StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/14/hillary-clinton-speech-to-economic-club-of-new-york-a-brilliant-moment.html

Here is Leslie H. Gelb adopting the rhetorical guise of the outsider to the Washington insiders who make and endlessly argue about Foreign Policy, intellectuals dedicated to the American Interest. He is one of those insiders, who receive calls from the White House about matters of import. Mr. Gelb freely and boastfully reported on that at The Daily Beast, so the pose of outsider rings absolutely hollow, except to add a certain luster, not to speak of necessary ballast, to his policy analysis. Hillary Clinton delivers a speech that emphasizes economic power over military power, in the midst of our precipitous economic decline, and Mr. Gelb through his celebratory rhetoric, stumbles over himself manufacturing encomiums to Madame Secretary.  My curiosity is peaked. What is afoot in the halls of power? Or did Mr. Gelb, like so many others, find the latest government concocted dark comedy, with Iran as it central villain, too unpalatable and farfetched to even consider seriously?

Political Cynic   

http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/History/17thC/?vi…

I keep going back to this old friend, when I have questions, and when I want to renew that friendship in pursuit of my intellectual quests.

Intellectual Quixote

Any attempt to ‘clean’ the private park, now in the hands of dissidents,will be a predictable end that will make real the power of a corrupt Capitalism. This is a reading that fully follows the mass media lead of handycapping the winners and losers to appeal to a mass auidence. But the lessons of the Depression are or should be foremost in minds of many i.e. the Bonus Army and how that was handled in an age not as closly connected as this one surly is. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on the career od Douglas MacArthur:

“One of MacArthur’s most controversial acts came in 1932, when the “Bonus Army” of veterans converged on Washington. He sent tents and camp equipment to the demonstrators, along with mobile kitchens, until an outburst in Congress caused the kitchens to be withdrawn. MacArthur was concerned that the demonstration had been taken over by communists and pacifists but the General Staff’s intelligence division reported that only three of the march’s twenty-six key leaders were communists. MacArthur went over contingency plans for civil disorder in the capital. Mechanized equipment was brought to Fort Myer, where anti-riot training was conducted.^[79] On 28 July 1932, a clash between the District police and demonstrators resulted in two men being shot. President Hoover ordered MacArthur to “surround the affected area and clear it without delay.”^[80] MacArthur brought up troops and tanks and, against the advice of Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, decided to accompany the troops, although he was not in change of the operation. The troops advanced with bayonets and sabers drawn under a shower of bricks and rocks, but no shots were fired. In less than four hours, they cleared the Bonus Army’s campground using tear gas. The tear gas canisters started a number of fires, and caused the only death during the riots. While not as violent as other anti-riot operations, it was nevertheless a public relations disaster.^[81]

In 1934 MacArthur sued journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen for defamation after they described his treatment of the Bonus marchers as “unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate, harsh and brutal.” In turn, they threatened to call Isobel Rosario Cooper as a witness. MacArthur had met Isobel, a Eurasian woman, while in the Philippines, and she had become his mistress. MacArthur was forced to settle out of court, secretly paying Pearson $15,000.^[82]”

The question is not how the Legitimists will fuck this up, but when. Winning no friends in a highly dissatified electorate, unable to understand the why of Obama’s political surrender to the oligarchs. The only support that a ‘cleaning’ of the park will garner is from the usual collection of right wing hacks on the Murdoch Network, and ‘pundits’ like David Brooks and George F. Will and their intellectual clones and of course the Mayor of New York and his Wall Street allies.

Almost Marx   

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/10/13/us.occupy.wall.street/

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/201110121715573693.html?…

“No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum – piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism – Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia. “

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15162-7/the-truth-about-girls-and-boys

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/96062/occupy-wall-street-zizek-lewis?passthru=NWJhNDIyNzAzNmU5MWExYzI1ZmM0ZGU0MDJiZTU2MTk&utm_source=Editors+and+Bloggers&utm_campaign=4e29fdf4cc-Edit_and_Blogs&utm_medium=email

The New Republic makes clear that respectable Liberals will find no common cause with the anti-capitalist rhetoric and group think of Occupy Wall Street(OWS): for after all Liberals believe in Capitalism as key to the survival of their philosophy, of themselves as political beings. And a threat to Capitalism is a threat to their very existence as political actors in the civic space of the Republic. In sum, the charge that the editors of this august publication make is that the movement is both politically trivial and that it is nihilistic: if it is trivial, why bother to write an editorial? If it is nihilistic and trivial, not to speak of marginal, will it not implode as a significant political force, as a result of this self-destructive intellectual/political trajectory?  The answer to why OWS has gained momentum might be argued as: “Liberals”, the “Left”, even, “Centrists” have finally given up any hope that the Rhetorical Obama would supersede the Political Obama, in the face of the grim economy; that is growing into the self-fulfilling economic prophecy of a Lost Generation. Is it not the citizens of that Lost Generation that constitute large portions of OWS? And that rhetorical hyperbole is a well worn methodology in mass political movements? These assertions seem to resemble a certain kind of clear thinking, not available to the manufacturers of a usable political hysteria in defense of a Liberalism and a Capitalism for members only.

Political Observer       

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/opinion/the-milquetoast-radicals.html?hp

It appears that David Brooks in his latest essay titled ‘The Milquetoast Radicals’ has let slip his carefully maintained  intellectual poise, his Platonically inflected reductionism, in favor of a hysterical rhetorical screech, as if the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators had committed a heresy in the Temple of Capital. He chatters on about ‘reform’ and wasted time when he in fact means the final destruction of what is left of the New Deal. He argues that the 99% believe themselves to be a political elect. Let us not even raise the idea that Mr. Brooks has an equally high-faultin’ sense of himself, as thinker and civic actor!  And, of course, as a good Conservative Intellectual would, he argues that the sin of anti-capitalism is rampant in this nascent movement, which has hardly had time to formulate a coherent ideology, if it will, ever. That question remains tantalizingly indeterminate at this moment in historical time. So,’ they have no plan’ seems a bit premature, except that it fits quite nicely as the foundational position of a Conservative Legitimist political stance: as a benchmark of ideological maturity and a handy cudgel with which to beat  the heretics into submission, or simply to murder this inchoate political being in its’ cradle.

Almost Marx

"My point is that nothing like the NSC process should ever be used again to kill an American. If another citizen is ever targeted, it should only be after an extensive debate in Congress, leading to the statutory creation of a serious legal procedure designed to eliminate the obvious abuses revealed in the Awlaki case. Because ultimately, isn't preserving American democracy what this is all about?"

Should any American citizen be surprised by this weak questioning of Presidential abuse of power, enunciated by an establishmentarian thinker fully recognizing the parameters of the American Imperial delusion, as it's central conceit? This essay seems promising until the reader reaches the last revelatory paragraph quoted above. The crisis of the Republic has reached its ignominious end: the putative guardians of the Republic have betrayed it with impunity, in the name of a benighted realpolitik precipitated by a crisis. And the political power that fear can make present in a populous, enhancing the argument that surrender of freedom is the path to the elusive notion of security.
Publius