@zbig The Hegemon must never betray or demonstrate it’s political contradictions and or weakness! See A. Scalia on 2000 election: ‘ We were the laughingstock of the world. The world’s greatest democracy that couldn’t conduct an election. We didn’t know who our next president was going to be.’
Belated hat tip on ‘stunningly superficial’ remark on Morning Joe, just can’t forget your clarifying honesty. Bravo!
Best regards,
StephenKMackSD
Is adoration the wrong word? Some examples of the questions:
‘While your opinions are are delectable to read…’, ‘Is your favorite one-liner still the sausage one?’, ‘Fifty years from now, which decisions in your tenure do you think will be heroic? ‘
One wishes that a real interview with Justice Scalia might be conducted by an intellectual antagonist or at the least a more tenacious inquirer. Continue reading
Douthat Chatter and Frum Chatter are as twin expressions of the self-destroying elan of the American Republican Party. Although, Frum Chatter, in this instance, opts for a shift of focus to his proclaimed victory of British Conservative governance, and the fading of the blight of Socialism: the favorite strategy of American Conservatism when confronted with failure or looming failure is to change the subject. Misdirection a favorite rhetorical strategy.
In Mr. D.’s argument American Conservatives are frustrated by the political fact that The New Deal and The Great Society are permanent fixtures of the American political landscape. The Republican Nihilists , with the aid of Koch,Rove and Club for Growth money, have attacked, by means of of a government shutdown, the very practice of governance. Is it mere tautology to call it a Pyrrhic victory? Underneath the avalanche of words, Mr. Douthat does not practice brevity in his blog posts, the reader confronts, at the essay’s end, what looks something like cynical resignation or even nihilistic fatalism.
Political Cynic
Read this essay by Daniel Pipes on what I can only call a kind of Sophisticated Xenophobia, on the question of the Syrian Refugee, that he argues must be- the title expresses his singular idea: ‘Let Refugees Remain in Their Own Culture Zone’. Does this even meet the lowest standard of humanitarian concern? Should a reader of this essay be surprised at the brazen expression of Islamophobia voiced by the notorious Neo-Conservative, Mr. Pipes? Based on the cultural/religious differences between the ‘West’ and the ‘Arabs’ as presented by Mr. Pipes: the specter of Mr. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations re-appears in an even more morally/intellectually pernicious form. Continue reading
I posted a comment on a Financial Times essay by John McDermott, this morning. And asked as part of it, Where are the Eisenhower Republicans?, to speak out against the Republican Nihilist. As I was driving to the gym this morning, I listened to Letters and Politics hosted by Mitch Jeserich. He was interviewing Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin, and Mr. K. commented that the reason that Republicans didn’t criticize the leadership was that The Club for Growth, come the next election, would run a candidate, farther to the right of the incumbent, of their own choosing, against any obdurate incumbent who criticized the leadership i.e. Tea Party zealots . That seems to answer my question in a very succinct manner. Continue reading
Why is the Republican Party headed straight to a permanent status as the party of daft plutocratic apologists, and craven imperial war mongers?(It almost sounds like a description of the New Democrats) But watch Mr. Bill Kristol, on ‘The Powerhouse Roundtable'(Recall that this a branch of ShowBiz)sound all the notes of the current Nihilist Republican party line,as he acts out his role as political contrarian,in opposition to the defenders of ‘Liberalism’.
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-powerhouse-roundtable-20412041?tab=9482930§ion=1206874&playlist=6505465 Continue reading
Mr. Douthat continues in his rhetorical mood of fabulism, that he expressed in his essay Call Me Vlad , with his latest entry titled Good Populism, Bad Populism. In sum Mr. D. presents the argument that the Republican Nihilists are not just ideological obstructionists but are, in fact, the future enactors of ‘reform’ . Now, given that these same future oriented pols have just voted to de-fund the Heritage Foundation Health-Care aka Obama Care, how might a reader interpret the idea of ‘reform’ as expressed by Mr. D?
Political Observer
The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes’s evolving response to the English Revolution. It rejects the prevailing understanding of Hobbes as a consistent, if idiosyncratic, royalist, and vindicates the contemporaneous view that the publication of Leviathan marked Hobbes’s accommodation with England’s revolutionary regime. In sustaining these conclusions, Professor Collins foregrounds the religious features of Hobbes’s writings, and maintains a contextual focus on the broader religious dynamics of the English Revolution itself. Hobbes and the Revolution are both placed within the tumultuous historical process that saw the emerging English state coercively secure jurisdictional control over national religion and the corporate church. Seen in the light of this history, Thomas Hobbes emerges as a theorist who moved with, rather than against, the revolutionary currents of his age. The strongest claim of the book is that Hobbes was motivated by his deep detestation of clerical power to break with the Stuart cause and to justify the religious policies of England’s post-regicidal masters, including Oliver Cromwell. Continue reading
What a wonderful stew of Conservative chatter ,that only Mr. Douthat can throw together, and still maintain any notion of the coherent, as he puts his various ingredients into the pot. He then applies intellectual heat, of a kind, to make this melange come to a rolling political boil!
Should we readers, in our astonishment at the power of Mr. D. to bring these disparate elements together and give it a meaning, again, of a kind, and produce a dish that barely passes as appetizing?
Another question: should the regular readers of Mr. D.’s thought experiments, on his blog, file the idea of Libertarian Populism under the same category of one of his other singular ideas Policy Entrepreneurship? Surely not a burning question but one that needs asking.
Political Cynic
Is it a surprise that Mr. Ross Douthat begins his New York Times essay of August 3, 2013 titled Return of the Jesus Wars with the titles of American movies as reference points? The Da Vinci Code, The Gospel of Judas, The Passion of Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ, he appeals not to an audience of readers but to movie fans, being a movie reviewer has it’s advantages. The fact that movies rule American lives and thought is a sobering thought. Although he quickly regains his intellectual footing with a mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls,the Gnostic gospels, aided by a reference to the German scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the first intellectual to seek the ‘historical Jesus’, as his posthumously published writing reveals. Recall that he, David Strauss and Albert Sweitzer, prominent German intellectuals, were the leaders of the quest for that historical personage. Continue reading
