Sometimes political cynicism reheated has an unattractive aroma. What to call it? the odor of decay, dessicated and dusty? Although Mr. Luce hits his marks with a certain effectiveness, as to Ms. Clinton’s unslakable political ambition, and it’s ruthless exercise of opportunism. For proof of this see the shameless jingoism in her interview with acolyte Jeffrey Goldberg, published August 10,2014, unfortunately Mr. Luce missed an opportunity to write a companion piece or simply an enlightening postscript to this review    :
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/
Ms. Clinton combines with certain public relations veracity: Feminism, Neo-Liberalism combined with the R2P, Neo-Conservative, New Democratic  alliance in response to their creature The New Cold War, and  the revived War on Terror: ISIL,ISIS,IL .

Political Observer

The effort to overcome the benighted Neo-Liberal model, which is now in it’s Austerity phase of self-rescue, will be a trans-generational battle. The Greeks are just the first followed by Spain and the rest of the Southern Tier i.e. the Profligate South vs the Virtuous North: the Germans the beneficiaries of economic rescue four times in the 20th Century have chosen to be, what is the word, recalcitrant?

We are in the opening phase of that battle and the wisdom of the failed and failing Neo-Liberal model and it’s rationalizers appears to have evaporated in the Crash of 2008, except that those apologists can’t quite bring themselves to anything like self-account. A signal failure both of the economic and the ethical. However those two civic ideals have been buried under the rubble of that dismal failure. Although glossed over by plenty of self-serving statistical data and Dismal Science speculation/metaphysics.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5faa51fe-ba7d-11e4-945d-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Sfggeg3M

Like all propaganda Ms. Cox’s essay is a parody of actual thought! Rhetorically framed by comic book metaphors about the powers of super heroes. One must ask the inevitable question: at which audience was this directed ? How does Ms. Cox place the blame for the Anti-Hillary phenomenon? Generic Sexism and her Prickly Staff, this last charge an example of our writer’s own experience?
After some boring, cliche ridden preliminaries we arrive at the question of Dynastic Politics. Jeb vs Hillary is the very definition of the shopworn politics of the American Political Present: two more than tired Neo-Liberals with nothing new to say, much less to think. The very act of thought is past the ability of either potential candidate or Ms. Cox, who is left defending Dynastic Politics and Hillary Clinton with this tortured paragraph:

Though some may point toward anti-Hillary coverage as proof that the media are not biased to the left, I consider this tendency toward deliberate, counter-factual undermining as pretty good evidence of that very bias, mostly because you just don’t see this pathology on the right. Base voters on either side rattle their cages when the presumptive nominee doesn’t fit their specific ideological prescription, but the Karl Roves of the world don’t lay into a GOP hopeful just because he (or she, but come on…) is clearly going to win.

The rest is more boring professional journalistic hyperventilating, equaling cynicism, in defense of Candidate Hillary as a welcome political inevitability. Ms. Cox all but declares opposition to Ms. Clinton as  political irrationalism, again, call it by it’s true name, propaganda!

Political Realist

For a partial answer to Kierkegaard’s nihilism in the Concept of Irony, see page 293 in Annette Baier’s Postures of the Mind;
‘I shall suggest that the secular equivalent of faith in God , which we need in morality as well as in science or knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and it’s evolving procedures-in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes.’ Etc.
https://books.google.com/books?id=kS73a3FOfeatures of an action OnsC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq=postures+of+the+mind&source=bl&ots=7kir7dgrPV&sig=LSHdD4YgwiRjq7kQyAEzxLzm19g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hNPoVKjnOMynNsCxgPAJ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=postures%20of%20the%20mind&f=false
Another part of the answer can be found in D.D. Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199568260.do
Page 21:
‘The relevant  features of an action include its effects on some other person or persons, and here imaginative sympathy has an important role.’ Etc.
We are a part of a human community, even though we may vigorously dissent to the felt and expressed values of that community. In a very real sense, we can never reach a state of complete nihilism, as we were born into and reached our point of self-emancipation through that existential medium. Faith was all that was left to Kierkergaard, given his nihilist self-conception of a completely desolate, alienated relation to that community. We are impelled to dissent, yet we must live within, accept the paradoxical nature of our ‘nihilism’.

Philosophical Apprentice

The New Cold War cliches are Putin as the New Stalin, President Obama’s lack of ‘resolve’ and it’s twin European/EU lack of resolve i.e. Merkel, and ‘Russian revanchism’ all carefully articulated by Mr. Stephens. Who then, quite boldly and imaginatively, uses the Long Telegram, and it’s successor the famous Mr. X essay as his starting point:  his extemporaneous and not quite convincing, not to speak of hectoring essay, is the issue of this thought experiment.

What Mr. Stephens leaves out of his political re-imagination, on ideological grounds? is the essay by American political mandarin Walter Lippmann. Perhaps a long quotation from this reply to Mr. X’s position paper will give much needed historical context, in the interest of demonstrating policy debates at the beginning of the Cold War and their relevance for policy debates in the present:

It will be evident, I am sure, to the reader who has followed the argument to this point that my criticism of the policy of containment, or the so-called Truman Doctrine, does not spring from any hope or belief that the Soviet pressure to expand can be “charmed or talked out of existence.” I agree entirely with Mr. X that we must make up our minds that the Soviet power is not amenable to our arguments, but only “to contrary force” that “is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power.”

My objection, then, to the policy of containment is not that it seeks to confront the Soviet power with American power, but that the policy is misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power. For as I have sought to show, it commits this country to a struggle which has for its objective nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years the Soviet power will, as the result of long frustration, “break up” or “mellow.” In this prolonged struggle the role of the United States is, according to Mr. X, to react “at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” to the encroachments of the Soviet power.

The policy, therefore, concedes to the Kremlin the strategical initiative as to when, where and under what local circumstances the issue is to be joined. It compels the United States to meet the Soviet pressure at these shifting geographical and political points by using satellite states, puppet governments and agents which have been subsidized and supported, though their effectiveness is meager and their reliability uncertain. By forcing us to expend our energies and our substance upon these dubious and unnatural allies on the perimeter of the Soviet Union, the effect of the policy is to neglect our natural allies in the Atlantic community, and to alienate them.

The Lippmann essay available here:

http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/lippman.html

Political Observer

Compare Mr. Timothy Garton Ash’s gentle but firm anti-intellectual attack on John Mearsheimer: ‘Professor Realist’ to the certifiable intellectual bumpkinry of former Air Force General Charles Wald.

First Mr. Ash’s attempt to discredit Mr. M.’s realism, better to call it a self-serving rhetorical cartoon version  of that ‘realism’. Notice that Mr. Ash’s rhetorical frame to the whole is the notorious Yalta surrender to Soviet imperial adventurism!

‘Moscow’s law of the jungle confronts Brussels’ jungle of law. Who’s winning? “Russia is winning” answers the well-known American “realist”, John Mearsheimer. So what should we do about it? “The west should seek to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and Nato. It should look like Austria during the cold war. Toward that end, the west should explicitly take European Union and Nato expansion off the table.” Well, thank you Professor Realist. Perhaps you would like to seal the deal yourself? We have the perfect location for your realpolitik summit: Yalta, where in 1945 Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave an ambiguous legitimacy to the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. That’s Yalta in now-annexed Crimea.’

Now former General Wald’s inept dismissal of Mr. Mearsheimer’s ‘realism’:

‘I think it’s a smart argument that a professor would make, but it’s wrong.’

One must watch and listen to the former General’s argument, and also his consistent inability to pronounce Mr. Mearsheimer’s name, that makes him seem clueless, like another garden variety anti-intellectual. See the debate here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/10/playing_with_fire_a_debate_on
The Ukrainian Coup and it’s American and EU backers has brought to prominence the Neo-Con, Neo-Liberal and R2P zealots, Mr. Ash among the most prominent, of The New Cold Warriors whose target is Putin as the New Stalin. Mr. Ash degrades his status as one of most prominent supporters of the dissidents in the Soviet Union and it satellites: a writer of conscience now supports blackwidow Victoria Nuland and her allies Right Sector and Svoboda!

Political Cynic

Is it any surprise that this editorial at The Economist begins with Left Wing hysteria mongering? This as the West finds itself covered in the soot of the Neo-Liberal delusion that turned to ash? The failure of Neo-Liberalism demands further Neo-Liberal ‘reforms’, so goes the Party Line of the apologists for that exhausted,demonstrably failed political/economic mirage. See Philip Mirowski’s Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste for the dismal history of  the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective’s mendacious ascendency and staying power:

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
For an alternative view to this Economist editorial see Jillian Tett’s essay at the Financial Times on debt forgiveness and the Germans, from an address by Benjamin Friedman, aptly titled A Predictable Pathology.
A link to Ms. Tett’s essay:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Rqy6UMA0
A link to Mr. Friedman’s essay:

Click to access friedman.pdf

The fact that the Germans were bailed out four times in the 20th Century 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. What bearing might that have on the Left Wing hysteria mongering at the Economist, and the issue of the Greeks and debt forgiveness? And/or a range of other options, open to EU technocrats, in alliance with the Greeks, to first and foremost alleviate the suffering of Greek citizens, as the primary issue, not the rescue of the Neo-Liberal delusion in it’s various iterations!  But the alleviation of the suffering of the Greeks is utterly antithetical to the whole of the Neo-Liberal Project:  civic good is in direct opposition to the argued ‘value’ of Markets and Market Discipline!

Almost Marx

Mr. Niall Ferguson’s essay of February 13, 2015 titled ‘The Meaning of the Minsk Agreement’ is one more demonstration that the political cliches of the New Cold War have become fully integrated in the rhetoric of the Western Exceptionalist Political Theology. Although the pretentious ‘frozen conflict’ has replaced the notion of ‘stalemate’ from the Old Cold War. Nothing has changed except that Putin takes the place of Stalin as the political monster that needs to be defeated.

In his essay Mr. Ferguson addresses and admonishes the ‘armchair strategist’. Our scribbler has read the ‘fine print’ of the document and shares his superior knowledge with his reader. Yet our experience of Mr. Ferguson has been one that recoils at his imperial apologetics and his bellicosity: one would think/posit that a person with no military experience, might just hesitate in the face of his own ignorance, to advocate such a course of action, that is the answer he provides to vexing political questions. We know that his household deity is Eris, the god of mischief and discord, a god he serves without fail.

Political Observer

If there is any doubt in your mind that War Fever has infected the same ‘minds/hearts’ that sold the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Here is the evidence.

Martin Wolff in the Financial Times under the title ‘Help Ukraine seize this chance’, with the subtitle of ‘A small price for the chance of securing a stable democracy on the continent’s eastern flank’. Needless to say Mr. Wolff’s polemic is larded with the cliches of the New Cold War i.e.Putin taking the lead as political monster in chief  :

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/806eb796-b08b-11e4-92b6-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3RMB1SPvi

I can’t quote directly from the text but Mr. Wolff acquits himself as a trusted spokesman for Western Values i.e. perpetual war in search of an elusive peace. The argument Mr. Wolff makes is economically based, complemented by winning graphics, no surprise here, but the IMF bailout, and as usual, in the face of failed Neo-Liberalism the prescription is more Neo-Liberalism. (The key word here is always ‘reform.’) See Philip Mirowski’s book ‘Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste’ for a telling description of this phenomenon:

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

There is so much more to be said about Mr. Wolff’s unseemly war advocacy! Yet he arrives at his political destination with a certain  aplomb: he manages to provide a rational economic gloss to his advocacy.

From The Economist, the F.T.’s sister publication, of the February 14, 2015 edition is the print magazine’s lead story, complete with a melodramatic, menacing picture of Putin as puppet master, on a black background, called ‘Putin’s war on the West’. The road to war is paved with cheap visual melodrama! But please don’t underestimate the power of sophisticated propaganda, that uses an hysteria mongering vocabulary allied to an appealing historically charged rhetoric. And also notice the sub-heading ‘What is to be done’ a reference/quotation from both Chernyshevsky and Lenin, a bit of Oxbridge flat footed irony?

Again , there is so much more to be said about this essay.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21643189-ukraine-suffers-it-time-recognise-gravity-russian-threatand-counter

HE IS ridiculed for his mendacity and ostracised by his peers. He presides over a free-falling currency and a rapidly shrinking economy. International sanctions stop his kleptocratic friends from holidaying in their ill-gotten Mediterranean villas. Judged against the objectives Vladimir Putin purported to set on inheriting Russia’s presidency 15 years ago—prosperity, the rule of law, westward integration—regarding him as a success might seem bleakly comical.

But those are no longer his goals, if they ever really were. Look at the world from his perspective, and Mr Putin is winning. For all his enemies’ machinations, he remains the Kremlin’s undisputed master. He has a throttlehold on Ukraine, a grip this week’s brittle agreement in Minsk has not eased. Domesticating Ukraine through his routine tactics of threats and bribery was his first preference, but the invasion has had side benefits. It has demonstrated the costs of insubordination to Russians; and, since he thinks Ukraine’s government is merely a puppet of the West (the supposed will of its people being, to his ultracynical mind, merely a cover for Western intrigues), the conflict has usefully shown who is boss in Russia’s backyard. Best of all, it has sown discord among Mr Putin’s adversaries: among Europeans, and between them and America.

An editorial from February 12, 2015 edition of the Financial Times titled ‘Tactical pause in Putin’s assault on Ukraine’ which tells the whole propaganda story in miniature:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d5481096-b2ac-11e4-a058-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3RZjbIAoQ

Political Skeptic

E.W. is author of the rambling essay titled Anxious Sensitivity under the rubric of Political Correctness, in which she/he engages in an evaluation of events, opinions, comments, that share a perceived common theme, expressed in that rubric and title. Here  is the ‘offending’ passage in the President’s address that has provoked the rhetorical animus of Christian Apologists:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

If this recitation of historical fact makes Christian apologists ‘uncomfortable’, they are uncomfortable with the facts of their own history, or simply, in their response to this historical precis, confronting their own spiritual/historical hubris?

After all ‘Faith’ is the triumph of ‘revelation’ over fact, the empirical: Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling experiences the ‘absurdity’ of faith as it’s proof: Soren reveled in and rebuked the Hegelian dialectic in equal measure i.e. he embraced the inherent schizophrenia of the Christian Mystery!

Here is what the Christian Apologist’s ignore, because it is politically inconvenient to their agenda, in President’s address:

So this is not unique to one group or one religion.  There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.  In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.  And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.

And, first, we should start with some basic humility.  I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments.  And we should assume humbly that we’re confused and don’t always know what we’re doing and we’re staggering and stumbling towards Him, and have some humility in that process.  And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty.  No God condones terror.  No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.

And so, as people of faith, we are summoned to push back against those who try to distort our religion — any religion — for their own nihilistic ends.  And here at home and around the world, we will constantly reaffirm that fundamental freedom — freedom of religion — the right to practice our faith how we choose, to change our faith if we choose, to practice no faith at all if we choose, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.

On the question of Charlie Hebdo: it is a publication of a politically exploitable Islamophobia as a function of a retrograde Colonial apologetics, and about the complete failure at integrating the immigrants from colonies into French civic life, the 2005 riots in the banlieues being utterly indicative. Holding the Prophet up to unrelenting ridicule was/is a cowardly attack on the whole of that population. Hebdo’s main target was the Prophet and by implication the entire immigrant community.

And on the question of Charlie Hebdo’s proffered relation to the Enlightenment, one need only read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary to see the various rhetorical modes of irony as practiced by the paradigmatic figure of the French Enlightenment. Even in his scandalous, even vulgar La Pucelle d’Orléans took place within the evolving Deist tradition.

On the question of Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine self-serving revival of Mr. Dinesh D’Souza thesis, presented in Illiberal Education, see Glenn Greenwald’s essay that provides a readable, enlightened  criticism of Mr. Chait’s exercise in self-justification. Not to speak of his un-becombing self-pity, heavily garnished with the kind of horror stories that made Mr. D’Souza’s potboiler a best seller.  Be forewarned, Mr. Chait’s essay is the purest form of hysteria mongering, and as such requires your patience and forbearance. 

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/petulant-entitlement-syndrome-journalists/

Political Observer