Comey may have made mistakes; he may have had a Messiah complex; he may go down in history as a self-righteous prick who interfered in an election. But he is obviously and transparently independent — the key criterion for any FBI director.

…

But Comey was my reassurance that someone would have the tools to get to the bottom of it, whatever it was. Now, if I am not to be stupefyingly naive, I have to assume the president is guilty of something and is busy rigging the system to stymie any attempt to bring potential traitors to justice. And yes: This is about the possibility of treason against our democratic system. And the president, chumming it up with Lavrov and Kislyak the next day, seems incensed that there is even an investigation at all.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trump-just-incriminated-himself.html#comments

Is there anything like the demonstrable ignorance of Andy Divine? The FBI is the creature of the American Inquisitor- in-Chief J. Edgar Hoover: a closeted gay man who felt his duty, like the medieval inquisitor, was to root out and destroy the heretics in the midst of American Political Virtue. For a portrait of this kind of destructive zealot see Karen Sullivan’s ‘The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors’ in his historical setting:

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo10715485.html

The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:

Don’t sing the praises of the utterly corrupt institutional expression of J. Edgar Hoover’s political/sexual paranoia!

StephenKMackSD

Headline: Donald Trump fires FBI director James Comey

Sub-headline: Washington stunned by dismissal carried out as bureau probes campaign ties to Russia

The latest episode in the New Cold War Melodrama is the firing of FBI Director James Comey by Donald Trump. As reported by Demetri Sevastopulo, et al , of The Financial Times, he uses the firing of Archibald Cox as his historical frame. Mr. Cox wasn’t fired by the ultra respectable WASP Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who resigned over the issue,  but by ‘Nixon ultimately had his way when his solicitor-general fired Cox,…’ That unnamed Solicitor General, which Mr.  Sevastopulo rhetorically diminishes by the use of the lower case, it being the title of an Executive Branch official should always be capitalized, was Neo-Confederate/Originalist Martyr Robert Bork.  Don’t call it an oversight, but call it what it is an exercise in Historical Erasure.

Mr. Sevastopulo then points to the involvement of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who ‘recused’ himself from ‘any Russia related investigations’, but will now assist President Trump in the selection of a new FBI Director.

  In recommending that Mr Comey be fired, Mr Sessions wrote that a “fresh start is needed at the leadership of the FBI”. Mr Sessions has recused himself from any Russia-related investigations because he himself had failed to disclose two meetings with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.

https://www.ft.com/content/c857ad9a-3501-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

Headline: FBI sacking puts little-known prosecutor under scrutiny

Sub-headline: Blistering memo from deputy AG Rosenstein made case for Comey dismissal

This news story by Joshua Chaffin and Brooke Masters is a report on ‘deputy attorney-general’ Rod Rosenstein. Again the lower case when the upper case is necessary, its not just a faux pas! Mr. Rosenstein is well respected but the reader should consider the evidence as offered in the article:

A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, he has spent almost 30 years in the Justice Department in a career that has included work on Kenneth Starr’s controversial probe of Democratic President Bill Clinton and prosecutions of violent street gangs and corrupt prison guards.

The reader confronts the very glaring issue of an association with prosecutorial zealot Kenneth Starr.

Mr Rosenstein demurred, but he tried to reassure the senators: “Political affiliation is irrelevant to my work.” He also told them: “I can certainly assure you, if it’s America against Russia or America against any other country I think everyone in this room knows which side I’m on,” adding that it was “critical for the American people to have confidence in the integrity of our investigation”

https://www.ft.com/content/16502d40-3559-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3

And Mr. Rosenstein’s self-serving denial of being political, allied to his assurances of political conformity/loyalty to America: proving beyond a doubt, that American politics and culture are infected with the Old Cold War Ethos, that has now been rehabilitated in the face of the rise of  Putin The Terrible as the New Enemy. Replacing Stalin in post World War II American life.

Headline: Comey falls victim to Trump’s Tuesday night massacre

Sub-headline: Nixon is the only precedent for the president firing the man investigating him

https://www.ft.com/content/d7c8215c-3519-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

Mr. Luce, in his latest essay, is framed by Watergate: he can find his Archibald Cox i.e. Comey, but where is his Elliot Richardson? No where to be found! To those of us who followed the Watergate case, day by day, on television and newspapers, Mr. Luce displays a cursory knowledge of some of the facts of this scandal, that act as his rhetorical frame. Yet he was not yet ten years old at the time of Watergate, for some of us it is etched in our memory by the acid of political criminality at the highest levels. Nixon was self-destructive, everything he touched he spoiled, with his mendacity aided by his mealy-mouthed search for bourgeois political respectability: Pat’s cloth coat and the Checkers speech just two examples of Nixonian groveling. Trump needs no one, that is the danger of this political nihilist. Nixon had to bargain with and court political respectability, Trump is all lizard brain, to reach back to another age of scientific hypothesis.

Political Observer

Macron is a Thatcherite with a Public Relations Makeover: all earnest young ‘Reformer’ that will lead France into the bright Neo-Liberal Future. He is not the Speed & Shock of Fillon, but the expression of the ‘Hope & Change’ of Obama, yet the fact is, that 60% of voters said they voted for Macron rather than for Le Pen. In an American context that would express the tired cliche of ‘The Lesser of Two Evils’ . The Financial Times is for once in harmony with the political sentiments of the voters  :
‘Above all, he is not Marine Le Pen.’
The rest of this editorial is window dressing wedded to ‘reformist cliches’. That avoids through the use of triumphalist rhetoric, the fact that Macron presidency will be fraught with constant conflict, as he attempts to make alliance with actual political parties: how does one govern without a political party structure? except by strategic alliances. Macron’s ‘reforms’ will simply exacerbate the fractious nature of French politics.That seems to me an elementary fact of French political life. All the French need do is look across the Channel to see the utter failure of Neo-Liberalism, no matter how Macron will garnish his warmed-over repast.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a314b5a4-33c2-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

Mr. Rachman’s political desperation is showing to an arresting degree. With his rhetorical frame being  John Maynard Keynes’ open letter to Franklin Roosevelt, after FDR won the 1933 election:

“You have made yourself the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.”

Macron is not FDR, nor is Rachman a Keynes. Rachman  puts his argument into the form of the Keynes open letter, as being a consideration Macron might exercise. Macron is the Neo-Liberal Lite Golden Boy. Although I’m sure that the Speed & Shock of Fillon resonated with Financial Times Free Marketeers. Fillon would have been their candidate of choice, even as he got almost 20% of the vote in the runoff, despite the pending trial.

Consider that according to Reuters the abstention rate in the French election was to be between 25-27% :

The final abstention level in the second round of the French presidential election is likely to stand at between 25-27 percent, according to four polls published on Sunday.

A survey from Ifop-Fiducial put the abstention rate at 25 percent. Polls from Ipsos Sopra Steria and Elabe estimated the abstention rate at 26 percent while another poll from Harris Interactive estimated that rate at 27 percent.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta; editing by Michel Rose)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-abstention-idUSKBN1830MT

And, according to Newsweek:

Abstention could be high, and close to 60 percent of those who plan to vote for Macron say they will do so to stop Le Pen from being elected to lead the euro zone’s second-largest economy rather than because they fully agree with the former banker-turned-politician.

http://www.newsweek.com/france-french-president-election-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-turnout-low-595935

Close to 60% of those voters ‘ who plan to vote for Macron say they will do so to stop Le Pen from being elected…’. The idea that Macron can be important to ‘the whole world’ is mooted by the fact of that 60% of voters cast ballots against Le Pen, rather than in favor of Macron. This puts the Macron Victory in a much clearer light. 

Also read this FiveThirtyEight essay by Harry Enten titled ‘Macron Won, But The French Polls Were Way Off’ :

This observation about the ‘shy voter’ adds some necessary insights:

None of this is to say that there aren’t “shy voters” in the electorate. It’s just that we may be thinking about them in the wrong way. Instead of undercounting conservative support because people are afraid to give a socially undesirable response, the polls may simply be missing unenthusiastic supporters — people who aren’t excited about their candidate enough to answer a poll but still vote. In fact, when the idea of a “shy” voter was originally formed in 1992, it had nothing to do with right-wing populists. Instead, pollsters were underestimating the strength of the mainstream and relatively milquetoast Conservative Party in the U.K.

“Milquetoast,” in fact, has been used to describe Macron. In the 2017 French election, his voters were more likely to say that they were voting against Le Pen than for Macron. A Suffolk University poll also indicates that voters who liked neither candidate went overwhelmingly for Macron. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well, Trump won because people who were unenthusiastic about both candidates (i.e., had an unfavorable view of both) went in large numbers for Trump. Maybe we should talk less about “shy” voters and more about “apathetic” voters or “reluctant” voters.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/macron-won-but-the-french-polls-were-way-off/

What would a Rachman political essay offer but more of the same Anti-Populist Hysterics? The ‘as if’ here is that the Neo-Liberal Dispensation didn’t crash in 2008. And that the watershed of that crash aren’t the dread Populists of the continuing political nightmares of Mr. Rachman:

For while Mr Macron can savour a crushing victory over Ms Le Pen, he also knows that 35 per cent of French voters have just voted for a far-right candidate. The cumulative vote for extremists of the far left and the far right in the first round of the presidential election was closer to 50 per cent. That means that almost half of French voters want to smash “the system”. It is Mr Macron’s job to show that the system can work better. If he fails, then, as Keynes put it in the 1930s, “rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world”. The chances of failure are quite high. Mr Macron has simultaneously to reinvigorate the French economy and the “European project”. Both are notoriously difficult to reform and face deep structural challenges that might defeat even the most imaginative and dynamic politician.

Its easy to lose patience with Mr. Rachman’s verbose agonizing about the problems that the Party-less Macron faces in the short and the long term. Not the least of which is the myth of the financial probity of Germany, as personified by Merkel. Please read Ms. Tett’s A Debt to History? in this newspaper, for the facts about the four time defaulter in the 20th Century Germany:

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

And not to forget the status of the EU as, in fact , a cartel with the trappings of democracy, that has become the sole province of Merkel and her scagnozzo politica.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/cbbb9a5a-33c6-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0fd2e

The reader of Mr. Luce’s long essay is first confronted by the Cold War Triumphalism of the fall of the Berlin Wall,  as he and his mates speed toward the Wall in a 18 hour road trip, to be a part of History, to assist in the destruction of that symbol of Soviet oppression.  While Putin broods in his Dresden KGB office. In this essay we are not in the province of the Historian, but of the Empire of Stan Lee’s  Marvel Comics! The panels of the comic book come to life, as Mr. Luce moves from one story telling moment to the next, as he weaves his maladroit Neo-Liberal Apologetic, in the guise of a History of The Siege of Western Liberalism. This sequence of the essay is awash in a nostalgia for lost youth, and what passes for political idealism, as viewed from the perspective of a well compensated ‘pundit’.

What is missing in Luce’s dismal comic book History is the rise of Neo-Liberalism, that supplanted, indeed annihilated Western Liberalism, in the name of the Free Market, as the singular historical/moral imperative, in the persons of both Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America, to the present political/economic nadir : the Age of Trump and Le Pen. The reader need only consult Wolfgang Steeck’s  latest essay at the New Left Review titled ‘The Return of the Repressed‘ for a more reality based critique of the age of the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Dispensation. Two examples of Streeck’s analysis puts Mr. Luce’s particular brand of punditry, a maladroit apologetic for this absent actor, an actor subject to an erasure for ideological reasons, into proper perspective.

From the perspective of neoliberal internationalism, of course, which had developed the propagation of illusions into the fine art of democratic government, the post-factual age began as late as 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum and the smashing of Clintonism by Donald Trump. [11] Only with the collapse of post-democracy, and the end of mass patience with the ‘narratives’ of a globalization that in the us had benefited in its final years only the top 1 per cent, did the guardians of the dominant ‘discourse’ call for obligatory fact-checking. Only then did they regret the deficits experienced by those caught in the pincer grip of the global attention economy on the one hand and the cost-cutting in the education and training sector on the other. It is at that point that they began to call for ‘eligibility tests’ of various kinds as a prerequisite for citizens being allowed to exercise their right to vote. [12] The fact that the Great Unwashed, who for so long had helped promote the progress of capitalism by passing their time with the Twitter feeds of Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber e tutti quanti, had now returned to the voting booth, was registered as a sign of an ominous regression. Moreover, distractions in the form of ‘humanitarian interventions’ or a reanimation of the East–West conflict, this time with Russia instead of the ussr and over lgbtiq rights instead of communism, seemed to have exhausted themselves. Truth and morality ceased to count, and in England a Tory politician, when asked why he was campaigning to leave the eu against the advice of ‘the experts’, brazenly replied: ‘People in this country have had enough of experts!’ [13]

…

Characteristic of today’s zeitgeist is a new cultural divide that has struck the capitalist democracies without warning. Structurally, it has its roots in long-festering discontent with ‘globalization’, while simultaneously the number of ‘globalization losers’ has been steadily growing. The process reached a tipping point in the years following the financial crisis of 2008, when the quantity of discontent transformed into the quality of open protest. One of the reasons why this took so long was that those who had earlier spoken up on behalf of society’s losers had ended up joining the fan club of globalization, by the late 1990s at the latest. For a while, then, those experiencing globalization as a problem rather than a solution had no one to stand up for them.

The high phase of globalization sponsored the establishment of a cosmopolitan consciousness industry, which discerned opportunities for growth in turbocharging the expansionist drive of capitalist markets with the libertarian values of the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s and their utopian promise of human emancipation. [14] In the process, the technocratic pensée unique of neoliberalism became fused with the moral juste milieu of an internationalist discourse community. Its control over the airspace above the seminar desks established at the time serves today as an operations base in a cultural struggle of a special kind, one in which the moralization of a globally expanding capitalism goes hand in hand with the demoralization of those who find their interests damaged by it.

After decades of decline, voter participation in the Western democracies has recently begun to bounce back, especially among the lower classes. The rediscovery of democracy as a political corrective, however, benefits exclusively new kinds of parties and movements whose appearance throws national political systems into disarray. The mainstream parties and their public-relations experts, which have long been closely associated with each other and with the machinery of the state, regard the new parties as a lethal threat to ‘democracy’ and fight them as such. The concept employed in this struggle, and rapidly included in the post-factual vocabulary, is that of ‘populism’, denoting left-wing and right-wing tendencies and organizations alike that reject the tina logic of ‘responsible’ politics in a world of neoliberal globalization.

https://newleftreview.org/II/104/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed

I write this on the morning of Monday May 8, 2017. It took time, not to speak of patience, to read Mr. Luce’s rambling historically infused essay, Mr. Streeck practices actual critical history writing, as opposed to propaganda. I haven’t yet read the expected hosannas, to the victory of Neo-Liberal Lite Golden Boy Macron as savior of Western Values and Practices. My first reaction to that victory:

Let Neo-Liberal Lite Golden Boy govern i.e. try to pass ‘reform’! Macron, a man without a Party: Speed & Shock Fillon will say it is a betrayal of his iteration of Thatcherism à la Française, perhaps from a jail cell?  Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France insoumise will say Macron’s ‘reforms’ are a betrayal of the French Socialist Tradition. Le Pen will continue the fight, it’s in her genes! Macron is also a ‘political friend’ of American Political Huckster Obama! Macron is Mrs. Thatcher with a better looking spouse!

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/c7444248-3000-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a

Let Neo-Liberal Lite Golden Boy govern i.e. try to pass ‘reform’! Macron, a man without a Party: Speed & Shock Fillon will say it is a betrayal of his iteration of Thatcherism à la Française, perhaps from a jail cell?  Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France insoumise will say Macron’s ‘reforms’ are a betrayal of the French Socialist Tradition. Le Pen will continue the fight, it’s in her genes! Macron is also a ‘political friend’ of American Political Huckster Obama! Macron is Mrs. Thatcher with a better looking spouse!

Committed Observer

May 3,2017

Headline:

Le Pen harries Macron in hostile French presidential debate

Sub-headline:

Centrist favourite keeps cool in the face of bitter onslaught as election run-off looms

https://www.ft.com/content/c1875fe6-3052-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a

May 4, 2017

Headline:

Macron emerges as clear winner of angry French election debate

Sub-headline:

Snap survey shows 63% of respondents thought the centrist candidate won

May 4,2017

https://www.ft.com/content/2e77f550-8e6d-3847-ae05-b9239c0b9a27

May 3, 2017

Headline:

Macron, Le Pen and the battle for the idea of France

Sub-headline:

‘Two ancient visions of France frame the way many voters of all political leanings see this election’

Committed Observer

I’m currently reading Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence by Francois Duchene. I’ve reached page eighty in which Monnet complains, that in his estimation, his allies in the War effort lack a ‘federalist vision’. The larger vision of a kind of federalism is the overarching theme of the Duchene hagiography: a backward historical estimation.  Now the vexing question that arises in my mind, given the current Brexit negotiations, was Monnet’s vision of ‘federalism’ based upon the underpinnings of a democratic practice that was posited as the sine qua non of that ‘federalism’? Or was his ‘vision’ about the power of the melding of the various technocracies and their ‘expertise’ of various countries of Europe, to form a cartel whose business was to sell coal and steel to the highest bidder? Duchene presents this as the beginning point of Monnet’s larger vision of the European Union.

To return to the political present: should the reader look to the way the EU treated the Greeks in 2014, as definitive, as to how the EU will treat Britain in the present? Is the  demand of 100 billion Euros, a startling reminder of the EU as the sovereign territory of Mrs Merkel. See Ms. Tett’s ‘A Debt to History’ in these pages to be reminded that Germany defaulted four times in the 20th Century, that renders the position of Merkel into the territory of hubris,again. The authoritarian strategy: make the cost of Brexit so onerous as to discourage any other country from even the consideration of such an action.

The tête-à-tête between Janan Ganesh and Lionel Barber offers Mr. Ganesh at his most subdued, as he offers the most banal though important considerations on Brexit. The viewer misses his Poisonous Dandy shtick, although that is best left to the considerations of producing pungent literary essays as political commentary. On Mr. Barber status as ‘objective observer’ of Brexit see this revelatory report in The Guardian:

The editor of the Financial Times has been offered France’s highest honour in recognition of his career in journalism and the paper’s “positive role in the European debate”.

However, Lionel Barber appears to be aware of the sensitivity of such an award following the UK’s Brexit vote, and deleted a tweet he posted featuring a photo of a letter from the French ambassador saying he has been appointed as a Chevalier in the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur.

The letter to Barber, which it seems he intended to send as a private direct message to someone referred to as “LW”, outlined the criteria for the award.

“France wants to recognise your remarkable career, your contribution to high-quality journalism, and the Financial Times’ positive role in the European debate,” the letter read.

Barber told “LW” he was sharing the award letter “confidentially because not good publicity in the UK right now!”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/08/ft-france-eu-lionel-barber-tweet

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/cc7eed42-2f49-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a

The completely disingenuous character of Mr. Bret Stephens comparison of Robby Mook’s imagined assertion that  ‘The data run counter to your anecdotes’ as central to the fact that Mrs. Clinton would win, as a matter of a belief based on science. Stephens compares this to Climate Scientists predictions of global warming, as somehow being equal, in terms of the exercise of Science.
This makes utterly plain where Mr. Stephens stands as Corporatist . Deliberate confusion of these two issues, is the point, to one the lamest exercises of political propaganda, since the latest Thomas Friedman or David Brooks columns . Stephens fits right in as the latest addition to the New York Times roster of pundits.

Matt Taibbi, at Rolling Stone offers a more balanced view of the revelation of the Clinton arrogance/incompetence, not to speak of Bill’s purging the Party Apparatus of those not sufficiently loyal , or better yet, not sufficiently deferential to the Hillary loyalists. These and other revelations offered by the Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ book.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-the-new-book-that-brutalizes-the-clinton-campaign-w477978?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=042017_16

Taibbi didn’t use those revelations as part of a dull-witted plan to attack Science, and Scientists who study and advocate for climate change legislation. Using the arrogance of Political Boy Wonder Robby Mook*, and his misplaced faith in the science of polling, as cudgel to attack those ‘hysterical’ reformers. All this proving that Stephens is just another denier ,with an inflated notion of the power of his rhetorical interventions.

Mr. Stephens is inept at the production of a propaganda that apes verisimilitude!
Political polling is based on statistical models, given that the questions asked of the subjects are the same, in each case the data gathered can vary widely, and that data collected and collated has proven in the past to be unreliable, again and again. If the polling was done in-house why wouldn’t those technocrats tell Mook what he wanted to hear? Or perhaps this was an act of bad faith exercised by Mook. Besides a stunning lack of imagination, Mr. Stephens hasn’t, in his career in journalism, ever engaged in the age old ‘cover your ass’ maneuver ?

The computer modeling about global warming is not based on the vagaries of the person, or her/his ambition, or just plain incompetence, but on objectified data, run through models that can play out various scenarios, over time. These models can be changed in the light of newer data: it is an evolutionary process of refinement, that attempts to describe the possible/probable in natural phenomenon, using data gathered over time. If your work fails to meet the critiques of your fellow scientists, in a wold-wide community of inquirers, you need to revise your models in light of their research: All this eludes Mr. Stephens attention for ideological reasons.

He is a defender of ‘Free Markets’ and as such his construction of  Climate Science’s ‘hysteria’ is not about anything but the crudest form of  apologetics for the Fossil Fuel Industry. Mr. Stephens doesn’t model himself on his mentor AEI’s Prof. Kass, but on Norman Podhoretz’s notorious ‘Making It’. That presents cynicism, opportunism, bathed in self-congratulation in all its iterations, as the key to the life of one of Neo-Conservatism most notorious self-advertisers.

*Mr. Stephens became the editor of the Jerusalem Post at age 28, so he shares the status as yesterday’s Political Boy Wonder with Mr. Mook.

American Pragmatist

Has the Daily Beast returned to the once successful formula, once practiced by editor  Tina Brown, of recycled Hollywood gossip? Tales of on-set and off-set melodrama of the long dead ‘Stars’ of another Age? The reader quails at the thought of a constipated  Elizabeth Taylor ! This particular essay concerns the filming of the 1973 release  ‘Ash Wednesday’, adapted from ‘Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts’ by Robert Hofler. The free use of quotation marks around the statements attributed  to  Taylor, Burton, Dunne and the other actors in this melodrama are based on the memory of Mr. Dunne? The meaning/practice of verisimilitude has been stretched to its limits by   Mr. Hofler, who doesn’t know the meaning nor the practice of brevity.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/30/booze-soaked-shoots-hot-gay-sex-and-elizabeth-taylor-s-poop-problems-behind-the-scenes-of-dominick-dunne-s-infamous-last-film.html

Myra Breckenridge