StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Brooks in his column of March 15,2012 is at his comic best, describing the ‘cagey’ President Obama. But it isn’t so much a moment of political revelation, as perhaps, a parable about how the president will lose the election of 2012, as narrated by Mr. Brooks. He describes the political journey of President Obama in the most self-serving cynical terms. And all the usual rhetorical actors assume their places in a narrative that is always consistent, even predictable: tax reform, entitlement reform, debt reduction,grand project,government reform,debt crisis. And just to indicate that he isn’t exactly duplicating or recycling his past essays he injects a telling bit of prescriptive political analysis:

“Leading the country through this will require the intelligence, balance and craftiness that Obama has demonstrated. But it will also require indomitable inner conviction and an aggressive drive to push change. It will require a fearless champion who will fight all the interests that love the tax code the way it is. It will require a fervent crusader to rally the country behind shared sacrifice. It will take an impervious leader willing to spread spending cuts everywhere and offend everybody all at once. There will have to be a clearly defined vision of what government will look like at the end.”

Mr. Brooks can’t help himself, he inflates his commentary with overblown melodrama and heavy moralizing, two more mainstays of his thought. But the patient regular reader of his commentaries is rewarded near the end of this essay by the appearance of the notion of ‘All In’. This astounding metaphor is defined quite glibly by our writer:

“He has never displayed an inner passion, a sense that these projects are his life mission, or a willingness to bear the pain that taking on these challenges necessarily entails.”

Surely Mr. Brooks qualifies as the Agnes Nixon of American punditry.

Political Observer

Here is Michael Tomasky’s latest essay at The Daily Beast on the subject of the political viability of President Obama endorsing gay marriage. Mr. Tomasky assures the reader that he is on the right side of this issue, a quote from his colleague Peter Beinart on ‘America’s moral destiny’ as related to gay marriage, as exemplary of his support for marriage equality, rings hollow as he habitually repeats a riff on Augustine, but not right now. Bourgeois hypocrisy makes it possible for President Obama to publicly sympathize with the family of Trayvon Martin, while the blood of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki has been recently washed from his hands, for reasons of state: the ‘pragmatism’ that Mr. Tomasky advocates share that common root. There is in this essay a great deal of recalled history, a vulgarizing blend of kitsch and realpolitik, that speaks to the politics of the admonition of ‘not right now’, but the demonstrations of history, of morality, of American legal precedent more broadly viewed, less rhetorically, ideologically proscribed, point inexorably in another direction. Will President Obama provide the answer to Mr. Beinart’s idea, indeed question of ‘America’s moral destiny’? Which in the strictest terms could be named leadership: the president could consider the advice of Mr. Tomasky as valuable, in terms of political realism, but incomplete and historically indefensible, and more importantly as an expression of a politically exhausted gradualism?

Queer Atheist

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ClassicalStudies/AncientReligio…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/us/new-look-at-an-old-memo-casts-more-doubt…

‘For starters, of course, Justice Jackson joined the unanimous opinion in Brown in 1954. And Justice Jackson’s secretary, Elsie Douglas, told John P. MacKenzie of The Washington Post in 1971 that Mr. Rehnquist had “smeared the reputation of a great justice.” ‘

“The fact that a justice and a chief justice lied in order to advance himself,” Mr. Prettyman said, referring to Chief Justice Rehnquist in his confirmation hearings, “the fact that he thought the way he did about Brown — which was that it would be a national disgrace — those facts alone justify an exploration of what happened.”

http://bclawreview.org/review/53_2/05_snyder_barrett/

Political Observer

What do David Brooks, The American Enterprise Institute, and the world’s population demographics have in common? That and other questions are elucidated in Mr. Brooks essay of March 12, 2012 titled The Fertility Implosion , be forewarned, his mood is Delphic. The declining birthrates of Arabs is Mr. Brooks starting point, assisted by a study published by The American Enterprise Institute. This is just the beginning of an essay whose point seems somewhat ambiguous, but delivered in his usual breathless, overwrought style. Perhaps the point of this mysterious exercise is that what the new world is becoming is a competition between Chinese slave state Capitalism and enlightened American Capital? The thinning Arab horde being just a garnish, an addition to the usual Conservative décor : a companion idea to the ever evolving Western notion of The Yellow Peril and all it’s intellectual permutations and iterations. I could be mistaken! Both Mr. Brooks and The American Enterprise Institute fervently believe that the blessings of Capital must and should be brought to the whole world, in its Free Market expression. A higher birth rate is to be encouraged, even demanded, so as to produce the workers and consumers that Capital must have to do it’s evangelical work. The simplistic differentiation between growth and development and the notion that the economy is the servant of human aspiration, rather than it’s master, are ideas that escapes the intellectual attention of both Mr. Brooks and The American Enterprise Institute. For an alternative view of the the role of Economics in a more holistic context read this enlightening Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics

Almost Marx

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12582

What is curious in Mr. James Klagge’s book Wittgenstein in Exile is that he explores very thoroughly the notion of exile as the master idea in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but he leaves utterly and inexplicably unexplored the fact that Mr. Wittgenstein lived in the existential, internal exile of the closet. That Wittgenstein was ‘homosexual’ and I use that term in quotation marks as gay is a product of late 20th Century thinking, as an indicative not pejorative descriptor. Mr. Ray Monk’s revelatory biography makes completely clear Wittgenstein’s sexual orientation and documents his emotional perversity that could be traced back to the traps of the closet. As Philipp Blom makes clear in his book The Vertigo Years Europe, 1900-1914 pages 176 through 179 homophobia was rampant throughout Europe, at the turn of the century. Wittgenstein was born in Austro-Hungarian empire in 1889, the Oscar Wilde trial commenced in 1895 , Mr. Blom’s history tells the stories of Archduke Ludwig Victor, Fritz Krupp, Eulenburg, General Dietrich Hülsen-Haeseler, Alfred Redl and Roger Casement. The environment for ‘uranists’ i.e. homosexuals was punitive in the extreme, so the closet was an act of self-preservation, but a deforming act nonetheless. What I can say with a feeling of confidence is that Mr. Klagge may be an accomplished writer on philosophical subjects but he proves in Wittgenstein in Exile that he has an absolute ignorance of the existential position of a particular closeted homosexual , Ludwig Wittgenstein. Mr. Klagge’s book is indeed a well written, informative and rewarding reading experience and as far as it goes a highly credible, careful account of the life and thought of Wittgenstein , but it is limited, proscribed by Mr. Klagge’s ignorance, cultivated or actual.

American Litterateur

I know that you, like me, never miss the opportunity to read,even on the sly,The Daily Beast. My friend Tina Brown has rescued more failures than Abe Burrows (look it up on Wikipedia), or at the least she valiantly tried. But the 'Beast' is her baby and she has made some shrewd choices in her stable of writers, Leslie Gelb is one such writer, a man with the credentials to make his opinionating stick, as they used to say several generations ago. And the White House connections that also make his opinionating pretty credible. His latest piece is titled 'Why Obama Won't Speed U.S. Troop Withdrawal in Afghanistan' and when it comes to exercising political cynicism Mr. Gelb doesn't have an equal, The Bundy brothers, Wolfowitz, Perle or Condoleezza Rice don't quite match the Gelb iteration of that old reliable political standby. The narrative according to Gelb is that President Obama is too politically savvy to end the war in Afghanistan in an election year and face a Republican attack on his 'National Security Policy' i.e. the toned downed 'War on Terror'. President Obama has been very good at positioning himself as tough in the area of Foreign Policy, the killing of bin Laden, of al-Awlaki and the seemingly endless number of drone attacks and the NDAA legislation, which establishes, in the public mind, his 'resolve' his 'toughness'. So he will wait till 2014 to really start to end this catastrophie in Afghanistan. Could one say, in a singular moment of candor, that great political leadership is informed by wise politics and the exercise of a shared public morality? Or would that strain the bounds of political realism, as argued by Mr. Gelb? I look forward to Mr. Gelb's subsequent attempts to answer such questions.

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/world/middleeast/iran-intelligence-crisis-s…

The World Hegemon declares itself the moral arbiter of who can or cannot build a nuclear weapon, while the painfully obvious empirical evidence that America has been the only nation to use such weapons, escapes the notice of the current crop of apologists, for this singular act of barbarity, in the name of securing the peace. But then Americans have always been convinced of their ‘exceptional’ moral/political condition. The notion of exceptionalism, the destructive, pernicious delusion of both the powerful and the powerless, that they are somehow more than their lesser fellow creatures.

Political Cynic

OUT OF PRINT

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300080377

http://www.amazon.com/George-Santayana-Mr-Irving-Singer/dp/0300080379/ref=sr_…

http://www.silviacattori.net/article2533.html