‘a presidential historian at Princeton University’  Julian Zelizer repeats the respectable bourgeois, not to speak of the mendaciously myopic, Party Line on the FBI:

“This is clearly a systemic effort to discredit [Robert Mueller’s investigation] and to sow doubts in the minds of as many voters as possible, especially Republican voters,” Mr Zelizer said. “What you’re watching now is not just that the investigation is partisan or that you have an overzealous prosecutor, it’s basically arguing that the entire FBI is corrupt.”

Aided by the Political Hysterics Senator Dick Durbin:

‘… said on CNN. “If the House Republicans believe they’ve set the stage for this president to end this investigation, they are basically saying that in America one man is above the law.”

His Republican colleagues were “bound and determined to continue to find ways to absolve this president from any responsibility”, Mr Durbin alleged. “And frankly it’s doing Putin’s work.” ‘

And  Rep. Adam Schiff:

Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said in an interview with ABC that Mr Trump’s decision to disregard FBI and Justice Department warnings and release the memo “could be evidence of the president’s intent to interfere with the investigation”.

And the reliable New Democrat Leon Panetta:

“I believe it creates a constitutional crisis when the president distrusts the justice department and the FBI . . . They’re the primary law enforcement agencies under our constitution,” Mr Panetta told CBS.

The only real problem with this maladroitly confected melodrama,  can be summed up into one vexing question: where is the evidence? What has evolved here is just the political hysterics of Hillary Clinton, and her political minions, amplified by unrelenting  repetition, its called propaganda for a reason.That old adage, repetition is the mother of memory, made real?

I was ‘interviewed‘, when Torquemada J. Edgar was still in charge, by the FBI. My brother was AWOL from the Army during the Vietnam War. You could spot these creeps a mile away, same late model, bottom of the line cars, and cheap suits awash in self-justified bulling. Just like the Narcs, on the lookout for Pot Smokers and their ‘Free Market’ experiments with sales. And on the subject of ‘police’, I was also ‘interviewed‘ by the LAPD Detectives who handled the O.J. Simpson case, in the matter of the ‘murder investigation’ of a notorious heiress, and her scheming butler. This inquiry was so old, that her file was in long term storage. These two dull-witted bunglers were a wonder.  The why of the O.J. verdict made abundantly clear!

For just one instance of the FBI’s mendacity allied to bungling, its Crime Lab Scandal is just one paradigmatic case:

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

https://books.google.com/books/about/Tainting_evidence.html?id=Y-bkAAAAMAAJ

Or Mr. Hoover’s notorious letter to Martin Luther King as another example of this monster’s unchecked power- call the FBI what it is, an American Stasi.

See also this Intercept report:

Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?

https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats/

Or this from The Guardian:

I read a portion of Andy Divine’s essay of January 26, 2018: the usual shopworn narrative of his being the epitome of ‘Centrism’: that iteration of  ‘Centrism’ being  about the political rapprochement between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives. That marks the movement of  our current politics, to the most reactionary form of  ‘Right Wing’ radical political nostalgia, allied to an equally reactionary and destructive, manufactured Free Market Romanticism.  As the only answer to the continual political/moral crisis of our present. It is beyond the ken of Mr. Divine that the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Mythology, and the failure of the metaphysic of the Self-Correcting Market to manifest itself in the present, might just be the key to that ineradicable mood of crisis.

First, Mr. Divine presents himself as the modern day Platonic Guardian, who can answer  all questions political and moral, in sum, those pressing questions answered by a wan political conformity, with what remains of his personal evolution: from Thatcherite, to Neo-Conservative, to Neo-Liberal. Showing the persistence of the worst of these beliefs, of this misbegotten troika of immiserating conditions , not to speak of , being a collection of ignoble lies,  while he vilifies the ‘social-justice left’ as the perpetual enemy. Using the strategy of rhetorical of displacement , as the-in-order-too of a serial denial, of responsibility for his demonstrably failed political advocacies in his past.

His propaganda precursors being Alan Bloom, of ‘The Closing of the American Mind’, Roger Kimball of ‘Tenured Radicals’ and Illiberal Education by Dinesh D’Souza.  In its most contemporary expression of Straussian Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics that attacks Identity Politics,  that Mr. Divine dubs the ‘social-justice left’, and that in the political present moment threatens- the title of his essay tells the whole his story, in its essence: ‘The Gay Rights Movement Is Undoing Its Best Work’ under the malign influence of that ‘social justice left’s inherent nihilism. The last paragraph of this portion of his episodic melodrama, casts him in his favorite role of Wise Political Elder counseling the neophytes. As always, awash in Patriarchal Attitudes, the title of Eva Figes 1970 book. Mr. Divine counts on the fact that his readership is at least as historically ignorant as he is, or should I call it a cultivated ignorance on both their parts?

The Trump era is, I fear, not just about this hideous embarrassment of a president. It’s also fueled by a reaction of many ordinary people to the excesses of the social-justice left — on immigration, race, gender, and sexual orientation. If the gay-rights movement decides to throw in with this new leftism, and abandon the moderation and integrationism of the recent past, they risk turning gay equality from being about a win-win process for gays and straights into a war between “LGBT” people and the rest. That’s a battle none of us need to fight. Especially after the real war was won.

Nothing is clearer, than that Carl Schmitt’s plangent idea of the Friend/Enemy distinction, rules the politics of our benighted political present.  That Neo-Conservative,  Neo-Liberal rapprochement: how long can it survive the natural antagonisms of these two expressions of a vulgarized, if such is possible, Social Darwinism?

Queer Atheist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/sullivan-the-gay-rights-movement-is-undoing-its-best-work.html

Don’t call Mr. Bezos a ‘disrupter’! Capitalism is about profit at any cost , it is never about  self-congratulatory Neo-Liberal mendacious rhetorical posing.  Call him an opportunist like all other Capitalist. Mr. Bezos is, in his other guises, owner of the Neo-Conservative Washington Post , CIA Propagandist and Savior of Capitalism! Forget the primary role of Health Care , in sum,  the welfare of patients and their return to good health. The tracking of Patient Outcomes was of primary concern , when I was in Health Care, where I worked the latter part of my career, almost 20 years.

But there is this from Warren Buffett on ‘costs‘:

Mr Buffett’s graphic description of ballooning healthcare costs as a “hungry tapeworm” is indicative of a growing exasperation in America’s boardrooms over soaring healthcare costs.

Or this from Paul Fronstin: ‘an independent research organisation focused on healthcare and other benefits’:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; French: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, OCDE) is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade.

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

‘An independent research organisation focused on healthcare and other benefits.’ ?

On the vexed question of  both positive patient outcomes and rising costs can be addressed by the answer of Universal Health Care: in America Medicare for all!  I forgot, for just a moment, that I’m  reading one of the House Organs of the failed promise of  Corporatist Paternalism, and its troika of pretenders who offer a Free Market alternative to that Universal Health Care. To paraphrase/riff on Blanche DuBois: ‘I rely on the kindness of greedy Capitalists’ and their allies and a bought and paid for political class!

As a patient, I encounter the future in which  cost cutting Corporations remove from Health Care the necessary human interactions: by providing check-in kiosks that ask, not just for your insurance card, but your drivers licence, because there is no person, but a machine, to check who you claim to be! Here is where Corporatism will fail , in their unenlightened imperative of ‘cost cutting’, they will utterly alienate their ‘consumers’  who are in fact their ‘patients’ ! The Free Market Mythology undermines, in the most primary way, the humanity, its civic/moral status as a primary obligation, in a world of equals, rather than a world subject to the ‘feigned benevolence’ of a world of profiteers, like Bezos, Buffet and the execrable Mr. Dimon!  

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/8929ecf4-0608-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

@Toronto M

Thank your for your question.

Begin your inquiry into Neo-Conservatism here:

Cloaked in Virtue : Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy by Nicholas Xenos

https://books.google.com/books/about/Cloaked_in_Virtue.html?id=r-LwdL_i1QwC

Then ,  Sphinx Without a Secret by  M.F. Burnyeat:

Sphinx Without a Secret

Both of these cover the intellectual mendacity of the ‘philosophical founder’ of  Neo-Conservatism Leo Strauss . Without his self-serving re-reading of the Western Philosophical Tradition, that  Neo-Conservatism would not have been born.

Next see:

The Neo-Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the shaping of Public Policy by Murray Friedman .

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neoconservative-revolution/1E04348FDD4069CA02085D5C06EB070

See ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by the paranoid Samuel P. Huntington, here critiqued by Edward Said:

Here is the political criminal, himself, on his paranoid fantasy of the hegemon’s technocrat. Mr. Rose’s sycophancy toward this monster is predictable, Fukuyama got the same obsequious deference! Who recalls the probing interviews conducted by Mike Wallace, in his 1950’s Night Beat  and The Mike Wallace Interview, that puts Mr. Rose’s kowtowing deference to shame?

See also the Wikipedia entry on ‘The Clash’:

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

Other sources on Neo-Conservative nihilism:

Project for a New American Century

The signatories to the ‘Statement of Principals’ are a whose who of American war mongers!

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

Also see this by the premier Neo-Conservative intellectual Francis Fukuyama, which is a concerted attack on the whole of the meliorist politics of the American 20th Century. The melding of  political reaction and nihilism.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

The imperative of your inquiry should point to the fact that the advocates of ‘The War on Terror’ , Huntington’s ‘Clash’ made real,  have no real military experience. Even the present American political class has only two Neo-Conservatives, John McCain and Tom Cotton, with actual experience of war. The rest of these public intellectuals  have no problem sending someone’s children to fight in America’s Thirty Years War. At last count,  the ‘Fronts’ of that ‘War’ have expanded to eight!

Look to the career of the bellicose Jeane Kirkpatrick, once a Democrat, whose Party affiliation ‘evolved’, as she became a paradigmatic figure, that describes the rise of a certain faction of that Neo-Conservatism*:

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

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

*Look to other Democrats, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who were subject to a similar political evolution. The Friedman book  is the very history of that evolutionary process!

The foreshortened evolution of Financial Times propaganda:  The Rebellion Against the Elites to the Populist Menace frames Mr. Rachman latest essay,  intervention,  as Corporatist advocate/apologists, that continues to exploit the seemingly endless political irrationalism of Trump. Yet Trump, like his mentor Roy Cohn, practices a form of ‘politics’ that keeps the opposition in a continuous and exploitable state of indignant fluster and confusion. Its the kind of ‘politics’ that Peron used to practice , except that Trump doesn’t need his minions to provoke discontent, anger and other forms of political emotion, he quite adroitly uses twitter to cultivate that necessary discord.

In his opening paragraph Mr. Rachman almost gives the game away:

The “global rules-based order” is a yawn-inducing phrase but it means something important. All countries in the world, bar a few rogue states, deal with each other according to an agreed set of legal, economic and military rules. Ignore or overturn them and confusion and conflict break out. Some non-western countries have long believed that the phrase is little more than a cloak for US global domination. Since America effectively wrote the rules, it was assumed that the whole system must be biased in favour of the US.

But Mr. Rachman places these speculations within the rhetoric of conjecture, a kind of political caricature of oratio obliqua. That “global rules-based order” is indeed a product of American Imperialism, and that ‘rule based order’ is now in the hands of  of NGO’s like the WTO and its ‘Court’, and the Corporatist schemes like NAFTA, the TPP and TTIP. This, while the failure to appear, as one of cornerstones of  the Neo-Liberal Mythology, The Self-Correcting Market  remains unrealized. An utter desecration of the Mt. Pelerin Olympus!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/b6001f76-0295-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

Never fear, Mr. Ganesh has never even approached books like the collection of essays published by Harvard University Press of the Cahiers du Cinema edited by Jim Hillerman,  What is Cinema 1 & 2 by Andre Bazin published by University of California Press, nor the engaging collection of essays by Truffaut in his  ‘Films in My Life’.

It is with the most awful dread that you sense cinema becoming another field of politics in these over-politicised times. Detectable in the pre-Oscars mood is a creeping indifference to art as art — a demotion of aesthetic judgment to tests of ideological soundness. Even if the intentions are mostly good, it amounts to philistinism by another name. A critical culture that rates work by what it says about populism, identity and the rest of the nightly news will end up begetting a lot of “woke” but low-quality film-making.

The American movies have always been ‘political’ ! Look to Birth of a Nation, that D.W. Griffith epic based on the racist The Clansman. Hollywood has always kowtowed to the American State’s Wars! But look also too the 1943 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer anti-fascist ‘Keeper of the Flame’ and the State of the Union 1948. Or ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ of 1947.

And of the vexing question of ‘over-politicised times’ : the Hollywood Ten, HUAC, the Blacklist, that was still alive in 1999 when Eli Kazan received his honorary Oscar.

The Vietnam War and its divisions produced John Wayne’s jingoistic  ‘Green Berets’, ‘Coming Home’, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, etc.!  Or the more recent films ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and  ‘Hurt Locker’ linked to the CIA in terms of money and logistical support!

Did the world really need another Winston Churchill hagiography (Darkest Hour) or crusade against Watergate (The Post)?

Yes! Hollywood, the American Movie Industry, needs to produce reliably profit-making ‘entertainment products’ !

One can only marvel as Mr. Ganesh uses of this paraphrase from John Banville: ‘Describe a familiar object in an original way,’ The Untouchable’: a roman à clef, a fictional  biography of the  ‘fourth man’ of the Cambridge Spies, Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures is a political novel! That follows the literary imperative of Mr. Banville  described by Ganesh, but is a complete expression, a portrait of a life in all its expressions and much more! The portrait of the ‘Graham Greene’ character in the book shows him to be as nasty, even malevolent as his biographers have depicted.

Famously, the great Irish novelist John Banville fears for any aspiring young writer who tells him that they have important things to say about the world. Describe a familiar object in an original way, is his preferred test of suitability for his profession. The essence of art is the technique, not the message.

Mr. Ganesh makes the ludicrous assertion that Alan Bloom, in his screeching polemic titled The Closing of the American Mind , somehow had an effect on ‘Literature‘ qualifies as the expression of a ideologically cultivated ignorance. ‘The Closing’ a mendacious exercise in Straussian Mythologizing,  about a generation of ‘Students’ addled by ‘Rock Music’ and their inherent narcissism, not to speak of nihilism. Those ‘Students’,  more importantly, ignored the modern Plato in their midst , who could have led them into the sunlight, out  from the play of shadows in the cave!    American novelist Saul Bellow provided the introduction to the Bloom screed, and wrote a roman à clef of Bloom’s life titled Ravelstein. Perhaps Ganesh is obliquely referring to this, to speak charitably?

What Bloom’s book produced was a valuable collection of replies titled Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, edited by Robert L. Stone and published by Chicago Review Press in 1989.

And the Movies, are by their very nature ‘Art by Committee’, a triumph of the Age of Technology wedded to Capital, and its necessary corollary Propaganda. The French Cinema Theorists seemed to have missed or ignored the insights offered by their philosophical/political contemporaries.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/2a9a8a26-01d1-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

As an American kid, who grew up in the 1950’s watching the ‘Wonderful World of Disney’ ,and its many iterations with my younger brothers and sisters, Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromet video collection was something I gave to my best friend’s kids. Charming and utterly winning, not speak of path breaking using ‘clay-mation’ pioneered by the great Harryhausen: Sinbad!

Disney was the great American kitsch meister and political reactionary who wouldn’t allow ‘long-hairs’ into his Anaheim amusement park, in the middle sixties. Those canny Corporatists, that now head this well wrought  ‘Wonderful World’, now features ‘Gay Days’ that poor old ‘Walt’ would have never, ever allowed. The Anaheim park even had a gay club!

The notion that the ‘Brexit’ constitutes the self-expulsion from the Eden of the EU is the perpetual Party Line of the Financial Times. Here is what historian J.G.A. Pocock’s said on the ‘calamity’ of  the ‘Brexit’:

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now#pocock

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/10922a92-00f2-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

Where is the self-proclaimed  ‘Wise Republican Elder’ @iamDavidFrum when we need him, to interpret Trump & Trumpism? The midwives of Trump created the possibility/actuality of a Trump & are now full of theories, that adroitly avoids confronting their own political culpability in his rise! Voila! ‘”Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic”  The promotion tour begins?

‘Only confirmed followers’ have access  to his twitter account!

Political Cynic

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

@BretStephensNYT names himself, in his praise of the Trump lowered corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. ‘Those whom the gods will mock, first they make pompous economic forecasters.’ Its reeks of a dull-witted pastiche of Heidegger’s Delphic utterances, after his ‘turn’, much to highfalutin for this intellectual rube called  ‘pundit’? This policy is a windfall, or the best these greedy corporations might ever get?  The ‘American’ beneficiaries of that tax break who will re-repatriate their billions, trillions!

Where have Mr. Stephens perennial manufactured Trump hysterics gone?  Look no further than Mr. Stephens’ Corporatist politics, in sum, his vision is of a polity run by and for  rapacious Corporations: who seek the mirage of unending growth, in a world that has reached the end of that road, in terms of environment catastrophe, actual and potential. And of the inability of ‘The Market‘ to provide a sustainable model, or better yet a tenable Mythology . The economic present, in the watershed of the 2008 Depression, and the failure of The Self-correcting Market to manifest itself, to put it in a regrettable passive construction, are subject to Mr. Stephens  selective ideological myopia.

The economy grew by 15.5 percent from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2016. During the (slightly longer) Reagan boom of 1982-90, it grew by more than 38 percent. The failure to understand this meant a failure to appreciate the depth of American discontent. It helps explain how Hillary Clinton lost her unlosable election to a man whose central claim to office was that he understood business.

The enviable economic model of Reagan remains revelatory, a touchstone in Mr. Stephens essay. The model of ‘development’, as replacement for a destructive, not to speak of doomed ‘growth’ model, of Manfred Max Neef ,are beyond the ken, of  the stunted economic/political imagination of  Mr. Stephens.

Mr. Stephens attacks the New Democrats, who are no less loyal adherents to the Free Market Mythology, for their failure, for their lack of ‘grace’ toward the Trump economic leadership, sounding comically like Emily Post of several generations ago:

Had the economy tumbled over the past year his critics would surely have blamed him. It’s ill grace to deny him all credit when it’s doing so well.

What follows is a collection of Conservative economic cliches, again in praise of Trump’s enlightened economic policies: more of the same Neo-Liberalism of both Parties. This amounts to a Corporatism of greater or lesser degree. The bad bet the Democrats have made on the ‘Shutdown’ and the Trump Party line of the disloyalty of the New Democrats, in the DACA matter.

The reader is, as always, taken aback by the cultivated  historical ignorance of  Mr. Stephens, and a great many Americans,  who think themselves entitled, whose self-conception is the ‘as if’ that they are a part of something eternal, The American State, as it is presently constituted. What ever happened to John Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants? to engage in the most superficial kind of bourgeois historical inquiry.

We are a historically realized state, founded on the genocide of Native Peoples , Slavery and the theft of land subject to an erasure by ‘pundits’ like Mr. Stephens. We exist as an historical inevitability created by an ersatz ‘Free Market Mythology’ , made possible by continuous strategic  governmental intervention, a set of facts inconvenient to the Mt. Pelerin mystagogues!

Almost Marx

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

Andy Divine opens his latest three act melodrama with this:

A long time ago now, I came rather abruptly face-to-face with what being a man means.

A telling bit of male arrogance? Or in Andy’s case the hubris of a ‘pundit’ who feels himself to be entitled?

But the key to his revelation is his suffering from AIDS and its effects on his ‘libido’ as a central fact of his ‘being’ as a male. He then employs his ‘revelation’ in the wake of  hormone therapy, to attack the #MeToo Feminists and their use of Patriarchy as persistent destructive cultural phenomenon .  It is impossible for Mr. Divine, a devout believer in a Catholicism steeped in patriarchy ,  to conceive of the power and persistence of those Patriarchal  Attitudes, Eva Figes book . But Mr. Divine attacks Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘social constructs’ as the master idea that is the root of Feminist Mythomania. What shall the reader make of Mr. D.’s political model Michael Oakeshott,  his support of  Thatcher and Reagan,  The Bell Curve, his support of Republican candidates from 1980 t0 2000? His support for the 2003 invasions of Iraq and the ‘War on Terror’:

Sullivan supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and was initially hawkish in the war on terror, arguing that weakness would embolden terrorists. He was “one of the most militant”^[27] supporters of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy immediately following the September 11 attacks in 2001; in an essay for The Sunday Times, he stated, “The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.”^[57

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

Mr.  D.’s Anti-Left hysterics are as persistent as they are mendacious! What can the reader make of this record of not just bad judgement? but a kind of self-righteously proclaimed political independence, that expresses a cantankerous conformity to the accepted and legitimized narratives: respectable bourgeois conformity.

Then Mr. D. offers an alternative to the #MeToo Party Line, which consists in a collection of cliches about male sexuality: men are naturally predatory and aggressive. But he shifts into a description of  challenges that ‘young men in this environment’ and ‘the fact of natural sexual differences.’  Mr. D. is the New Philip Wylie whose ‘Generation of Vipers’ propounded the idea of ‘Momism‘:  except that being a Philosopher whose specialty is Male Sexuality and Patriarchal Apologetics, in this essay, demonstrates that the #MeToo Movement is attacking ‘young men’ . Being that Mr. D. is by ‘nature’ an inquisitor, and a person who proves that the Christian Myth of ‘unmerited suffering being redemptive’, in a probably irrelevant political sense to that Christian Mythology, yet the reader is confronted by the fact of the pronouncements of a Zealot against the Heretics: the usual Andy Divine moral/political position. My  apologies to my readers, for the brevity of my comment on Mr. D.’s usual three act monologue, my tolerance for this writer’s chatter has reached its end!

Myra B.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/sullivan-metoo-must-choose-between-reality-and-ideology.html#comments

The Financial Times and its hirelings are politically smitten with Neo-Liberal Golden Boy Emmanuel Macron. In his essay of January 15, 2018, Mr. Ganesh reveals the central Macron conceit:

Before he became president of France, he identified a hole in his nation’s public life. “This absence is the figure of the king,” he said, “whom I don’t think fundamentally the French people wanted to kill.” The theory, not new in France, might explain the country’s periodic thrall to exceptional, almost monarchical leaders. François Mitterrand is the most recent in a gallery that includes Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon.

Call Macron M. 37% after the spoiled, and other uncountable ballots that ushered in the Jupertarian, read authoritarian, politics of Macron. Mr. Ganesh has more pressing business, in sum: ‘…Britain succumbs to relative drift.’ Mr. Ganesh can’t resist the ‘temptation’ of engaging in a public shaming of Mrs. May. Now this couldn’t be rooted in misogyny as Ganesh worships at the Thatcher shrine?

But the regular reader of his essays knows that he would prefer Tory bully-boy and political master-mind Cameron, or the rapacious opportunist Blair.

Yet Mr. Ganesh engages in dishonesty when he describes Macron’s politics as: Mr Macron has started to liberalise France’s labour regulations and reduce the state’s holdings in major companies. Substitute the actuality of neo-liberalise for the notion of liberalise! In the ‘West’ corporations have enjoyed state subsidies and regulation since the post 29 Crash, this did not end with the rise of Thatcher/Reagan. But this fact is superfluous to the Ganesh attack on May, who ‘ showed a stern face to international business.’

Macon’s position as presented by Ganesh: More than this, he plainly hates the idea of France as the passive subject of continental events. Or more likely tired of being just one more cheerleader for NATO, as check on ‘Russian Revanchism’?  the American Hegemon?

Not to forget, ‘The old liberal-left awe of France as a place that “just does things better”…’   At At The Financial Times, Left hysterics are never out of place!

In conclusion Mr. Ganesh presents France in its potentiality under Macron and Britain as confused under the ‘leadership’ of May:

At times, it has been no country for young men (or women). But then that is why it took a chance on the president who is bringing his regal certainties to Britain, which appears much less sure where to go and who is to lead it there

Here is a link to a New York Times report on Macron’s recent speech in Calais on the refugee crisis.

This crisis made by America’s continuing, never ending ‘War on Terror’ and its ever expanding theaters. Macron’s Jupertarian Politics with its highfalutin rhetoric, mounting broken promises, and unapologetic authoritarianism, will collapse in the disgust of the French electorate. And this obvious fraudulence, and it root in Macron’s hubris.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/41ffb734-f9db-11e7-9b32-d7d59aace167