StephenKMackSD's Blog

How apt that Bozoma Saint John is a sort of protege of Arianna Huffington, but with better hipster credentials . Ms. Huffington lost her ‘Progressive Credential’ with the sale of her website, with the whine that it was just a business, when it was part and parcel the Obama Evangelism, that gripped the American electorate, in answer to eight years of Bush The Younger, and his puppet masters Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and their War on Terror: the realization of Huntington’s ‘Clash’. That Obama Evangelism became the third  and fourth term of the dreaded Neo-Liberalism of the Clinton’s Reaganite political nihilism. Note that Obama never praised FDR but only Reagan:

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html

Spying, lying and compromised customer data are the hallmarks of the Uber Neo-Liberal con. It is not ‘a ride hailing service’ but is, in fact, a taxi service, and as such must be regulated by the municipalities in which it operates, in the public interest!  What a perfect place for Huffington, an adept in the art of the con, to practice the grifters business model. A kind of riff on Rovian politics in a corporate setting. With the vivacious and winning person of Ms. Saint John. Yet…

At Uber, her first big ad campaigns have featured tie-ups with the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. “Utilising these channels in pop culture is really important. People love the product [of Uber]; they don’t necessarily love the brand,” she admits. Uber has previously been seen as a utility, she explains, rather than a service that elicits an emotional connection with its users. “Pop culture . . . is a very effective way to add more, and to talk about the narrative,” she says. In Uber’s recent NBA campaign, sports journalist Cari Champion poses as an Uber driver, interviewing the young basketball stars he is ferrying around.

Ms. Saint John proves to be just another huckster running the con via Pop Culture! Featuring the linchpin of  ‘Brand’ as part of the Madison Ave. campaign to save Uber from its own incompetent, indeed malfeasant ‘self-governance’. Using ‘sports journalist Cari Champion’: What journalist do you know who drives a cab? How much did they pay Ms. Champion for her endorsement? What about a real NFL or NBA player? Or was the bribe to represent Uber not quite high enough to place a career in jeopardy?

Myra Breckenridge

https://www.ft.com/content/0fefb486-da16-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482

Call this essay Mr. Goldsmith’s lack of courage to confront the mendacious and lawless history of the FBI! The very notion that Comey and Mueller represent the saviors of the Republic, in the current political melodrama, demonstrates that, contra Straussian hack Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The Decay of American Political institutions’ is rather about the collapse of the political legitimacy of these institutions. Mr. Goldsmith, in the throws of his Anti-Trumpism,  fails to grapple with anything remotely close to candor about the loss of that legitimacy. Even a mention of such weighty consideration is beyond the scope of Mr. Goldsmith’s apologia for the Comey/ Mueller political virtue, as opposed to the demonstrable reality of Trump’s political nihilism.

Where were these exemplars of republican virtue, as the FBI Crime Lab scandal developed from 1998 onward?

https://books.google.com/books/about/Tainting_Evidence.html?id=Y-bkAAAAMAAJ&hl=en

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

Add to this toxic politics, the fact of the rise of the Neo-Confederate/Originalist coterie on the Supreme Court, and its dependable fellow traveler Anthony Kennedy, and its Plantation Mentality. That re-made American Jurisprudence awash in a destructive radical political nostalgia for Pre-Civil War white male power!

Consider Mr. Goldsmith’s final paragraph:

But in performing this calculus, the leaders of the Justice Department should candidly consider the large costs of their silence. When they do not speak out against the president’s attacks on their institutions and the rule of law, they signal to their employees and the world that they are indefeasibly beholden to the president, or that they do not care. The failure to protect and defend the department engenders anger, suffering, and resentment by the men and women they are charged with leading the department. It also contributes to a sense of delegitimization within the department, and thus stokes the morale crisis. These are not consequences that any leader should ever tolerate.

How many masters can the ‘rule of law’ serve? The imperatives of The American National Security State in the FISA Court?  Its  National Security Letters , its secret indictments and trials.  Better to  attribute the FISA Court to the exercise of Sen.Church’s political conformity and cowardice.  While Mr. Goldsmith frets over the ‘a sense of delegitimization within the department, and thus stokes the morale crisis.’  The freely available record  of American Law has delegitimized itself, Trump is just another denouement of this ‘Moral crisis’ diagnosed by Mr. Goldsmith.

Publius

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/the-high-price-of-sessionss-failure-to-defend-the-justice-department/547382/#article-comments

http://disq.us/p/1oasc2x

Mr. Stephens frames his critique of Trump by refracting it through the insights offered by Peter Pomerantsev’s book “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible”  published in 2014.  Pomerantsev was a Russian television producer,  in the Age of Putin, and narrates the challenges of a television producer faced with a coercive political environment, in sum, the truth was sacrificed to the ‘safe space’ of producing political melodrama, rather than reporting the actual news.

This is where Pomerantsev is so instructive. In one of his book’s early scenes, he relates a professional homily from a man he identifies as prominent Russian TV presenter. “We all know there will be no real politics” in Putin’s Russia, the man says at a staff conference.

“But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with? Shall we attack the oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like … like a movie!”

No matter how Stephens garnishes his propaganda, with tangential material that is supposed to represent the Age of Trump, as indicative of  decline or decay, a favorite Neo-Conservative trope, America is not Russia in the Age of Putin. More of  Pomerantsev paraphrase of a Russian TV presenter, does not describe Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice as a vehicle for the political assent of Trump. He played a ruthless boss, and or ringmaster, on television, whose tag line was ‘your fired’, to contestants who failed to perform to his ‘standards’, not a ‘bare chested action hero’!  Trump’s confected melodrama was the Neo-Liberal dog-eat-dog edited into the one dimensional life for the small screen.

This is why there’s a Colosseum in Rome, and why public spectacle, theater, cinema, TV and now the internet have always been handmaids of dictators. In Russia, it’s all about casting the president as a bare-chested action hero, pumping out anti-Western conspiracy theories and serving up remakes of Western sitcoms and reality shows.

The reader could simply ask the very salient question, what do these long quotations/paraphrases from Pomerantsev’s book serve? The point being  that the relationship Stephens argues, between the politics of Putin and Trump, share some commonality gets lost in the celerity of  the forward movement of his polemic: if there even exists such a commonality: the point of this propaganda is to create that commonality. That it need not meet a standard of argument, but that it plays on emotional registers, rather than a reasoned step by step building of empirically verified facts. Stephens constructs a convoluted tale designed to  indite Trump as a minion of Putin: that is the current Party Line of America’s respectable ‘Centrism‘, meaning the current alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives.

The recent American elections put Democrats into power. Trump failed to repeal ‘Obama Care’. Will the Republican Tax Reform be the next Trump political defeat/stalemate ?  Twitter is not some all powerful propaganda tool. Trump uses twitter as a tool for political incitement, his only real political ability. Trump keeps his political opponents in a constant state of disequilibrium via twitter. He is Roy Cohn’s protégé , self-serving mendacity is his métier.

Mr. Stephens is a New Cold Warrior, and as such, ties Putin and Trump together to further his political agenda. Yet Stephens polemic, for all its dubious hysterics reeks of political desperation. The Stephens’  ‘argument’, such as it is:  that Trump is the purveyor of a political irrationalism,  accomplished by treason. While Stephens’ self -presentation, as steeped in rationalism, turns Neo-Conservatism on its head : Neo-Conservatism is defined by its toxic bellicose nationalism, and rule by a set of self-elected Platonic Guardians. Trump was elected to office, and in the current mythology is the tool of Putin, or at the least, aided and abetted by Putin. I use the word mythology – where is the empirical evidence of such collusion? Should we rely on the opinions of the notorious liars like Brennan and Clapper? Or the maladroit propaganda of Mr. Stephens?

Committed Observer

Added December 3, 2017:

As Mr. Stephens was born in 1973, he has no idea, or as a propagandist ignores as politically inconvenient, the influence, and indeed the heroic status of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When the Gulag Archipelago was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973, it  inspired among others Bernard-Henri Levy and Alain de Benoist. Why is this relevant to Mr. Stephens latest polemic against President Trump as a callabo of Putin? Here is a long and telling excerpt from William Harrison’s essay from August 2008 titled The other Solzhenitsyn:

Putin and Solzhenitsyn share in the ideology pan-Slavism : ‘ But his credentials as a historian are dubious to say the least, and the fantastical, backward-looking political idealism that led him to support Putin’s project is a dangerous relic. ‘ Or should the reader just call it by the name given to it by other Russiaphobes, across the political spectrum,   of ‘Russian Revanchism’ ?  This pan-Slavism, shared by Putin and Solzhenitsyn, is the untouched, and inconvenient political/historical reality,  that could give context to an honest appraisal of the current climate of The New Cold War,  and Putin as bad political actor. Pan-Slavism and American Exceptionalism are destructive political/moral ideologies.

The hysteria mongering about ‘Russian meddling’ in America’s presidential election is the starkest form of hubris:  American not only ‘meddles’ in the elections of other sovereign nations, but makes war on, invades and occupies other nations  at will! Not to speak of its NGO’s who actively subvert those whom it deems its political opponents.  And its National Security State apparatus, that pursues the American interest, using its network of military bases to launch its campaigns with  murderous abandon:  The Clash of Civilizations/The War on Terror is the American political destiny, in the nihilistic world view of the Neo-Conservative/Neo-Liberal cabal.

Committed Observer

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

This is my second time reading Mr. Luce’s cliche ridden praise of Mr. Mattis. In his desperation to find some saving grace of a Trumpism, that operates on a barrage of manufactured political chaos, in sum, Peronism to the second power: Mr. Luce has unearthed the pragmatism of Mr. Mattis. He didn’t become a Marine Corp. General without being aware, not to speak of being a canny practitioner of the art of politics, as a military careerist, to state the obvious.

Being a well connected pundit, Mr. Luce quotes from a ‘senior Pentagon official’ , in his exalted position who else would Luce deign to speak to or to ask?

When I asked a senior Pentagon official to list the department’s three strategic priorities, I expected North Korea would top the list. The response was: “Educating the president, educating the president and educating the president.” America’s allies know Mr Mattis does this — as do people in Washington.

The questions arises how long will it be until Trump is impeached, if the New Democrats sweep the 2018 elections in both House and Senate? Americans love a Show Trail. Or a ‘virtuous’  American Military enacts a Seven Days in May scenario? The wholesale collapse of America’s political class, allied to the imperatives of the National Security State, may offer an opportunity for Mr. Mattis to become more that just Secretary of Defense.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/1f870592-d4ea-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5f44

The only time I hear of Time magazine is when it elects its ‘Person of the Year’. In the past, I’ve looked through a couple of issues of this magazine at the local library. I thought it looked like a smaller version of the once famous Life magazine, with plenty of color pictures, and since it is ‘Time’ , a collection of eye catching color graphics. Foreign Policy, in its print edition, seems to has followed suit, featuring vivid graphics and photographs, and diminished print content. Both of these magazines feature the usual bourgeois political opinionating, call it the tedious recitation of the current Party Line of the American Empire’s  apologists and pseudo-critics .  One of the only reasons, in the past,  to read Time were the vivid, pungent, even acid evaluations of art and artists in the   essays of art critic Robert Hughes. Otherwise the Time/Life enterprise launched hundreds of mediocre writers, and the Luce Style of predigested journalism, for the busy Organization Man and Woman, has evolved into what passes for Journalism today. Luce like Hearst used his publication to attack his enemies, and give comfort to his political allies. Murdoch is another example of this kind of abuse of power.

In world in which I came of age, the well informed person, that our teachers encouraged us to be, read at least one newspaper, and a collection of magazines, to exercise our civic duty to be well informed. Not to speak of reading books, as part of that duty. Civics is no longer taught, nor thought worthy of considerations, in the Neo-Liberal Age of Market Dominance. Shrines have been built to the New Trinity of Hayek/Mises/Friedman, since the rise of the Thatcher/Reagan Dark Age.

This reader can only wish that Thomas Nast was still alive! I can only imagine the cartoon he would have bought to vivid life ,of the Koch brothers sitting on bags of money, as they whip their newly acquired minions into ideological line, in their print shop. Their are other candidates who could have  matched Nast, Jack Levine of ‘Gangsters Funeral’ or David Levine of the New York Review of Books.

It is only fitting that the Koch brothers should wish to exercise the influence that Henry Luce once exercised in American life and culture. ‘The American Century’ is  Luce’s destructive hegemonic fantasy. Read this part of his Luce’s Wikipedia entry:

Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party.^[7] An instrumental figure behind the so-called “China Lobby“, he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, in their war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.^[8])

It has been reported that Luce, during the 1960s, tried LSD and reported that he had talked to God under its influence.^[9]

Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called “The American Century“, which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century (and perhaps beyond).^[7]

An ardent anti-Soviet, he once demanded John Kennedy invade Cuba, later to remark to his editors that if he did not, his corporation would act like Hearst during the Spanish–American War. The publisher would advance his concepts of US dominance of the “American Century” through his periodicals with the ideals shared and guided by members of his social circle, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State and his brother, director of the CIA, Allen Dulles.^{[citation needed]}

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

The Financial Times offers an economic evaluation of the Koch’s purchase of Time via Meredith Corporation. Plus a bit of the melodrama that garnishes, not to speak of enlivening  its reportage of this purchase. One can only imagine what Thomas Nast , Jack Levine or David Levine could have offered.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a56359e2-d2f9-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9

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

The current German ‘political crisis’ faced by Merkel  is covered  in The Financial Times. The completeness of the coverage, is made self -evident by these five reports. Here are the headline and sub-headlines, to each of these reports and links to each. Then compare this coverage with Ross Douthat’s New York Times column of November 22, 2017. (Link below)

Headline: Angela Merkel left searching for route out of crisis

Sub-headline: German chancellor eyes new elections or partners to keep her grip on power

https://www.ft.com/content/5f04da3e-cdf9-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

Headline : Merkel refuses to resign despite breakdown of coalition talks

Headline:  Chancellor’s future in balance as German president calls on parties to end impasse

https://www.ft.com/content/b67fe012-cdd4-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

Headline: FDP calculates the political odds with talks walkout

https://www.ft.com/content/f05a555e-ced5-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc

Headline: Wolfgang Schäuble urges German political leaders to compromise

Sub-headline: New parliamentary speaker calls on parties to ‘show some responsibility’

https://www.ft.com/content/50331282-ceb2-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

Headline: Pressure grows on Germany’s SPD to support Merkel

https://www.ft.com/content/9a9fb390-cf8c-11e7-b781-794ce08b24dc

Mr. Douthat’s essay is awash in self-congratulation about being ‘vindicated’, in his earlier essay on Merkel’s disastrous acceptance of one million refugees,  although he feigns a non-existent modesty. He knows neither modesty, nor brevity:

In an unpredictable world, it’s always a pleasure to claim vindication for one’s own prophetic powers, and the political crisis in Germany — the inability of Angela Merkel to form a coalition government that keeps her country’s far right sidelined — could easily inspire an “I told you so” from those of us who have criticized the German chancellor and doubted her leader-of-the-free-world mystique.

That mystique is undeserved because it is too kind to her decision, lauded for its idealism but ultimately deeply reckless and destabilizing, to swiftly admit a million-odd migrants into the heart of Europe in 2015. No recent move has so clearly highlighted the undemocratic, Berlin-dominated nature of European decision making and the gulf between the elite consensus and popular opinion. And no move has contributed so much to the disturbances since — the worsening of Europe’s terrorism problem, the shock of Brexit and the rise of Trump, and the growing divide between the E.U.’s Franco-German core and its eastern nations.

So it’s fitting that the immigration issue has finally come back to undercut Merkel directly, first costing her votes in Germany’s last election, which saw unprecedented gains for the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, and then making a potential grand coalition impossible in part because the centrist, pro-business Free Democrats now see an opportunity in getting to Merkel’s right on migration policy.

Mr. Douthat’s politics/religious Conservatism is not the usual American Evangelical version, it partakes of Opus Dei Ultramontanism, and its Francoist politics as an expression of that unapologetic authoritarianism. This based on male heterosexual power as foundational to the exercise of that moral/political authority.

This is followed by  of Douthat suggestive historical chatter , its ‘as if’ being a demonstration of his intellectual self-infatuation as a Knower.

I’m not sure they’re ready for that adaptation; instead, my sense of the state of Western elites after Trump and Brexit is similar to the analysis offered recently by Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. Dougherty has been circulating in high-level confabs since Trump’s election and reports a persistent mood of entitlement and ’90s nostalgia — a refusal to take responsibility for foreign policy failures, to admit that post-national utopianism was oversold, to reckon with the social decay and spiritual crisis shadowing the cosmopolitan dream.

This being the introductory material to frame his attack on the ‘Liberal Order’ as being anathema to an elusive, or better yet, an un-realized ‘ideological pluralism‘ :

What will save the liberal order, if it is to be saved, will be the successful integration of concerns that its leaders have dismissed or ignored back into normal political debate, an end to what Josh Barro of Business Insider has called “no-choice politics,” in which genuine ideological pluralism is something to be smothered with a pillow.

The dishonesty of Mr. Douthat, to confront the failure of the Neo-Liberal Order, not the mythical ‘Liberal Order’, in 2008, that has ruled the ‘West’ since the halcyon days of Thatcher/Reagan is evident, even in this heavily garnished essay. Not to forget the failure of Neo-Liberalism’s foundational myth of the ‘Self-Correcting Market’ to actualize itself in the political present.  Mr. Douthat is a Theocrat of a very exotic kind: God and Mammon are the twin Deities, in the Douthat World View: the very definition of contemporary Conservatism nihilism!

Old Socialist

The evolution of the Think Tank as an instrument of propaganda for the American National Security State, and its NATO allies, could not be better represented than by the Carnegie Foundation, in its various iterations. It has become the home of various operatives of that State, and NATO,  who have served in various capacities, and are now marking time until their next appointment, or have transitioned to full time academic/think tank employment. Or journalists who have become members of the Carnegie coterie of writers/policy experts. This five act melodrama was written by the Russian born Alexander Baunov:

‘… is a Russian international policy expert, journalist, publicist, and former diplomat.Since 2015, he has been a senior associate in Carnegie Moscow Center and editor in chief of Carnegie.ru.’

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

And British journalist Thomas de Waal:

‘…is a British journalist and writer on the Caucasus. He is best known for his 2003 book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War.

…

He has reported for, amongst others, the BBC World Service, the Moscow Times, and The Times.^[1] He was a Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London until December 2008, and later as a research associate with the peace-building NGO, Conciliation Resources. Currently he is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specialising primarily in the South Caucasus region.^[2]

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

Prologue:

Russia’s interference in American and European elections constitutes a serious offense. But by treating Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies as an existential threat, Western leaders are playing directly into the Kremlin’s hands, and validating its false narrative about Russia’s place in the world.

This paragraph is followed by a made to measure history of the American Red scare from the 1920’s to the McCarthy Era, and refers to the mentor-ship of Donald Trump by the utterly notorious Roy Cohn. The connection is made in the readers mind that Trump is culpable by his close relations with Cohn: the thing that bound them together was naked opportunism. What is so blatant in this section is this sentence that demonstrates the utter historical ignorance of these two dramaturges:

As in 1920, the Red Scare of the early 1950s faded almost as quickly as it had begun.

This historically maladroit but self-serving misreading of actual history serves the end of  producing a stirring  melodrama. In sum, the admonition of Baunov/de Waal to the reader is forget what you know, from living through this historical period: call this dramatic license? Call by its real name, self-willed political amnesia, allied to the suspension of disbelief, exercised by the reader as if under the spell of this rickety melodrama? Very complicated, indeed.

Act One: The Paranoid Style in American Kremlinology:

In this act Baunov/de Waal extemporize on the theme of American historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. And as such, they quite rightly are dismissive of the notion that Russian ‘trolls’ somehow subverted both the US Election and the Brexit Vote. As they point out,  the New Democrats used this to cover their loss to Trump, but fails to mention the mythical Bernie Bros in the Hillary Clinton victimology, that demonstrated the Populist contagion within the Party.  The leaked Podesta e mails became a product of ‘Russian Meddling’ ,when their origin was clearly from Wikileaks, possibly leaked by Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Our authors point to China, Saudi Arabia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in Turkey as more fearsome political bad actors.

Act Two : The Western Id:

In this act, the framing of the dramatic exposition of Baunov/de Waal is the utterly discredited Sigmund Freud, the Id, the primal the irrational! Enter stage left Putin The Terrible:  Our two dramaturges now shift into the melodrama of the small screen of the black and white era, with this characterization of Putin, ‘Like the Bolsheviks a century ago’ .

Putin now takes the role of anti-imperialist, but with a decided Conservatism that doesn’t just resonate with the dreaded ‘ Populists’ , European and American, but with American Evangelicals, that is a sizable portion of the American Republican Parties fervent base. That predates the rise of the Populists: the well financed American Tea Party appeared in 2008. The political/religious consonance between the American Evangelicals and Putin’s religiously inspired Conservatism, escapes these European Technocrats political/historical grasp!

Act Three : Getting Russia Right:

In this act Baunov/de Waal shift back to a descriptive rationalism as a strategy that ‘The West’ must follow, in response to the trivial Russian interference in America’s election. The pronouncements of the notorious liars Monsignor Brennan, James Clapper and the strategic leaks from CIA sources, are elided from this melodrama as too inconvenient.      Of course, the ‘Russian revanchism’ represented by Georgia and Ukraine remain of primary concern to these NATO fellow travelers. Who scrupulously ignore the Coup in Ukraine engineered by America, the EU and NATO, with the aid of journalists and Think Tank allies like themselves! But the answer to this revanchism is further and more effective sanctions.

Act Four : The Way Ahead:

In this act Baunov/de Waal almost echoes the chatter once supplied by the Cold War duo of ‘Vital Center’ apologist Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and his  ‘Christian Realist’ ally  Reinhold Niebuhr.  The answer to Putin’s Russian revanchism ,described as ‘posturing’ in all of its varieties, is for ‘The West’  ‘to boost their own resilience – morally and practically. More of the same : More broadly, Western countries must do more than merely assert their moral superiority… The question arises where might the reader find this moral superiority? Should the reader look just a bit further in this essay? for this surprising  bit of moral/political honesty about American imperialism, wedded to its sanctimonious moralizing, that almost rescues this collection of shopworn cliches:

Lest we forget, the US invaded Iraq unilaterally in 2003, has refused to join international rules-based institutions such as the International Criminal Court, and is now the only country not participating in the Paris climate agreement.

But not to forget the Russian crimes in Chechnya , and ‘blithely changed  international borders’ as seen through the lens of NATO, if not sub rosa operatives, then at the least, apologists. But note, does ‘blithely changed international borders’ constitute a crime of the magnitude of Chechnya?

After all, Russia killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in Chechnya, all in the name of preserving its “territorial integrity,” and then blithely changed international borders by force in both Georgia and Ukraine.

Act Five : Tear Down That Wall:

This act takes it frame from Ronald Reagan’s famous/infamous admonition! There is no cliche safe from this team of dramatists!

As for the  ‘reaching out to Russia’s urban middle class’ : Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are still broadcasting:

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government–funded broadcasting organization that spreads news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East where it says that “the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed”.^[3] RFE/RL is a 501(c)(3) corporation that receives U.S. government funding and is supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an agency overseeing all U.S. federal government international broadcasting services.^[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Liberty

Plain speaking is imperative, Putin is an authoritarian personality who was a career KGB officer/official, and  rose through its ranks in the Cold War. But was given his political opportunity by Neo-Liberal front man, and manipulable drunkard Boris Yeltsin: who succeeded an actual political reformer Gorbachev, when the Soviet Union collapsed. For the particulars on Gorbachev’s reforms and its actors read ‘Voices of Glasnost’ a series of interviews conducted by Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuval. This book will not be of interest to our ‘playwrights’, what they have produced here is a propaganda vehicle confected for the 21 inch black and white screen of 1952.

Old Socialist

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/red-scares-then-and-now-by-alexander-baunov-and-thomas-de-waal-2017-11

The vulgar popular press, of today and yesterday, have/had the power to direct and control the way we see the world! Look at this headline from November 20, 2017 from the Financial Times:

Then look at the cover of the once very powerful Henry Luce publication ‘Time Magazine’ of July 7, 1967:

The cover of Time marked the official recognition of the ‘Hippie‘ and ‘The Summer of Love’. The ‘Hippie’ was the newest American cultural actor, as the expression of disillusion with the Post War world of the Organization Man: a best seller published in 1956, that gave empirical weight and shape, to the melodrama captured in the 1955 best selling novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson. Were the Beats of Howl, published in 1956,  and On the Road, published in 1957, simply the precursors to the ‘Hippie’?

My friends and I grew our hair long, and took the bus to Hollywood Blvd. from our backwater of Lynwood, California: to buy our bell bottomed jeans. We bought the L. A. Free Press, and visited, later on, Art Kunkin’s bookstore. Not to speak of flashing the Peace Sign to people on the street, as we walked to go shopping, or pay the gas and light bills, on the offices located on Long Beach Blvd.

One very real expression of the influence of the ‘Hippie Ethos‘ , in popular music and culture, was the Beatles 1967 release of  ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. The Beatles made that ethos mainstream for so many people young and old, to the consternation of the respectable bourgeoisie.

The popularity of books like the Organization Man and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit were indicative of the discontent with this world, that was alive, active in moral imaginations of the children of the Depression. Who were caught in a world, where economic striving replaced any semblance of mutual care, that was the ruling ethos of the Depression.  At least, as presented in the movies of the period: the American Good Guy as presented in ‘My Man Godfrey’ of 1936, or the collection of movies by Frank Capra, dubbed Capra-corn by some.

In American popular entertainment ‘Mad Men’ , and its ant-ihero Don Draper, expressed a kind of perverse nostalgia for the world of white male heterosexual dominance, and the ethos of success defined as capital accumulation, in its obsession with the collection of the  trophies of that success. This world view rules, is the very sine qua non, of the editors Financial Times. The death of Charles Manson, offers an opportunity for these editors to publicly shame those deviationists from the cult of capital accumulation, called ‘Hippies’: as sharing in the actions of a deranged leader of a cult which committed mass murder, that had noting in common with that ‘Hippie Ethos’, except that they shared contiguous historical space.    

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.

Perry Anderson

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

Headline: Castaner confirmed as director of Macron’s party

Sub-headline: Unopposed appointment of government spokesman sparks resignations

Have the Jupertarian Politics of Macron reached another denouement in the French Neo-Liberal Melodrama? Is Macron’s insufferable arrogance, or should it be called dictatorial politics, a predictor of the future of La République en Marche? That old political saw of keeping your enemies closer, has transmogrified into alienating your own party members?

About 100 members of the fledgling centrist party have quit the movement in protest at Mr Castaner’s appointment.

Where will these 100 members find a new political home? Another tantalizing  question occurs, will they be the last?

Its been some time since the Financial Times  reported on their Neo-Liberal Champion, or have I missed something? Both Macri and Macron- are they the last gasp of the collapsed Neo-Liberal Project? Even @BretStephensNYT ,  one of the New York Times’ coven of Neo-Conservatives, celebrated the death of French Socialism, as one of the  pivotal moments in the history of the Free Market Swindle, when Macron was elected. Was Mr. Stephens expressing a premature triumphalism?

In the political world occupied by the Financial Times and its ‘reporters’ the spoiled ballots, abstentions etc., from the preliminary vote to final election, not to speak of the subsequent street demonstrations,  irrelevant to the praise it heaps on their Golden Boy? Who will deliver the French Nation into the Neo-Liberal fold! Not quite the ‘Speed and Shock’ of Thatcherite François Fillon?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/ac7d4e26-cc5b-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

In this case the ‘truth’ of the question is about partisan loyalty, refracted through the historical lens of the Weinstein scandal- our Present illuminates the Past? And Joe has always been a political conformist : I was a reader of his since he wrote for the New York Observer, and called Ralph Nader a ‘spoiler’ in the 2000 election.
And if Joe isn’t a Clinton partisan, he is, at the least, a Clinton ‘fellow traveler’! How did Joe convince the Clintons that he offered them something that other ‘reporters’ couldn’t ? At the least Joe isn’t a doormat, but probably can be counted on to follow The Clinton Party Line. Voila! Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton.
Andy Divine’s various political incarnations are a fact, and so is his opportunism: his role is now that of Political Moralist, he competes with David Brooks in the arena of the ersatz. Ms. Goldberg’s essay offers Andy an opportunity to gesticulate, chatter and roll his eyes, rhetorically speaking!

StephenKMackSD