StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/with-liberty-and-justice-for-some-glenn-green…

http://jeffreyfeldman1.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/innovative-direct-action-key-…

Here is a revelatory essay on the OWS strategy of “Direct Action” by Jeffrey Feldman. Absolutely worth you time and consideration. Best insight and a forthright answer to all the opinionating,hysterical and otherwise on OWS.

Stephen

Leslie Gelb like so many of the adherents to Foriegn Policy Realism,(the once celebrated, but now politically passe ‘Adult Supervision’ of Scowcroft/Brzezinski?)never tires of proclaiming at a shout,”We are the sane ones. We are the rational ones.” Although you would not know that from even a cursory reading of his latest essay at The Daily Beast. He attacks the arch Neo-Conservative warmonger and bully, Mr. William Kristol. Although Mr. Gelb is not in any way a ‘dove’, witness his joy at the news at the state sponsored murder of Osama bin Laden,an e-mail from an anonymous, but ‘key’ White House aide brought the happy news; narrated in the hushed but respectful tone of the commited ‘Realist’. Or his genuflection in the direction of the FBI concocted plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone attacks on targets around the world.  I see no sanity or rationality here, in his stolid opinionating, I have joined with the many and the few, who wonder at the place this opinionator has attained, and his advocacy of policies, that are simply the faded reflection of the Neo-Conservative Ideology of perpetual war.

Political Cynic

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

It’s very interesting to compare the usages of the ‘68rs’ i.e. the ‘Radical Left’ activists  that Mr. Lind and Mr. Will argue in their respective essays, on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Both are highly selective historical interpretations, that tell a carefully managed historical tale, but are absolutely incomplete by design. Their respective rhetorical ends are to situate the historical victory of  a ‘Law and Order’ Conservatism at the feet of the nihilistic ‘Left’. Although they reach different conclusions, their use of the “68rs” is what I find fascinating, in their respective attempts at revisionism. The most salient point of both their arguments is that they leave blank two key events in the political life of 1968: the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 and the subsequent assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. These two events are crucial to any deeper understanding of the victory of ‘Law and Order’ Conservatism.These shocking, violent murders, of significant persons who represented the possibility of political reconsiliation and redress, can only be argued as traumatic to the national psyche: with that highly determinative to the votes that Americans cast in 1968.To leave these events out is to engage in pure historical dishonesty, by their omission. To further illustrate the deep political fracture of America in 1968, we need only consult the data provided the Presidential election of that year:

9,901,118 votes for George Wallace, 13.5% of vote

31,783,783 votes for Richard Nixon, 43.4% of vote

31,271,839 votes for Hubert Humphrey, 42.7% of vote

(Data provided by Wikipedia)

Mr. Nixon was a .7% victor in 1968. Hardly what could be considered a mandate for ‘Law and Order’ Conservatism.The political turbulence of 1968 cannot be denied, Chicago 1968 etc., but to argue that the ‘68rs’ were responsible, in the broadest terms, for the triumph of Law and Order Conservatism: Nixon, Reagan and their epigones, serves short term rhetorical ends, rather than a fealty to the ethical demands of a rigorous historiography.

Political Observer   

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-occupy-wall-street-give-liberals-a-lift/2011/10/11/gIQA8GyCgL_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Ah! The pleasures of The Great Will’s (TGW) manufactured  hysterical proclamation about the dirty hippies of Occupy Wall Street, barely contained by the demands of a nearly coherent rhetoric: garnished by score settling political asides about Solyndra, and the corruption of the Obama Administration, while conveniently forgetting its beginning in the Bush Administration. The demands of ideologically inflected politics must be served.  All this follows his praise of the successes of the Koch brothers financed and Eric Cantor coordinated Tea Party. Is this a surprise? Effective propaganda is based not in ascertainable fact but on the carefully shaped language of a necessary expediency. In this TGW succeeds, at least with the internal coherence of his broadside. The assertion that Occupy Wall Street has modeled itself on the Tea Party is the first proof that TGW is in the province of unadulterated propaganda. And no essay of his would be complete without the appearance of his Neo-Burkian personae as a means to put the upstarts in their place: a tiresome reminder that TGW fancies himself a natural aristocrat, in every sense of the term. And, please, don’t forget that carefully woven into this essay is another of the many hobbyhorses that TGW loves to ride: that the idea and practice of governance is a corruption, a grounding principle of modern Conservatism via Thatcher and Reagan, that is the issue of the Free Market Ideology.

But the heart of this diatribe is two paragraphs of historical revisionism that can truly be labeled as the cartoonish musings of a right wing political hack:

“Imitation is the sincerest form of progressivism because nostalgia motivates progressives, not conservatives. Tea Party Envy is leavened by Woodstock Envy — note the drum circles at the Manhattan site — which is a facet of Sixties Envy. Hence, conservatives should be rejoicing.

From 1965 through 1968, the left found its voice and style in consciousness-raising demonstrations and disruptions. In November 1968, the nation, its consciousness raised, elected Richard Nixon president and gave 56.9 percent of the popular vote to Nixon or George Wallace. Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections.”

TGW will fight the battle for the soul of America, circa 1968, and declare the victory of the utterly corrupt lout Richard Nixon, at the drop of a hat, and here he remains true to form, with a venomous brio. The “68” share the qualities that our writer most deplores in the OWS demonstrators, a destructive political nihilism and an inability to see the joy and wonder that the Free Market can bring. Mr. Will seeks to change the subject: the citizens of the Lost Generation are not really listening as their futures fades before it has even begun.

Political Observer

How can one dismiss the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr? Because his special brand of intellectually inflected political conformism fits so handily in this modern age of outright attacks on citizens, by their own government? Of drone attacks on civilian populations, argued by government agencies to be the locus of terrorist activities? Of preemptive war against states possessing weapons of mass destruction? That he is a Christian Theologian add luster to his varied career as political apologist for the Cold War and the National Security State. While some might even argue that he is the thinking man’s Billy Graham, with a more persuasive intellectual resume.  With his ally Mr. Schlesinger singing his praises, as an intellectual leader, and with their creation of what was to be the ADA, a refuge of Liberals anxious to establish their credentials as anti-communists: freedom of political expression for right and left wing social democrats only! One need only read Mr. Schlesinger's tedious and self-congratulatory diary entries of the period; with his penchant for the use of the word 'commie', to identify political dissidents of that benighted age in America.

As for Mr. Niebuhr’s status as political philosopher, he has an intellectual breadth and a seemly ever changing, evolving set of ideas tending toward conservatism as he aged. The addition of the fallen nature of ‘man’, the sine qua non of the Christian mythology, appealed to the deep stain of Puritanism still active in the American consciousness: the world historical battle between good and evil as background. He was a public intellectual with something to offer Liberal and Conservative thinkers, a kind of Cold War Pragmatist, perfect for our age of suspicion, our age of terror, peopled by intellectual pretenders of all stripes.

Political Observer   

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/middle-east/graphic-novel-about-irans-post-electio…

Why can't those unwashed hippies be more like us sane self-congratulating Liberals? Who can't stop characterizing Obama's policies as moderate when, in fact, they are moderately conservative, at best. See that lefty Paul Krugman's essays in the New York Times for some background. That is the agonizing dilemma of Mr. Chait, confronted with the Lost Generation, as they rebel against the failure of Liberalism to address their plight, their shattered hopes and desires for a future, that does not freely, passively accept a political fatalism. The bad news for all Neo-Liberals is that the Free Market failed to deliver the goods, as promised. It brought economic blight to millions, world wide, and a great many public intellectuals, like Mr. Chait, with the continual problem of covering up their bad judgement with rhetorical drivel like this essay.
 
Almost Marx

http://www.versobooks.com/books/973-the-total-art-of-stalinism

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300152180