll and accompanied the French football team on their World Cup victory drive down the Champs-Élysées last week. The affair only came to light after a video implicating Mr Benalla was widely circulated online and published in Le Monde newspaper.

The scandal has united opposition parties across the political spectrum, which are preparing to submit a motion of no confidence against the government.

As reported in an earlier part of this essay, this is Macron’s response:

“Let them come and get me.”

In a political contest where 36.5 % of voters abstained from casting a vote for Macron, this defensive bravado is utterly misplaced, or should the reader call it more blundering by the utterly obtuse Macron? Jupertarian Politics is highfalutin re-description for  ‘rule-by-decree’ that is the Macron Trademark. In short, Macron is a bully-boy, with a degree from one of the Grandes Écoles.

Thomas Guénolé  sums up quite adroitly The Macron Problem:

“It’s unthinkable that Mr Macron should taunt his opponents with ‘come and get me,’” said Thomas Guénolé, a political analyst and member of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left Unbowed party. “It’s a provocation by a child king, not a statesman. The head of state has a behavioural problem — he expresses provocations but refuses to answer questions.”

Mr Guénolé said the affair is “a French Watergate . . . the main problem is not what Benalla did but the cover-up by the highest officials in Macron’s team. The accumulation of lies and the different versions of events are absolutely spectacular.”

Macron is what? A few answers provided by Harriet Agnew in this collection of brief revelatory passages :

…’“president for the rich” who is arrogant and out of touch with the lives of ordinary French people.’… . A €26,000 bill for three months of make-up,… a public dressing down he gave to a teenager who called him Manu,… Mr Macron recently ordered €500,000 worth of new banqueting plates ,… his staff posted a video of him lashing out at the “insane amount of dough” pumped into social benefits,… that Mr Macron’s support had dropped to 32 per cent, down four points since June and the lowest level since September 2017.

But never fear here is the Financial Times’ defense of  Macron:

Some say Mr Macron’s reign is as much about his style as his ambitious reform agenda, which is aimed at rebooting the eurozone’s second-largest economy.

That ambitious reform agenda is Neo-Liberalism a la francaise. The fact that the Neo-Liberal Theology was catestropnic in both America and Britain, and its Austerity for the 99%, and the free reign for Robber Capital is the ‘why’ of the Financial Times’ Macron enthusiasm. The reason why the comments section on this ‘new story’ were not opened: there is nothing that the editors of The Financial Times fears more than the disdain of its loyal readership! Thomas Guénolé describes Macron with devastating accuracy, as a ‘child king’!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/a4452e7a-91a6-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421

Andy Divine latest essay focuses on ‘Russia-Gate’? The indictments of ‘Russian Trolls’ & ‘Russian Spies’ – but Show Trials in absentia are not what Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey have in mind. Of more import are Trump’s machinations & coverup of his sexual escapades & corruption, that all of a piece, add up to unfitness to hold the office of the Presidency.

The whole point of the Russian Meddling propaganda being the removal of Trump from office. The political allies of the Mueller, Rosenstein, Comey  are the Clinton coterie’s featured players are Brennan, Clapper and their allies in the ‘Deep State’ and in American Corporate Media.

But Andy’s foray into the muck, of this  detour from the stated purpose of the Mueller Investigation, is his portrayal of Trump:

It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. He’s clearly aware of everything that’s going on: “Let me know what’s happening, okay?” he says to someone — Pam (Bondi)? — on the phone at first. He talks about how some issue will blow over: “I think this goes away quickly … in two weeks; it’s fine.” He then asks Cohen, “Can we use him anymore?” referring to an Evangelical pastor, and Cohen says absolutely.

Then they briefly discuss “the financing” for the National Enquirer’s capture and withholding of the McDougal story. “So, what do we got to pay for this? $150?” Trump asks at one point, meaning $150,000. The question of “cash” is raised by Trump (the precise wording is hard to make out from the audio), and Cohen strongly rules it out: “No, no, no.”

Andy makes it read like television melodrama of the black and white 21 inch screen era. But Andy shifts into deep analysis mode, or as deep as Andy is capable of going:

…

What this tiny glimpse into reality reveals is something quite simple. It’s not that it’s a shock that Trump has been lying about this incident from the very beginning. That has long been clear. But there’s something about listening to his voice acknowledging this in such a breezy, matter-of-fact tone that exposes the purity of the cynicism behind the lies. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks, had, after all, originally told The Wall Street Journal when it broke the story days before the 2016 election. The idea that Trump had had an affair at all, let alone organized hush money to the National Enquirer, was “totally untrue.” And yet here, as the curtain is pulled back, we hear Trump himself figuring out how to finance its cover-up.

…

Mr. Divine’s unslakable verbosity, his jejune moralizing  go on for paragraph after paragraph, and is fully demonstrated in his latest political encyclical. He fancies himself as possessing some valuable political/moral insights, yet he exhausts the readers patience and forbearance with his self-congratulatory pose as a wise man in search of truth: the end point, for this reader, is to demonstrate his status as bourgeois political chatterer.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/andrew-sullivan-portrait-of-the-president-as-a-con-man.html

The Financial Times editors again demonstrates their fear of their own readership, by way of disabling the comments section, on this ‘news story ‘ ,on the proposed Impeachment of Rod Rosenstein by House Republicans

There are plenty of reason to dislike the priggish inquisitor Rosenstein, besides the usual arrogance of a lawyer in power. How many Show Trials of absent Russians indited in the investigation will take place? The central cases are just an investigation into Trump’s utterly corrupt machinations and an exposure of his confederates, embellished by those ever-present Russian bad actors: its The New Cold War that simply repeats the cliched propaganda of the Old Cold War. Led by Clinton and her coterie, instead of Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt post WWII hysteria mongering about The New Deal being ‘a generation of treason’.

With this Impeachment proposal the bourgeois News outlets, print, television and the internet  will be in full hysterical cry. ‘The Republican Leadership taking orders from Moscow’ a headline soon to be read somewhere or everywhere, in this continuing American political melodrama: the script writes itself!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/8d82de7c-9065-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421

Headline: Revenge on the US is sweet for Vladimir Putin

Sub-headline:  The Russian president draws satisfaction from embarrassing America

Taking the temperature of ‘The Washington foreign policy establishment’  must have been  a  challenging, even a daunting task. Like Mr. Rachman, and the headline writers at The Financial Times, I engage in self-serving hyperbole. The ‘thought’ of the Foreign Policy establishment is not even broached, but its ’emotional state’ is the point of Mr. Rachman’s unverifiable speculations. The daunting task of a description of such sweep,  on the  range of the stunted American political spectrum, as represented in the Think Tanks of Washington D.C.! Or is this Washington foreign policy establishment’ just the small coterie of Mr. Rachman’s fellow pundits?  The key to this essay is a kind of textbook psychoanalysis, an utterly bankrupt ‘science’, of Putin. But first thing first: the smirking Putin straight out of the Marvel Universe.

The Washington foreign policy establishment has experienced many emotions since the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki: incredulity, fear, anger. But foremost among those emotions is a profound sense of humiliation. Here was the US president disgracing himself on an international stage, while the Russian president looked on, smirking.

It wasn’t long in his essay before  the ‘Putin’, shaped by a ‘West’, that has ‘weakened and humiliated Russia for decades.’ appears on cue!

For Vladimir Putin, inflicting this kind of embarrassment on America is deeply satisfying. The Russian president’s worldview is built around the idea that the west has deliberately weakened and humiliated Russia for decades. For Mr Putin, it is payback time.

But the patience of the reader is rewarded with this summation of the ‘Crimes of Putin’ :

In the US and UK, Russia is seen as a violent state that has annexed Crimea and waged an undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The Russian response is that the western allies have committed greater acts of aggression in Iraq and Libya and have threatened Russia directly, by expanding the Nato alliance up to its borders. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is portrayed as a defensive measure in Moscow, designed partly to ensure that the Russian navy’s base in Sevastopol never plays host to Nato ships.

Mr. Rachman elides from his bill of attainder, the fact that ‘The West’ i.e. America failed or even betrayed the agreements made with Gorbachev, on the expansion of NATO. More inconvenient history! Here is how Mr. Rachman ‘explains’ the expansion of NATO, in that betrayal of the agreement with Gorbachev:

Mr Putin and his acolytes are wrong to blame all the setbacks that the Russian state has experienced since 1991 on western plots. The countries that joined Nato after the end of the cold war did so of their own volition because they had a deep fear of Russia, based on their own recent history.

In sum the Hegemon does at it likes !

Some of  Mr. Rachman’s readers were witnesses to the ‘transition’ of the Soviet Union to Russia and the execrable @RussiaHand, Strobe Talbott, appointed by the Neo-Liberal Bill Clinton,  as head of that ‘transition’: the Shock Therapy of Austerity, on the Russians, was a crime, a revenge on people of the Soviet Union/Russia at the least, led by Mr. Talbott and his coterie of Chicago Boys! All of this utterly inconvenient to the New Cold War propaganda cobbled together by Mr.  Rachman.

Similarly, the economic and political chaos in Russia in the 1990s was not “imposed on Russia by the west”, as the Putinist ideology would have it. It flowed from the collapse of the Soviet system and later mistakes by the Russian government.

Mr. Rachman is one of the many ‘Midwives of Trump’  who pronounces on the psychologically unhinged Putin as fellow conspirator , with Trump, against the post war  ‘rules based order’ and the concomitant crisis of the American Republic.

But now the American democratic system — triumphant in 1989 — is itself in deep trouble. Russia, meanwhile, is once again treated by a US president as a peer superpower.

Mr Rachman’s admonitory concluding paragraph is almost Delphic:

For Mr Putin, it is a moment of sweet revenge. For American liberals, it should be a cause for reflection. Much of what has gone wrong in Mr Putin’s Russia flows from its failure to deal with domestic problems in favour of an effort to blame the west for all the country’s woes. Now it is tempting for American liberals to blame Russia for their Donald Trump nightmare. But the real problems, in both countries, begin at home.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/7d63ecc6-8e5c-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546

No need to wonder or even agonize over the men leading our once Republic. Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Clapper are the dregs of now vanished Republic, swallowed whole by the imperatives of the National Security State. If you need a reminder of how bankrupt these men are read Comey’s tweet here:

Mr. Comey, like his predecessor J. Edgar Hoover,  is a paranoid political hysteric with a sense of mission, and once possessed a malign power. He now poses as a beacon of moral/political virtue, in the Age of Trump: the Authoritarian Personality is  true, the reader need only pay attention to the unhinged political discourse of the present . Look to the Margaret Kimberley tweet on the porcine Dowager Empress of ‘The Resistance’  Hillary Clinton:

Publius