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Ms. Weaver has shown, with this essay, that she is not a ‘reporter’ but a fully fledged member of the Western Press, and its construction of the Myth of Putin The Terrible. Following the Party Line relentlessly ballyhooed by the FT, The Economist, The New York Times and Victoria Nuland,The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the other co-conspirators in the Ukrainian Coup.  American/EU NGO’s NATO, and  the chorus of Neo-Cons and R2P zealots/propagandists:  Samantha Power, Michael Ignateiff , Timothy Snyder, The New York Review of Books and Eurozine. These and many more political actors helped to construct The New Cold War!

Ms. Weaver puts to question this among other inquiries:

‘In his campaign, Mr Trump appears to be taking chapters out of Mr Putin’s handbook. There is the creation of a perceived external threat (in Mr Putin’s case, the US and its encroachment into Russia’s sphere of influence; in Mr Trump’s, it is Muslims and illegal immigrants);’

She compares Trump to Putin in terms of decisive action so much admired by her two protagonists is this political vignette: Tal Wollschlaeger and Duane Ernster. The utter failure of the Neo-Liberal Dogma to bring that Free Market Utopia into being, has brought forth the political monster of Populism, and its infatuation with the Caudillo, in the mold of Peron! Trump has had many years on television to perfect his personae as just that.

Putin, in this iteration of the Myth, is, of course, subject to the paranoid delusion of an outside enemy, yet the fact of the Ukrainian Coup and the utterly corrupt and incompetent governance that followed, of what is left of that state, and our murderous proxy war, are the dismal proof of American/EU political machinations. Not to speak of the evolving role of Right Sector and Svoboda and their epigones in the national politics of that state. The West has seen fit to exercise its murderous, blundering, not to speak of incompetent political will on Ukraine. And attempts to deny its responsibility by blaming Putin as The New Stalin: this is now a part of the sham narrative invented and nurtured by American/EU apologists.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/76412252-a26d-11e5-8d70-42b68cfae6e4.html#axzz3uUf1SpBt

Is there no end of the Freud Apologists and their project of historical revisionism, rehabilitation? Although Prof. Zaretsky offers Freud as ‘political’, that breaks new ground in Freudian Rehabilitation. But the Project remains the same. The chorus of respectable bourgeois apologists has grown since the reviews for Adam Phillips’ ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’. The ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, that once morphed into a metaphysic has once again been adapted to the needs of a political pragmatism, as the in order too of rescue from political/intellectual/moral irrelevance. Describe the journey from science to metaphysic to politics as a kind of map of the desperate acolytes.  A sample of the reviews of the Phillips’ book:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-becoming-freud-the-making-of-a-psychoanalyst-by-adam-phillips/2014/06/27/240684e2-d4aa-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html

http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/the-freud-we-wish-for

Mr. William Geraldi’s review titled ‘Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller’ certainly takes first place in this collection of reviews of Mr. Phillips Freudian Revisionism: this review makes these astounding pronouncements on ‘psychoanalysis’ and the ‘ Freudian unconscious in particular’ was ‘​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’ Given this what can any reader make of the original Freudian claim of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and as Freud’s status as ‘physician’ ?

http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-criticism/2014/06/sigmund-freud-never-ending-storyteller

Some quotation seems in order:

‘Phillips writes that “the modern individual Sigmund Freud would eventually describe was a person under continuous threat with little knowledge of what was really happening to him”—​a Jew, in other words, as Freud himself admitted in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis. The paradoxes at the hub of Freud—​the heaving dichotomies of life/death, sex/death, past/present, present/future, sickness/health—​are human paradoxes, to be sure, but they are human paradoxes expertly manifest in Hebraic mythos. Phillips contends that “Freud’s work shows us … that nothing in our lives is self-​evident, that not even the facts of our lives speak for themselves.” Consider how that assertion applies both to the Torah and to the indispensible modern Jewish writers, from Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka to Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you’ll begin to see how psychoanalysis in general and the Freudian unconscious in particular—​that dark swamp of our minds—​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’

There is more:

‘In reference to every Freudian’s loving or bitter impulse to tackle the august founder, Bloom speaks of “the burden of the writing psychoanalyst, who is tempted to a battle he is doomed to lose,” meaning that Freud can be an oily, protean subject, whether approached from the logical, biographical, or pedagogical angle. The one angle not doomed to failure is the one that Peter Brooks takes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and that Adam Phillips emphasizes here (with no mention of Brooks): Freud the storyteller. Brooks calls psychoanalysis “not only narrative and linguistic but also oral, a praxis of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling.” Say what you will about the psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan, but Freud and his theory have always been about language, the language of the self telling stories, “this new language for the heart and soul and conscience of modern people,” as Phillips phrases it.’

For the surprising literary antecedent to Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic project’, Cervantes’ Quixote,  see ‘Freud’s Paranoid Quest,Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion by John C. Farrell, Chapter 6 ‘Freud as Quixote’:

http://nyupress.org/books/9780814726501/

And see this unsurprisingly hostile review of Mr. Farrel’s book in the New York Times by Sarah Boxer titled ‘Flogging Freud’:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html

Some of the Evaluations of Freud and Psychoanalysis:

Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank Sulloway

Freud Evaluated, The Completed Arc by Malcolm Macmillan https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/freud-evaluated

The Memory Wars, Freud’s Legacy in Dispute by Frederick Crews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Wars

Follies of the Wise, Dissenting Essays by Frederick Crews https://books.google.com/books/about/Follies_of_the_Wise.html?id=SKQGIZHuhW8C

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend by Frederick Crews http://www.amazon.com/Unauthorized-Freud-Doubters-Confront-Legend/dp/0670872210

Freudian Fallacy: An Alternative View of Freudian Theory by E.M. Thornton

The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason,3rd Edition by Ernest Gellner, Forward by Jose Brunner

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631234136.html

Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz

Philosophical  Apprentice

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161440

This essay proves, beyond doubt, that in that locked bottom drawer of Mr. Luce’s desk is a novel he’s been working on for years. Now, he worked diligently, in his younger years on that pet project, but the years and his career have consigned that nearly completed project, to that bottom drawer.

But Mr. Luce redeems his ambition with his fictive creation of Joe Biden’s letter to the president. Although Mr. Biden is,to be frank, a career politician, once a Liberal, who like most Democrats ‘evolved’ into a Neo-Liberal. But Mr. Biden had a talent of putting his foot in mouth, in his extemporaneous remarks, unlike Reagan he didn’t have a script writer and a staff that kept him ‘on message’. Some might call Biden an amenable political hack, a V.P. with a staff to control his need to opine on pressing political issues. Mr. Luce’s essays captures the politically managed ‘anguish’ of Biden, and its focus on the  Trump political phenomenon, an imagined Biden as conscience of a nation doesn’t quite ring true.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7c69dc5e-a020-11e5-beba-5e33e2b79e46.html#axzz3uJ2FP32v

Don’t need Roth’s weak parable starring the nearly unseen Lindbergh, heavy melodrama allied to an authorial nostalgia, as teetering armature! You’re not old enough to recall Jimmy Stewart in that 1957 blockbuster apologia for Lucky Lindy, directed by Billy Wilder? I’m tired of Republicans of all stripes condemnation of fascist bully boy Trump, he’s all yours, from the ‘Generation of Treason’ to capo Karl Rove: a culmination not an aberration. The really unpleasant truth is hard to face, for a Party whose raison d’etre is political nihilism. Neo-Cons,No-Nothings,Theocrats,Dixiecrats and Free Market Grandees, better knows as thieves.  ‘At long last sir, have you no shame?’

The title is the giveaway: ‘Liberalism’s Gun Problem’
Allied to this is the notion that gun violence ‘drives liberals into a fury’: deliberate mis-characterization, not to speak of ideologically fueled and deliberate misapprehension, that puts the onus on ‘Liberals’ to come up with the solution for the problem of gun violence. Another as if: that the problem of gun violence is a problem for ‘Liberals’ to solve, rather than a persistent,vexing problem of our polity, our collective national life. First put the onus on ‘Liberals’, then demonstrate that the solutions, using the French and Australian models as not viable, but then to demonstrate his political desperation, Mr. Douthat adds the non sequitur of Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk as bait, ‘a mix of Bloombergist police tactics’. The essay ends in a kind of nonplussed political nihilism, which simply reinforces the status quo as a political inevitability.

Political Reporter

The sun set on Britain as international political/moral actor, of import, a long time ago, yet Mr. Rachman engages in a kind of rhetorical version of political nostalgia, not exactly mirroring that of Niall Ferguson’s nostalgia for Empire, but continuing the deeply held notion, that is indeed a fiction, of British Indispensability.

American Exceptionalism rules all Foreign Policy debate in America, even as other political actors are on the rise, like China and India. Declinism is an idee fixe of the Ferguson world view, steeped in a ersatz political nostalgia for a lost world dominance.

What are ‘British Values’ ? Supporting the new 30 Years War? Spending on War while cutting the Welfare State to the point of being able to drown it in a bathtub, to paraphrase American Grover Norquist? Hilary Benn and Mr. Rachman are part of a long tradition of political nostalgics, who find the political world refracted through a failed Neo-Liberalism, and its ally the myth of a hegemony lost, a very powerful mythology.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dfeac05c-9a87-11e5-be4f-0abd1978acaa.html#axzz3tMInA3po

One can approach Mr. Peter Wehner’s essay as a defense of ‘Moderate Conservatism’ or what might be judged as the party since the end of WWII, except that what is missing from this potted history are some inconvenient facts about the Party:

‘Trump is the culmination of Republican Party mendacity. The beginning of Trumpism can be traced from the ‘Generation of Treason’ Anti-New Deal propaganda offensive of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren Cold War alliance. And from Goldwater and his allies, who purged the Republican Liberals from the Convention in 1964, the Dixiecrat mass migration to the Republican Party in 1964 and 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to the New Nixon of 68: The Southern Strategy, that even pitchman Reagan embraced in his first speech after his nomination at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980.  And then to the Willy Horton hysterics confected by Lee Atwater & Bush I. And the rise of political capo Karl Rove of Bush II.’

Somehow this little precis doesn’t quite prepare the reader for these rhetorical/stylistic gems, this one dipped in purple:

The understandable frustration of many has transmogrified into a mindless attachment to a political harlequin. Something has gone awry in the party.

Of all the ‘reasons’ enumerated in the paragraph below, I would submit the most glaring ‘reason’ for the rise in the dreaded ‘populism’ is the utter failure of the ‘Free Market’ in 2008, an inconvenient fact that is anathema to Neo-Liberals, both Republican and New Democrat.

This anger is, in some respects, justified. Political institutions have long been unresponsive to the challenges many Americans face, including stagnant wages, rising tuition and health costs, a byzantine tax code, high debt levels and mediocre education.

One thought on this paragraph: education is, to use a favorite trope of the Neo-Liberal, the ‘personal responsibility’ of each political actor, over a lifetime. Education does not end at the attainment of a Bachelors, Masters, or PhD, but is a the work of a lifetime!

Hence the appeal of an outsider such as Mr Trump, especially among male blue-collar workers, many of whom have borne the brunt of globalisation.

In the above sentence ‘globalisation’ acts as a maladroit stand in for the failed Neo-Liberal/Free Market delusion. And what has followed this collapse, seemingly endless Economic Stagnation, seven years after this catastrophe. One might ask when does the mechanism of the Self-correcting Market begin?

Mr Trump has also tapped into something that resonates with many of these Republicans: illegal immigration. This has undermined the rule of law and depressed the economic prospects of some low-skilled workers.

Xenophobia and ‘low-skilled workers’ are two concerns of The Republican Party: consider the anti-immigrant question in California in 1994, backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson of Prop 187:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_187

This  not anything resembling the exercise of tolerance, in sum, the Republican stance on immigration ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ is a matter of public record, that even Mr. Wehner’s flaccid apologetics can’t mask!

It would be nice to chalk up his success to temporary insanity — an episode of Trumpmania that will end on its own. But a figure like Mr Trump does not appear ex nihilo. He is the product of certain intellectual and political habits that have taken hold over the years: a lazy anti-government ideology, prizing emotivism over empiricism, and conflict in pursuit of lost causes. This is not conservatism; it is splenetic, embittered populism. These habits of thought are discrediting the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Now would be a good time to begin to break them.

Trump is not a political abberation but the culmination of Republican No-Nothingism that has been an unacknowledged component  of the Party, as it is denied by its apologists like Mr. Wehner.  But there are more charaterizations of Trump and Trumpism:’lazy anti-government ideology’, ‘prizing emotivism over empiricism’,’splenetic, embittered populism’ but the sine qua non of Republican self-spologetics, the self-exculpatory, a comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan:

These habits of thought are discrediting the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. Now would be a good time to begin to break them.

Here is a telling excerpt from Reagan’s opening speech of his presidential run of 1980, at the Nashoba County Fair, not many miles from where Civil Right workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered,that should leave no doubt as to his alligence to The Republican Party of Mr. Lincoln:

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

http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/23462a72-98e8-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html#axzz3tMInA3po

In Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh runs in the American presidential race of 1940 and wins. Could another American writer imagine Donald Trump as that kind of a likely presidential candidate? Lindbergh was heroic and admired, even idolized by millions around the world, an aviation pioneer, handsome and dashing to boot, schooled in tragedy, who remained a steadfast American patriot, at least in his own reckoning.

Perhaps Trump is better suited to the movies, more in the mold of Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, rather than The Spirit of St. Louis, starring another American icon Jimmy Stewart as Lindbergh?

Since the anonymous writer of this essay mentioned Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, I thought Mr Roth’s antifascist literary/historical polemic, a re-imagination of America in 1940’s, seemed a more politically resonant,  pertinent to the Trump candidacy.

The writer’s contempt for the candidate and his audience couldn’t be more plain. Yet calling Mr. Trump’s  very receptive supporters ‘wrinklies’ seems an exercise in contempt, that attacks a portion of the readership of this publication. Or don’t journalists realize the truth of that old saying don’t bite the hand that feeds you?

The title of the essay ‘The greatest show on earth’ trivializes the Trump candidacy as a kind of joke. It’s too bad Trump uncannily resembles Mussolini strutting in his television Boardroom, passing out the rough justice of Vulture Capital with the admonition your fired. This is the definition of ‘Leadership’ as confected for the small screen.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21679429-mr-trumps-support-will-not-collapse-he-still-long-shot-republican

Niall Ferguson proves himself to be the natural successor to Samuel P. Huntington, whose paranoia embraced all of the world’s Civilizations, except our own naturally superior Western example. Huntington in his last book titled ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ posits the notion that American Anglo-Protestant virtue is being threatened by Latino immigration. Mr. Ferguson trades in the same kind of paranoia mongering but with the refugees fleeing the ‘Middle East’ as the New Barbarians about to sack Rome. Ferguson penchant for drawing melodramatic historical parallels that reinforce his Neo-Imperial ambitions makes his essays almost comic, in a perverse way. The inconvenient fact is that these refugees are the watershed of the Western ‘War on Terror’ and the drones used, with absolute disregard for any human value. This is irrelevant to Ferguson’s idee fixe of Western Virtue facing obliteration, by means of a subversive contingent of Muslim refugees, bent on our destruction from the inside, a Muslim 5th Column. The Barbarians sacked Rome with an army, in Ferguson’s telling the refugees play the part of a Trojan Horse in his speculative melodrama.
Here is a quotation from his essay that demonstrates a facet of the Ferguson posturing hypocrisy:

‘ But it is also true that the majority of Muslims in Europe hold views that are not easily reconciled with the principles of our modern liberal democracies, including those novel notions we have about equality between the sexes and tolerance not merely of religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities.’

One need only recall Mr. Ferguson’s comment on Keynes sexuality and its negative relation to economic thinking  to see that not all of we Westerners share a tolerance ‘of nearly all sexual proclivities’ !

Political Reporter

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/16/paris-and-fall-rome/ErlRjkQMGXhvDarTIxXpdK/story.html

Bagehot is a talented writer as his unsparing polemic against Jeremy Corbyn demonstrated:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2015/11/corbyn-labour-and-paris#commentForm
In this essay he uses his power to evoke various melodramatic scenes from the National Security State files, in defense of :

‘This state of affairs is regrettable, not least as it makes it harder for the country to take the initiative and exercise international leadership.’

And this :

‘Britain’s evolution from a “force for change” to a “force for order” (in the words of Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank) makes sense.’

Bagehot has what can only be described as a highfalutin notion of the British State in 2015. ‘Exercise of international leadership’ and ‘evolution from a “force for change” to a “force for order”’   As far as one can judge from recent events America and Russia are providing ‘international leadership’ no matter how maladroit that ‘exercise’ may appear. As Britain acts as part of a nearly fictive European Coalition of the Willing, to use a discarded rhetorical frame.

Two instances of Bagehot’s practice of British self-inflation, as indispensable international political actor:

‘If Britain is to play this role—as a networked, surgical power—it should do so properly.’

‘At a time when Britain is putting ever more emphasis on its distinctive knack for gathering and disseminating knowledge, reacting quickly and forging alliances, it is odd that it should let one of its most relevant and admired global assets go to seed.’

Then Bagehot tells, quite inconveniently, on himself as not an ‘objective journalist/commentator’ but as part of the technocracy of the National Security State apparatus, or at the least one of its employees:

‘A recent report (to which Bagehot contributed) published by Chatham House, another think-tank, proposed a long-term doubling of the proportional diplomatic budget to 0.2% of GDP; a totemic target to sit alongside the defence and aid ones. A savvy SDSR would pay such suggestions heed: in an age of uneasy coalitions, asymmetric threats and scrambles for information, the word in the ear can be as decisive as the gun in the hand. ‘

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21678822-britain-must-start-thinking-its-diplomats-part-its-defencesand-fund-them-accordingly

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