StephenKMackSD's Blog

I am struck today by the idea that so many writers of opinion pieces, about current events, seem to need to impress on their readers their importance as thinkers and writers, and their connectedness to centers of power. I grow weary of commentators, who really have not much to say, beyond certain proscribed establishmentarian views, who trot out their connection to the powerful. Two examples from fairly recent history: Steve Clemons comments on the recent but almost utterly forgotten Jennifer Rubin column on the massacre in Norway. And then the flatfooted apologetics issued by The Washington Post Ombudsman.  Mr. Clemons, in the Atlantic, rather solemnly assures his readers that he spoke to the person in charge, whose name escapes me, about why Ms. Rubin was hired. Mr. Clemons acts the part of the good corporate employee in his circumspect inquiry, but it seems rather more about assurance rather than anything like critique. But the report of second hand assurance, from the man who hired Ms. Rubin, is made concrete in our minds, as readers, demonstrating to us that Mr. Clemons has access to decision makers, although that somehow begs the real question of Ms. Rubin’s lack of anything resembling journalistic responsibility, and her always aggressive ideological stance.  My second example is column on The Daily Beast by Leslie Gelb regarding the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, in which Mr. Gelb in some detail describes his call from a White House contact informing  him of the jubilation of the President and his staff , this while Mr. Gelb describes his own unalloyed celebration of this occurrence. All of this neatly framed in the ‘we are at war’ stance as ultimate explanation and rationalization. In both these instances of sounding the note of access to the powerful, the main critical questions are left aside as unimportant, as if the simple articulation of the notion of contact with the powerful is demonstrative of some kind of superior knowledge,  that is not shared but simply must be taken by the reader as an act of faith: all this leads to another triumph for the American Panglossians.

Political Cynic    

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2011/08/03/destroying_democratic_presidents&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110

Welcome to another episode of ‘It Happened to Joan’ that vital political melodrama played out in the pages of Salon, on a regular basis. Today Joan is wringing her hands over the treatment of Barack Obama at the hands of the ‘evil’, not to speak of racist, Republicans.  Now, these are the actualities of contemporary political life in America : the embracing of racism by the Republican Party, Nixon and the Southern Strategy, after passage of the landmark Civil Rights Bill and the historic mass defection of Southern Democrats to the GOP. But poor Joan is also confusing the contemporary attacks on Obama with the attacks on Bill Clinton of more than a decade ago. Although the Republican strategy has not essentially changed, but only deepened with the  manufacture of the Tea Party nihilists, and their cries of permanent insurgency rather than any pretense of governance.  Joan portrays Obama as the hapless victim of this confluence of mendacities rather than the demonstration of Obama’s deep faith in monetarist economic policy, bent on providing the necessary shock therapy that has been the hallmark of a failed Neo-liberalism. A confrontation with the ugly reality of the New Democrats faith in the viability of the Market rather than a faith in the New Deal and its historical evolution, proves too much for Joan and she spins a tale to forestall her shaken faith in a leader not much different from his political antagonists  All the other names of political actors merely render this bit of political propaganda more believable, adding the necessary note of verisimilitude, that almost makes this bit of special pleading believable, except for the fact of the readers own experience of the untidy failures of Obama’s Progressivism and the Republican Party’s surrender to political irrationalism.

Almost Marx         

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/08/01/284907/washington-post-rubin-norway/

Does it matter that Ms. Jennifer Rubin is an ardent Zionist on the Bibi model, also a Neoconservative, which is framed by the idea and practice of Jewish Exceptionalism. ( Please see The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy by Murray Friedman) And that in her worldview the font of modern 'evil' resides in Islam, as a matter of belief. That the jihadists represent an infinitesimal portion of all practitioners of the Islamic faith is not a matter to be honestly considered, now, or at any point. Ms. Rubin is a propagandist, pure and simple, and the defensiveness of  one corporate employee defending another corporate employee, from the attacks of ‘leftwing opinionators’ seems like so much corporate CYA . One need only look to another respectable publication like the Financial Times which ran Mr. Christopher Caldwell's latest column in which he solemnly declares that Mr. Breivik acted alone, based on what evidence we do not know, neither does Mr. Caldwell: but the demands of propaganda are different than the demands of reporting, or even labeling your imaginings as pure conjecture. That Mr. Caldwell is an employee of the Weekly Standard should come as no surprise to the sophisticated analyst of these two hastily cobbled together poisonous political confections.    

Political Cynic

Do not look upon the latest political developments of the last few weeks as the surrender of President Obama to the Tea Party Jacobins; rather view it as the Triumph of Neo-Liberalism, that ersatz political economy, that is essentially a political romanticism. Though we look to a future of the decline of what was once the ‘American Dream’, we now join the rest of the world, in the active pursuit of a New Feudalism led by Plutocrats, Kleptocrats and their political surrogates. Those surrogates are both Republicans and Democrats, who believe, or profess a faith in the Market as the ultimate arbiter of all value, no matter the context. Gone now is a fealty to the cultivation of civic republican virtue, and it’s imperative of mutual dependence within the frame of a cultivation and grooming for the acceptance of that responsibility, as the primary ethical duty of citizenship. The Market is the central ethical, political, economic arbiter of all ‘civic’ acts, in this new world of the Triumph of the Tea Party Jacobins.

Failed Poet     

'Simply put, there are no brakes that could stop the global economy from blundering into another financial crisis. Tax havens remain numerous, and their regulation anarchic. The skimpy enforcement measures undertaken by bank regulators since the crisis are nowhere near appropriate to what is at stake. Governments have refused to reinstate the absolute wall of separation between commercial and investment banks, leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay deposit-insurance claims when the bubble-prone financial sector blows up.'

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/07/30/debt_ceiling_14th_amendment&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110

Here is Steve Kornacki reporting for Salon on the Republican Party kowtowing to the radical fringe of political nihilists, namely the Tea Party, who do not believe in any concept of governance, but believe and practice the concept of permanent insurgency. Here are the old Wall Street Republican hacks finding common cause with their newest brethren, whose commitment to the dismantling of the last vestiges of the New Deal is now beyond question. Creating a crisis where there was none has been a propaganda coup, to use plain language. But the fomentation of political hysteria is a proud Republican tradition, now being used in its most extreme form.  Is the extreme intransigence of the Republican Party simply a cynical political maneuver to push the President to take the radical step of invoking the 14^th amendment?(Is the Republican leadership even capable of this kind of ‘political vision’?) Imagine the political climate after the President invoked the 14^th: it would be the perfect rhetorical frame for the campaign of 2012. Obama, The Dictator, the Constitutional usurper, a perfect book end to Obama, The Socialist. Also one can see very clearly that this whole debate about the evils of deficit spending is a way to foreclose any form of policy predicated on any form of Neo-Keynesian economics, even though we are mired in a severe economic depression. We can also see that the notion of austerity is the newest intellectual and political plaything of the ‘Free Marketeers’ who managed to drive the economy into the ground in 2008. Austerity is the call to all but the Wall Street elite, whose profits are at all time highs, while the ordinary citizen is mired in the reality of loss, devaluation and long term unemployment.

Almost Marx