StephenKMackSD's Blog

It’s as if Herman Kahn had never died. The mild mannered thinker of the unthinkable reappears as the cartoonisly bellicose academic Tom Nichols.? Or could it be Dr. Strangelove, or one of the other hawkish characters in Kubrick’s classic satire?

All that New Cold War swagger goes  to waste on those of us who lived through the last Cold War, as we recall some of it’s hold overs like Strobe Talbott , Russia Hand, at Brookings. Call the New Cold War a creature of  NATO expansionism as the instrument of the waning power of the American Empire, and the complete failure of a benighted Neo-Liberalism. The doomsayers, like Niall Ferguson, opine that the precipitous rise of China is the end of western hegemony, even with all our sophisticated weaponry. America is in hock to China! Our civic order/life is in tatters. Yet Mr. Nichols prattles on about the Russians like it was 1950, but not quite.

Political Observer

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/russias-supersonic-tu-160-bomber-back-should-america-worry-12787

Ah! Is there nothing more satisfying that reading BHL as he builds his case against the Hebdo Dissenters! It isn’t as if they have some how broken the rules of democratic society by dissenting? Or is that just the problem? Is dissenting from the deeply held political orthodoxy, as articulated by BHL, the central matter?

Also, is it hard to perceive that Hebdo and the Le Pens share a politics of demonization, against a small minority of former colonial subjects, and their children? The Le Pens in direct political attack against immigrants, and Hebdo using the very potent symbol of The Prophet as the means of attack on this minority, this ‘otherness’ in the midst of the authentically French. Xenophobia and Islamophobia express the same fear of otherness, yet BHL leaves this vexing problematic out, as it interferes with his extensive public scolding of the dissidents.

Almost Marx

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/04/the-pen-gala-and-the-gall-of-the-boycott.html

There is a lot of real estate between Singapore and France! Perhaps, that is why it was so easy for J.F. to write his dissent on the PEN dissenters?
Or is it very easy to see that Charlie Hebdo’s attack on Muslims and the Prophet was/is a politically motivated attack on an un-assimilated, vulnerable minority population inside the French nation? Made up of former inhabitants and their children, of their former colonies. How many generations will full assimilation take? You could easily view Hebdo as a retrograde defense of France’s civilizing mission, of it’s cultural hubris. The Hebdo methodology riffs on demonization and defamation: the demeaning cartoons of the Prophet acting as stand-in for that vulnerable population, and in a politically perverse way echoing the Le Pen’s! Or does that thought strain irony to the point of fracture?  All this as the prelude to politically charged violence against the ‘other’ in our midst? Or have we learned nothing from the last bloody Century worthy of inconvenient recall?

Political Observer

One can only marvel at this ‘review’ of H.W. Brand’s Reagan:The Life, after all, public relations ruled this man’s career from the movies to politics, and even in death, he relies on his hagiographers to homogenize his politics, into line with the Reagan Mythology: in that Mr. Brands is the perfect biographer. Reagan’s strengths were that he knew his lines and he hit his marks. He only stumbled when he extemporized, deviating from the script was the cardinal sin of the contract player.
Look at Reagan’s poll numbers from his years in office, not particularly impressive, in fact, they seem to be all over the map:
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/cfide/roper/presidential/webroot/presidential_rating_detail.cfm?allRate=True&presidentName=Reagan
Should I even quote Mr. Reagan’s notorious speech at the Nashoba County Fair? It is quite explicit in his support of States Rights, and by inference in support of Nixon’s notorious Southern Strategy, not many miles from the sight where three Civil Rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner ,were murdered in 1964. In a politics ruled by symbolism and rhetoric, the very life blood of the practice of public relations, the intent of the Reagan speech is completely clear, except for the willfully myopic ideologues!

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&TM=60417.67

This is just one example of the politics of Ronald Reagan, in his eight years in office. Lew Cannon wrote what some might call the definitive biography, aptly titled President Reagan The Role of a Lifetime. The title captures all the melodrama of a television miniseries, except that in real life Reagan was the harbinger of a poisonous Neo-Liberalism, that is still reeking havoc in 2015.

Democratic Socialist

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21650065-excellent-new-life-americas-40th-president-who-died-2004-great-storytellers

Larchmont has written a very cogent reply to Mr. Barber’s essay on the European Populists. Let me presume to add another dimension to the debate, which is ignored at The Financial Times and it’s sister publication The Economist: the utter failure of Neo-Liberalism, and it’s successor Austerity to answer the catastrophic failure of that very Neo-Liberalism: these facts play no part in an answer to the scourge of the fading European Populism, as argued in Mr. Barber’s rather low key but transparent polemic. An indictment of both left and right as the political center has mitigated  the predations of the Crash of 2008. The whole of Mr. Barber’s argument doesn’t  even approach economic/political intelligibility!

Never will these reporters and editorial writers, at either publication, address that issue as a matter of ideological solidarity. So what we readers are confronted with is a tale of the rise of the dreaded Populists, without historical context, that renders Mr. Barber’s essay into the realm of the blunderingly comic: think of the the herky-jerky movement of slapstick comedies of the silent era, and their use of title cards to move the story along. It isn’t the perfect analogy, but it is a characterization that might best describe the root of Mr. Barber’s maladroit a-historical polemic in defense of The Free Market.

Political Observer

During the Watts Riots I watched the fires on Alameda near Imperial Blvd., from my sister’s second floor apartment on Fernwood Ave. and State Street, in Lynwood California in 1965. With my two brothers in law, both armed with rifles and their impotent racist bravado at full cry!

Fast forward to 2015 and the string of police murders of black people, men and women, the past few years. But one might locate the possible beginning to the Zimmerman murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and has simply escalated to this point, as if the two Brown v. Board Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights era in America had never occurred. But this is indicative of the rise of the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the appointment of  Neo-Confederate/Originalists like Rehnquist and Scalia to the Supreme Court.  And then Alito and Roberts as the representatives of the legal expression of American Political Romanticism, that didn’t die but simply retreated to fight another day: it has arrived in the siege mentality that afflicts the white dominated police forces of America, well armed for the coming insurrections, with the spare military equipment from the Pentagon.

Mr. Silverman’s almost hand wringing essay, in which he mentions the Kerner Commission report, fits the Financial Times ideological requirements. But ponder this thought: that from this historical/political/ethical constellation will come the births of the New Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seal, Eldridge Clever,Stokley Carmichael! The thought/idea that Black Lives Matter will evolve into the the idea and practice of self-defense, against police violence, is hardly an historical anomaly. Unless like Mr. Silverman, and his readers, the active cultivation of political myopia is a habit of being.

Political Observer

In sum what we have from Mr. Aspden is a lengthy extemporizing  on the Lazy Southern Tier of Europe: Greece,Italy,Spain,Portugal etc. vs. the mercantile virtues of the Anglo-Saxons and Gauls that make up the Northern Tier of productive virtuous entrepreneurs.

Mr. Aspden wins his readers with the the story of how his father and mother met in Greece, and then with the long history of the German’s fascination with modern Hellenism, indeed nearly inventing it. On the recent scholarship, see On Germans and Other Greeks  by Dennis J. Schmidt. Yet Mr. Aspden leaves out the very pertinent fact that Winckelmann was homosexual, and addicted to contemplating Greek naked male statuary and then rationalizing/rhapsodizing it’s power to move him as a universal aesthetic experience. To engage in a necessary argumentative foreshortening.

The ideological intent becomes clear when Mr. Aspden then integrates into his story the laying of a memorial wreath by Alexis Tsipras, with the additional argumentative and cultural zing of Zorba the Greek and Never on Sunday, two classic instances that feature the Southern Tier Mythology, in Mr. Aspden’s view, yet both exist as entertainments that make arguments to live life to it’s fullest: carpe diem!  But the reader must assemble the pieces of Mr. Aspden’s argument from his almost charming ramble of an essay for herself/himself.

Political Observer

P.S. The photo of your father and mother must be a prized memento!

The Republicans have a penchant for  placing their most reactionary political curmudgeons in the United Nations ambassadorship, because they utterly despise an institution, whose godmother was Eleanore Roosevelt. Recall the verbose, bellicose Jeane Kirkpatrick? The Liberal Internationalist baggage is too much for those citizens and their re-imagined, halcyon 19th Century, who hold in contempt those who lived and live in the 20th and 21st Centuries: that kind of pragmatism is anathema to those in the Republican Party who view Eisenhower, not simply with disdain, but suspicion. This is a partial description of the political context of the ‘diplomat’ John Bolton. He is the perfect compliment to the announced and about to be announced candidates: Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Fiorino, Carson and Huckabee.

Mr. Bolton’s shameless bellicosity, in the face of his history of policy incompetence, in terms of the loss of human lives, is demonstrative of his being absolutely unfit for any office public or private! Two quotations from his New York Times opinion essay of March 26,2015 give necessary insight:

Ironically perhaps, Israel’s nuclear weapons have not triggered an arms race. Other states in the region understood — even if they couldn’t admit it publicly — that Israel’s nukes were intended as a deterrent, not as an offensive measure.

The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/da896030-e76f-11e4-8ebb-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Y8gUms00

You’ve got to give it to Ms. Clinton, at least her face doesn’t look like it’s been freshly ironed like Ms. Fiorina’s! Ms. Clinton’s face is jowly and a bit puffy, like a woman her age! Or more to the point, I hardly recognized Ms. Fiorina, from her last campaign here in California in 2010, she’s beginning to look scary, like Joan Rivers, early in her long relationship with plastic surgery. Sen. Schumer  is also sporting that ironed look himself, so it’s not just women, who somehow think that a facelift will make them look younger, and more  appealing to voters. Call it what it is pathetic!
If Ms. Clinton represents the shopworn Neo-Liberalism of the New Democrats twenty years on, Ms. Fiorina represents The Republican Party of Neo-Cons, Originalists, Free Marketeers, Know-Nothings and a sizable number of Dixiecrats. Is Ms. Fiorina an answer to the Jeb Bush v. Ms. Clinton: the inevitable battle of American Dynastic Politics? One of the burning questions not addressed in Ms. Clift’s utterly pedestrian essay. One can only wonder at Ms. Clift’s naivete, at not recognizing that the nail polish remark has all the earmarks of a political script: a planted question to give Ms. F. the chance to express her wit and ability to respond to the political moment. Her chance to shine in front of a very important audience.
Political Cynic

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/22/as-a-woman-fiorina-slams-identity-politics.html