StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/opinion/brooks-a-choice-not-a-whine.html?_r…

I lost my patience with Mr. Brooks after reading the first paragraph of this propaganda and will only quote that paragraph. I did read the remainder of the essay, but I fear anything else will lead to a loss of what is left of my civility. I quote aforementioned paragraph:

“Hostility toward the Supreme Court has risen sharply since Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. upheld the Obama health care law. People are apparently angry that the court didn’t rid them of a law they detest. But that’s silly. If Americans want to replace this thing, they should do it themselves.”

Political Cynic

 

 

The point of propaganda is to shape public opinion and Ross Douthat in essay The Liberal Embrace of Judicial Restraint has written it as a kind of self-celebration. It's casual in tone, given that it appears under the title of Campaign Stops, Strong Opinions on the 2012 Elections, it is even a bit breezy, given the subject matter. It is a kind of potted history, that exudes an all knowing I told you so kind of stance: his relish in his ferreting out of an obvious liberal hypocrisy regarding the rhetorical creature judicial restraint, a synonym for the Conservative epithet of judicial activism, while reinforcing the essential notion of Conservative probity. This self-created discovery is the product of his history as ideologically inflected story telling. It is a narrative constructed of convenient bits and pieces, a bricolage in service to the a priori rightness of post Brown v. Board of Education Conservative judicial politicking. Now Mr. Douthat carefully avoids the inconvenient actualities, the dismal,the bleak record of American Conservatism failure to engage with the legacy of institutional racism and the great turning point of Brown v. Board. It marked the re-invigoration of the Originalism in it's first and least attractive expression of States Rights, and it's unsavory, even down right repugnant cast of characters. Modern Conservatism has carefully washed itself of that taint, Mr. Douthat and others being the beneficiaries of that project. It could and must be argued that the point of the Originalists and Conservatism was to remake the judicial system that perpetrated that crime against Jim Crow and it 's institutional legitimacy. That became the raison d'etre of Conservatism aided by a concerted campaign to launder the political image of the States Rights/Originalists judicial candidates: Robert Bork being one of it's failures and John Roberts being one of it's successes. What a difference a generation of careful, patient grooming can make. Is the self-serving, even gleeful assertion that Mr. Douthat makes in his essay, that Conservatives and Liberals have almost reached a point of convergence in his argued notion of judicial restraint/judicial activism? Mr. Douthat succeeds in producing a collection of usable political arguments , fully reflecting the Conservative imperative to rewrite American legal history as a triumph of States Rights/Originalism with John Roberts as it's hero.

Political Observer

Schumpeter in his column of June 23,2012, in the Economist titled Adieu, la France, concocts a fable in which Robber Capital has worked it's magic and we stand in the ruin of the Free Market, where we must listen to Schumpeter point his finger at those French Socialist, and their economic castles in the air: that are a response to the failures of both the Free Market Ideology and it's successor Austerity. It is the perfect time to use that old political standby, misdirection: demonize the Socialists for a failure of pragmatism, and a faith in outmoded state planning. Also accuse them and the French educational establishment, namely the grandes écoles, of a kind of incestuousness, that manifests itself even in the very firms whom he defends against a ruinous Socialism. Prestigious degrees from any famous university in Europe or American can be a stepping stone into both government and corporations. Another fact of contemporary life is that universities have deep governmental attachments, whether public or private schools. But the French system becomes a part of his designated target, a confirmation of a certain French mendacity,a lack of forthrightness: the French aren't like us, socialism has already corrupted them, so we can expect the worst.

Political Cynic

"Obamacare Showdown"

Who can forget the audacious even bravura performance of John Roberts before the Judiciary Committee and his beautifully delivered defense of stare decisis? In retrospect it was an encomium, of sorts: the confirmation, The Citizens United decision. Legal pragmatism or politics? But does it compare, in it's mendacity and bad faith, to the outright lie of William Rehnquist, as he denied authorship, of a letter he asserted to be the work of Justice Jackson?

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

The erosion of respect for the Supreme Court is the realization that it is not a legal bulwark, an interpreter of law, but a tool of a careful, respectable legal politicking. Let us connect the present day Originalism, that John Roberts most certainly is an adherent of, to the politically galvanizing Brown v. Board (decided in both instances 9-0) to an indigenous American political romanticism. A destructive, pernicious nostalgia for an imagined past, elided of the conundrum of racism and affirming the moral necessity of patriarchal power. Justice Roberts is Robert Bork scrubbed clean of any taint of the legal margin, the radical fringe of legal thought and practice. Expect the worst in the case of the 'Obamacare' decision, but be prepared for a carefully worded document exuding a cultivated but essentially absent political respectability.

Political Observer

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/opinion/brooks-the-power-of-the-particular….

 

I can see Davey all dressed up for any of the Springsteen concerts: bandana wrapped around his head, Wayfarers on,Springsteen tee shirt, cargo shorts and flip flops and holding a mighty forty ouncer. Am I hallucinating? Yeh, cause fanboy just harshed my mellow by talking some shit about The Power of the Particular, and w.t.f. “paracosms”. Fanboy just can’t chill and party and then go home and crash, no! He gotta get all up into it, and tell us about it: what is this some excuse for a tax write-off? Was it fun? Were you with it, or just some lame ass spectator, who just can’t stop his moralistic poser self?

GeriatricG

 

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14628-9/foundations-of-the-america…

“Inderjeet Parmar reveals the complex interrelations, shared mindsets, and collaborative efforts of influential public and private organizations in the building of American hegemony. Focusing on the involvement of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations in U.S. foreign affairs, Parmar traces the transformation of America from an “isolationist” nation into the world’s only superpower, all in the name of benevolent stewardship.”

What is so striking in this long article on Apple retail stores in the New York Times titled Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay is that in the comments section so many writers defended the Apple policies, that perpetuated the myth that somehow because Apple is a giant corporation, it could do what it pleased, as far as employee pay etc. was concerned. It is as if it had no civic duty or obligation to treat it’s fellow citizens and employees first as fellow citizens of the commonwealth and as if their contribution to the success of their products was a meaningful contribution to that success. When did corporations stop being active participants in the civic life of the republic? What happened to the notion and practice of fairness and equity in the face of the moralizing rhetoric of the once triumphant Free Marketeers? If the corporations are granted the rights of citizenship by a reactionary majority of the Supreme Court,Citizens United,when do they start acting like good citizens aware of their obligations to a fully realized notion of good citizenship? When do we as citizens and contributors to the flourishing of Capital stop apologizing for insisting on a living wage for work performed? Is it 1930 all over again?

Publius

Mr. Gelb's usual chatter seems better organized and more succinct in this essay. Conjecture: one of Tina Brown's subordinates has assigned a new editor with the chore of revising his essays before publication. Or perhaps a cassette tape arrives at the Daily Beast office in a small padded envelope, that after the editing process takes place, will be returned to it's sender, for his next essay. It is a tantalizing thought.  Mr. Gelb takes on the foreign policy conundrum of whether the America should lend military aid and support to various rebels fighting dictators in the Arab World.  Mr. Gelb takes his usual rhetorical stance of that of the outsider, which can only be described as purest fiction. Anyone curious enough to do an internet search will find his CV very impressive but not at all confirming his pose as outsider, in the foreign policy realm. Although it does provide a cover of sorts. Mr. Gelb and his fellow experts in 'Foreign Policy' have spent the better part of their active political careers defending the ad hoc and carelessly cobbled together policy toward the 'Middle East'. Which meant that support for usable tyrants, who could keep their restive but quiescent populations under control, as long as US interests were duly recognized, has come to an abrupt and surprising end. Now, that wobbly structure is crumbling with a heavy loss of life, and a very real threat to Israel our unmanageable and increasingly reactionary client state. Mr. Gelb and his fellow 'Foreign Policy' experts are now in an uncomfortable moral quandary. Should we be at all surprised about the confusion and seeming disarray of one of the elite thinkers on this pressing issue? How does one act in the face of a failed policy constructed over two or more generations? Certainly not with a painful honesty, or a belated plain-speaking. Mr. Gelb and his intellectual partners squandered America's moral and political capital on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the revamped War on Terror. The new policy is based upon remotely controlled devices for murder at a distance. But with all it's virtues in terms of killing the 'guilty', it also kills the innocents, who are declared guilty as a matter of policy. All of this outside any notion or practice of checks and balances, but under the rubric of presidential power exercised in a time of war. No actual moral concern but a demonstration of it's exploitable politicized twin.
Political Cynic     
      
   

Compare the more empirical and historically based , revelatory arguments of Paul Krugman, on the Greek crisis and election, with the usual politically exploitable left wing paranoia of Conservative Ross Douthat. Although the discussion are not exactly parallel, Mr. D. extemporizes on the 'lazy southerner' of Bonn/Brussels myth, adding the political frisson of nihilistic radical left wing politicking, that always resonates with his political fellow travelers. The self-willed and irresponsible Left will, by it's actions, force the responsible members of that loose federation called the Eurozone, to precipitous action. Syriza represents a minority in Greek political life, as the elections demonstrated, but the imperative that Mr. D. expresses, in an American political context, is that the 'Left' is destructive and illegitimate, prima facie, no matter the context. A closely held belief of Conservatives: Occupy and the Nader of 2000 being the objects of his moralizing contempt. Mr. D. pitches his commentary to an American reader who fully accepts the political nihilism of the Tea Party; it's ideological control of the Republican Party, as a matter of urgent necessity, of national rescue, from the mendacity and bad faith of an outdated politics of pragmatism. Creating a politics of purity without compromise, which means no politics at all. Mr. D. does not acknowledging certain themes that both the Tea Party and Syriza have in common. Read this story at the Guardian for some insight into the elections, that puts the 'lazy southerner' myth into a more rational perspective. I am not saying that my interpretation of events and political predispositions is one hundred percent correct or true. But simply reading the Greek crisis in it's American political context, following the lead of Mr. Douthat.

Political Observer