StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/12/war-on-terror-corrupting?…

He has hemmed me in so that I cannot escape;

he has weighed me down with fetters.

Even when I cry out and plead for help

he rejects my prayer.

He has barred my road with blocks of stone and

entangled my way.

The Oxford Study Bible

It seems perfectly appropriate to quote Lamentations in my comment on Ross Douthat's essay of April 7, 2012 titled Divided by God. Here are some of the ideas, catch phrases that hold together this essay taken from the first paragraphs:

many of America’s established churches 

affluent and sexually permissive America

religiously fluid,

We’re neither traditionally Christian nor straightforwardly secular

a nation of heretics

old Christian establishment

the existence of a Christian center also helped bind a vast and teeming nation together

It was the hierarchy, discipline and institutional continuity

the inescapability of religious polarization

a sign of what happens to a deeply religious country when its theological center cannot hold

Mr. Douthat freely borrows and adapts from Schlesinger, Yeats and extemporizes within the moralizing rhetoric of Modern Conservatism, post Reagan. Although I have quoted piecemeal from his essay, I believe that what follows these assertions is simply a defense of this set of ideas elaborated historically and politically, given the frame of a defense of the Conservative Worldview: a rationalization, an apologia for patriarchal power. Christianity is invested in male power, male authority and the free exercise of that power over others. Conservatism shares those imperatives. Also, I will say that I treat Mr Douthat's essay as propaganda: a set of arguments made for purely political ends. In this case to establish the primacy of institutional authority and also of the waning power of institutional Christian moralists over the lives of Americans, as leading to crisis both moral and political. Mr. Douthat looks backward to a past he has rhetorically created, that sketches, in very proscribed form, a description of an American actuality, in service to a backhanded Christian apologetics. America in the age of the internet and other social media is a time of fracture of the old patriarchal systems of social control and moral censure, and the rise of an unprecedented personal freedom, that renders the old system of moral/political sanctions against nonconformist thought and behavior moot. The erosion of that ability to sanction effectively the behavior of others, has led to the notion of crisis that Mr. Douthat argues as the crisis of Christian institutional authority and a concomitant American decline. American decadence is the perennial theme of American Conservatism.

Queer Atheist

I wonder at how Leslie Gelb manages to maintain his breezy casual tone when discussing such potentially destructive concurrences as an Israeli attack upon Iran, support for Syrian rebels and a escalation of conflict with North Korea. He argues in his latest essay at The Daily Beast, War Looms for Obama in Iran, Syria, and North Korea, that these are the three crises waiting to confront President Obama. Yet Mr. Gelb manages to maintain a tone of un-seriousness, as if it were written from within the confines of his book lined study, to be shared with a few of his intimates as table talk, or even as a diary entry rather than an essay for publication. In fact, this essay reminds me so much of the casual and self-congratulatory style of the late Arthur Schlesinger’s published diaries.

Political Cynic

Here are the two opening paragraphs of the David Brooks essay of April 5,2012:

"President Obama is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue. But every once in a while he tries to get politically cute, and he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask. I suppose it’s to his credit that he’s most inept when he tries to take the low road. He resorts to hoary, brain-dead clichés. He wanders so far from his true nature that he makes Mitt Romney look like Mr. Authenticity."

Keith Olberman mask, low road, hoary,brain dead cliches and Mitt Romney as Mr. Authenticity, a list that is pregnant with possibilities. Keith Olberman as the 'left wing' Glenn Beck (i.e. destructive political nihilist)? Hoary and brain dead cliche, descriptive of himself as collector and chief launderer of the Conservative lexicon and the auxiliary jargon of the Tea Party? Mr. Brooks is careless, even cavalier, in his treatment of Mitt Romney/Mr. Authenticity who apparently will be the Republican nominee. Just a momentary strategic feint, as an in order to, in service to the pointed critique of the veracity of President Obama? The questions ramify.

That President Obama had the temerity to criticism Mr. Paul Ryan and his budget and to dignify the contemporary Republican reactionary political nostalgia as Social Darwinism, too much for Mr. Brooks. His conscience was pricked. It was the spur that drove him to his rhetorical strategy of first and last resort, his usual hortatory, nearly intemperate tone, in defense of Mr. Ryan as Republican Economic Guru and Social Darwinism as a one dimensional racialist ideology. One needn’t be an historian of ideas to know that Social Darwinism was a multifaceted ideological expression wedded to very real and active practices of social stratification,hierarchy and active prejudices against the 'lower orders': hardly new concepts in American political and social life. And at its most virulent in the Modern Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.

Again Mr. Brooks:

"As I say, I have my own problems with Ryan’s plan, which Obama identified. But Ryan has at least taken a big step toward an eventual fiscal solution. He’s proposed necessary structural entitlement reforms, which the Democrats are unwilling to do. He’s proposed real tax reform, which the Democrats are also unwilling to do."

Necessary structural entitlement reform and real tax reform enter as the next stock players to enter the dramatic menage. 

"The first truth is that we will have to do these big things to avoid a fiscal calamity. The second truth is there is no one party solution; there has to be a merger of respectable ideas. The third truth is that gimmicky speeches obscure the president’s best character and make it seem as if he doesn’t understand the scope of the calamity looming in front of us.

Obama shouldn’t be sniping at Ryan. He should be topping him with something bigger and better."

Fiscal calamity is Mr. Brooks final dramatis personae to enter; but it has been present since the economic crisis of 2008. Most of us dwell in the fiscal calamity of the collapse of the Free Market Delusion, while Mr. Brooks contemplates the failure of it's successor Austerity, as the only real solution. And what if Austerity fails to deliver as the Free Market failed?

The Liberal Interventionist is no more! I assert that without apology. The contest of ideas is between the death cult of Neo-Conservatism and their first cousins the New Democrats. The spirochete of the Imperial Disease has infected both contestants. Even the self-exculpatory intellectual chatter of Mr. David Bosco, in his essay in Foreign Policy titled What divides neocons and liberal interventionists, can’t erase the fact that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believe and practice, not an institutional multilateralism, but a destructive even murderous unilateralism. Both these political actors assert their right to practice the ability to declare anyone, or any country, an enemy of this state, and execute them without redress, or invade at will. The descriptive phrases abound in this exercise in deep analysis by Mr. Bosco: liberal interventionist, global architecture,mainstream liberal interventionists, the stuff of bourgeois respectable political opinionating, well garnished with a reader in mind that just might not exist, except as a figment of the cliché ridden imagination of Mr. Bosco. His intellectual surety and poise reflect the practiced rhetorician who realizes the a priori limits of legitimist political discourse.

Almost Marx

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/08/soul-needs-free-physical-…

http://www.defendjohnk.com/

“Every penny of your contribution will help make it possible for John Kiriakou to defend himself and to stand up for the principle that in the United States, no one should go to jail for answering questions from a New York Times reporter about torture.”