StephenKMackSD's Blog

Is there noting like Mr. Ganesh in high dudgeon? It is an exhilarating rhetorical experience dotted with pop culture references, though light years from Disraeli’s Vivian Grey: an instance of post adolescent poking fun? Mr. Ganesh means to be wounding, but his contempt for the political uses of the Ian Duncan Smith resignation, that Mr. Corbyn has made of this political opportunity, falls short. Has Mr. Ganesh’s long advocacy of the politically eternal Tories come to one of its many denouements? That might be predicative of political change? The questions that might have resulted from this single political occurrence, and the conjectures that might have come of it, are given a strategic burial under Ganesh’s avalanche of entertaining, yet transparent,rhetoric.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/46a36362-ecfe-11e5-bb79-2303682345c8.html#axzz43dlNKnM7

4:17 PDT, Tuesday March 22,2016

I have just read this FT editorial, titled ‘Welfare cuts cannot only fall on the working poor’  Call it tepid, it is after all the FT, but indicative of a fundamental policy disagreement:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/08f55c4e-ef5d-11e5-9f20-c3a047354386.html#axzz43flqNFm2

Followed by George Parker’s essay titled ‘UK minister Duncan Smith’s departure sows political chaos’

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0251fee2-eea9-11e5-aff5-19b4e253664a.html?siteedition=intl

Mr. Parker makes these three startling political claims:

‘When Iain Duncan Smith quit as Britain’s pensions minister on Friday, it was perhaps the most explosive resignation in the country’s politics for more than 25 years.’

‘Not since Geoffrey Howe resigned from Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet in 1990 — a move that precipitated the end of the Iron Lady’s tenure as prime minister — has a senior minister left office with such a calculated attempt to sow political chaos

‘Writing in the Financial Times, Bruce Anderson, a political commentator, described Mr Duncan Smith’s departure as not just a resignation but a suicide bombing.’

Without foreclosing  further debate on the questions that these essay provoke/raise, might we use these, the serious nature of the claims, as a means to examine  Mr. Ganesh’s extensive use of pop culture references,to sharpen the focus on these references ,as the rhetorical vehicle to trivialize the resignation of Mr. Duncan Smith as politically unimportant?  Which raises the question, might a re-examination of  actual, rather than the speculative causes of that resignation, precipitate a shattering of Mr. Ganesh’s Tory Faith?

‘ By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America’s privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace?’

One can only wonder where Mr. David Oshinsky has been? The scholarship on the real Holmes, an actual Civil War hero, wounded three times, a  misogynist and misanthrope, not to speak of a political bootlicker, when absolutely necessary, has been readily available  for some time:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/justice-oliver-wendell-holmes-9780195101287?q=oliver%20wendell%20holms&lang=en&cc=us

Published November 1995

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3621221.html

Published December 2000

Perhaps Mr. Oshinsky fell victim to the ubiquitous Holmes Mythology,here codified by Prof. White?

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/oliver-wendell-holmes-9780195116670?q=oliver%20wendell%20holms&lang=en&cc=us

Published January 2000

On the vexed question of Buck v. Bell, Professor White quite carefully sidesteps the moral question raised by the Buck v. Bell decision, in Law and the Inner Self, by opining that we of the 20th Century are amiss in imposing our moral/ethical view on the 19th Century jurist. Call this utterly weak if not a complete surrender to the Myth of Holmes’ status as Sage!

From 408 of Law and the Inner Self: ‘He wrote Lewis Einstein in 1927, after the Buck v. Bell decision, that “establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles…gave me pleasure”.

Professor Alschuler’s Law Without Values is the antithesis of Prof. White’s illuminating biography’s want of candor or political/moral courage. Just call it a necessary polemical antidote to the Holmes Hagiography, that afflicts American intellectual life, and in this instance Mr. Oshinsky‘s collection of cliches: ‘ nobler instincts’, ‘why his reckless majority opinion’, ‘ ‘remains an enigma’,’an isolated misstep’, followed by this expression of abject self-imposed ignorance posed as a question: ‘an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace?’ Justice Holmes read Spencer’s Social Statics and was a Social Darwinist, if not in name, then in the spirit of Spencer’s survival of the fittest! Buck v. Bell is the monument to Holmes as American Monster!

American Writer

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

I care not one whit whether Judge Garland’s tears were real or feigned! Totally irrelevant to the pressing civic/political question of Judge Garland’s treatment of defendants that come before him, in the cases he reviews. What evidence do we have available? We have this from ThinkProgress:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/03/16/3760727/who-is-merrick-garland/
‘The former prosecutor also has a relatively conservative record on criminal justice. A 2010 examination of his decisions by SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein determined that “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.” Goldstein “identified only eight such published rulings,” in addition to seven where “he voted to reverse the defendant’s sentence in whole or in part, or to permit the defendant to raise a argument relating to sentencing on remand,” during the 13 years Garland had then spent on the DC Circuit.
To be clear, Garland’s record does not suggest that he would join the Court’s right flank if confirmed to the Supreme Court. He would likely vote much more often than not with the Supreme Court’s liberals, while occasionally casting a heterodox vote. Nevertheless, as Goldstein wrote in 2010 when Garland was under consideration to replace the retiring liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, “to the extent that the President’s goal is to select a nominee who will articulate a broad progressive vision for the law, Judge Garland would be a very unlikely candidate to take up that role.” ‘

Judge Garland shows no ‘legal compassion’ for defendants who come before him, in that he is very like Rehnquist, who idolized Judge Parker, a notorious ‘hanging judge’ of the 19th Century.

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

Obama demonstrates that the New Democrats are really Reaganites with a thin veneer of progressive varnish, that cracks easily and exposes them as political posers and abject conformists.  Garland is their perfect candidate, his crocodile tears make him a shoo in with the New Democrats. It will be a hard sell with the Nihilist Republicans: they will want to engage in the usual obstructionist political theatrics, even if it costs them the 2016 election, with the Peronist Trump leading the ticket. Even after the convention bloodbath, in which the Party Elders try to steal the nomination from ‘The Donald’!
Political Cynic

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/19/why-do-public-tears-make-us-uncomfortable

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

How regrettable that your two reporters do not even mention, due to historical ignorance? the 1964 Republican Convention, that might just be the only loose analogy to the political present? Rockefeller/Hershey vs. Goldwater, Liberals vs. Conservatives: the very idea of an actual Republican Liberal is in this time, unimaginable. The Liberals tried to stop Goldwater at the convention, it didn’t work. And Goldwater lost to Johnson, but Goldwater led to Nixon, and then Reagan: the Conservative takeover the Republican Party was sealed.

But what of Trump? Again we might look to the political imperative articulated by Goldwater: ‘extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice’? Compare that to Mr. Trump’s promise that if he is denied the nomination by the ‘Party Elders’, led by Mr. 47% Romney, there could be riots. The violence practiced at Trump’s campaign stops are just the beginning? All this historically grounded speculation being outside the scope of your two political handicappers, who marshal their arguments/evidence with the professionalism worthy of this publication, yet remain well within the narrowest of parameters.

Political Fossil

http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2016/03/how-to-torpedo-trump/

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

The Silver Fork Punditry that Mr. Ganesh practices with such aplomb, not to speak of sang-froid seems to degenerated into the usual stern moral/political lecture favored by Conservatives. Yet the millennials he targets are just part of a collection of generational categories, that he rhetorically trades in, and at the same moment dismisses, with an utter disdain, a Ganesh trademark. Perhaps that Silver Fork has become a Runcible Spoon?

The cast of characters: Baby boomers,Generation X,Generation Y, millennials and the unspoken of roles of the ‘Makers’ and the ‘Takers’, whose roles in this moralizing harangue are in rhetorical play, but remain unmentioned, except for Ganesh’s admiration of that  50 year old self-made man, of course a man! a Maker not a Taker!

‘The fracturing of public life along generational lines has felt imminent for some time. And it will continue to feel imminent. Generational politics will never take off because no normal person identifies with a collective as large and internally diverse as their age cohort. It is too tenuous a bond to spur concerted civic action.

For that frisson of authentic brotherhood, the element of class must be present. I feel more for a self-made 50-year-old than a gilded youth. The inequities between millennials make a joke of their supposed togetherness as a political force.’

In sum what the reader is presented with is a long and tedious lecture, about a spoiled and coddled generation, who lack historical perspective, and the will to remain in that state of ignorance, on the world of the generations that have preceded them. Just call it shopworn, with none of the usual stylistic shimmer, woven into his usual rebellious, nihilistic attacks on the Welfare Statism of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/57d49d92-ec57-11e5-bb79-2303682345c8.html#axzz43H6qilF0

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD?ty=h

The choice of Judge Garland reflects the ersatz virtue of Obama: he is not simply a ‘Centrist’, of the most unimaginative kind, but more importantly an abject political/legal conformist. The safe choice of a ‘Centrist’ a center defined by the rise the Neo-Confederate/Originalists and the pernicious effect it has had on American Jurisprudence, since the appointment of Rehnquist by Nixon: see The Rehnquist Choice by John Dean and The Partisan by John A. Jenkins for the political particulars on that appointment.

Meant to mute, if not destroy, the ‘sociology’, argued by conservatives, rather than law as the foundation of Brown I&II, that became the Party Line of The Federalist Society and their fellow travelers. The influence of the Federalists has been nothing if not completely pernicious.
On the question of Hugo Black let his majority opinion in Korimatsu stand as witness to his status of political pariah, not to speak of betrayer of the letter and spirit Bill of Rights. Let Justice Jackson’s dissent remind all of us about the power of dissent in the face of actual crisis.
Should we compare Black’s opinion to Scalia’s oft quoted:
‘Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.’
But adding this ‘explanation/interpolation’:
‘However, Justice Scalia’s words regarding that decision are often quoted
out of context, leaving readers with the mistaken impression that he
believed it was perfectly acceptable for our legal system to execute
people whom we knew to be innocent. In the fuller context, what he was
actually expressing was that once a person had been fairly convicted and
sentenced in court, and had exhausted all his possible avenues of
appeal, a last-minute claim of innocence was not by itself sufficient grounds for further delaying the carrying out of the sentence.’
http://www.snopes.com/scalia-d…
One could ask how this ‘explanation/interpolation’ fits into the Neo-Confederate/Originalist ideological reading of law?
Political Observer

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-17/garland-s-a-fine-supreme-court-choice-but-not-the-best-one

No American politician can escape the reality of the Israel Lobby! Abe Foxman and Aron David Miller are both integral parts of that Lobby, chronicled in the Walt and Mearsheimer book, and this 2006 excerpt in the London Review of Books: that precipitated a moral/political panic among America’s political class :

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

Even  Caudillo Trump must pay obedience to the power of that Lobby. Or does he? One wonders whether a billionaire whose political raison d’etre is a political populism and or a ‘Rebellion against The Elites’, financed by his own money, needs to play by the rules of respectable bourgeois politics? His politics are defined by the singular idea and practice of the anti-establishment, what possible pressure could be used to encourage Trump to play ball like every other American politician? Has his daughter become an ardent Zionist?  Or will Trump moderate his positions as his coronation draws near?

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2261c1f8-e789-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.html#axzz42sog7D1A

Another voice from a ‘Center’ dominated by a total lack of political modesty and an unshakable faith in Neo-Liberalism, and its successor the TPP, offers more of the same: a belief in the political inevitability of both Trump and Clinton. What the future holds is always predictable for those with special abilities! The cast of political characters that bought you that failed Neo-Liberal Revolution now bring you the TPP! If Communism was the product of a failed utopianism, what can we call the ardor expressed by that same old coterie of purchasable thinkers/writers?

Mrs. Clinton isn’t ‘likable’ but compared to the ‘poisonous windbag’ she faces, she has as yet undiscovered charms. The Neo-Cons have pronounced on their preference for Clinton, and even McConnell has pledged, in the heat of the primaries, to drop Trump like a ‘hot rock’. What ever happened to the Republican Party and its 11th Commandment? Like so many political commentators  Mr. Weisberg offer comments on the future, yet there are no indispensable political actors, only an ever changing cast of characters and the best laid plans of those actors, who project themselves into unknown territory. The rest is mere chatter.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b79142e0-e6e3-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.html#axzz42VYJ4Gd9

Does Ms. Tett’s column mark a shift of The Party Line at The Financial Times? From the Rebellion against The Elites hysteria, to a grudging acceptance of Tump as a political inevitability? At which point, we must come to terms with this political monster and hope that he moderates his political tone: the proffered pragmatism? Call this wishful thinking? Or does Ms. Tett exercise clairvoyance, instead of relying on empirical evidence? To state the obvious, the future is unknowable. Political speculation in this instance acts as an analgesic.

Then comes Republicans :Huntsman, Kasich,Christie aided by Neo-Liberals/New Democrats  Lieberman,  Martin O’Malley,  that appear under the Group designation of ‘No Labels’ which advocates ‘reform’ and ‘planning’ for the future. The rise of the  political front group is about politicking in a more respectable key, that puts front and center, the perception of that respectability as fact. The very notion that the Republican Party harbors any ‘pragmatists’ is prima facie ludicrous! Sen. Lugar was the last of the  political pragmatist, who was purged in 2012. And Ryan’s compromise with Obama was about his galloping, not to speak of ruthless, ambition. His fellow Republicans in the House are  restive and outspoken on his exercise of that ‘pragmatism’. 

How does TTP and TTIP figure in Ms. Tett’s and this group’s, and its various members, advocacy of ‘reform’? When TPP and TTIP are in fact creatures of an active political collusion between government and business, that is the very definition of fascism. Trump is not an aberration, but the culmination of the political necromancy practiced by the Republicans since the Nixon/McCarthy era.

Almost  Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e6e60e54-e616-11e5-bc31-138df2ae9ee6.html#axzz42VYJ4Gd9