StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26brooks.html?ref=opinion

 

‘Some of us like to think big. We thought at the beginning of this debt crisis that it might be possible to reach a Grand Bargain. This deal would make a serious dent in the country’s awful debt problem. It would begin to reform entitlements. It would involve enough revenue to forestall ruinous cuts in domestic programs.’

Here is the laughable opening paragraph of David Brooks’ latest column titled Congress In the Lead.  It’s all there, the self-congratulatory style, Big Thinking as an imitation of real thought, almost bursting the seams of its’ rhetorical frame. He can’t let go of The Grand Bargain, it won’t happen, as he reports, but the capacious intellectual vacuity of this idea has irresistible appeal to our writer; Mr. Brooks has never been modest, although he is sometimes coy.  But in just under 800 words, in his inimitably breathless foreshortened style, he narrates the denouement of the Fake Debt Crisis, in which the lead switches from President Obama to the Congress, meaning the Republican controlled House and the Democratically controlled Senate. As the deadline of August 2, 2011 approaches, the melodramatic tension increases to a fever pitch. It is great television, perfect for the small screen.  And Mr. Brooks is having a grand time, reassuring his avid readers, that reasonable establishmentarians will prevail, and a Default will just be avoided, by the actions of big thinkers like himself, among others.  As the American Empire’s slow but steady decline continues apace, with all the garnishes that were once the envy of the huddled masses, we must feel a certain good fortune in having Public Men of the caliber of Mr. Brooks: to lead an enlightened public discourse and to have such men who continually remind us of their public virtue.

Political Cynic     

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/congress-stands-its-ground/2011/07/25/gIQAmvNsYI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

George F. Will has been a Republican Party operative since the days of his duel employment by President Reagan and ABC News. While that is old news, indeed, it was a flagrant breach of the public trust, the flouting of any real notion of conflict of interest: public integrity and its concomitant notion of a public morality exercised in historical time is passé in Mr. Will’s world view, it failed to fit the Free Market paradigm. Mr. Will has over time proclaimed his ethical superiority as a fact, while never demonstrating that bit of moral legerdemain. This is mere introduction to this hectoring, even overtly insulting, opinion piece in which President Obama is cast in the role of Devil opposed to the ‘ Virtuous 87’ elected  Tea party Jacobins, this all taking place within the narrative bounds of American Political Theology. Mr. Will has cast his lot with the most radical wing, the No-Nothing fringe, of a Republican Party that has utterly discarded any notion of political rationality or the notion or practice of political compromise, while maintaining an unending narrative steeped in fomented hysteria. Here is a quotation:

‘It has, however, rescued the nation from Obama’s preference for a “clean” debt-ceiling increase that would ignore the onrushing debt tsunami. There are 87 reasons for Obama’s temporary conversion of convenience to the cause of spending restraint — the 87 House Republican freshmen. Their inflexibility astonishes and scandalizes Washington because it reflects the rarity of serene fidelity to campaign promises.’

 Mr. Will’s ultimate rhetorical destination is the constitutional practice of separate but equal branches of government, which is the lynchpin of his whole column. But Mr. Will has been inconsistent in his advocacy of that idea, it has been a matter of political pragmatism, even political opportunism, that brought him to this position, after the defeat of the Republicans in 2008 and the political victory of The Socialist Obama.

But let me now present my argument as to the thrust of this latest propaganda piece: the Debt Ceiling Crisis is another one in a long line of fake crises, manufactured by an utterly desperate Republican Party to rescue it from its marginal political status, aided and abetted by President Obama, who is not a New Deal Democrat but a New Democrat, who unreflectively enunciated the new party line of the evils of deficits .This whole line of argument can serve the Republicans well by establishing in the public mind the lack of viability of any form of  Neo-Keynesianism, as a way of addressing any economic problem, after a through demonization in the public debate. As Paul Krugman has pointed out on his blog, this is 1937 and the idea and practice of austerity will not work, except as a strategy to get a Republican elected in 2012, by putting an already struggling economy in further jeopardy.

Political Observer   

       

Corrected

I first heard an interview with Professor Khrushcheva on Live From The Left Coast with Ian Masters on KPFK, some years ago. Mr. Masters is an informed and intelligent questioner, he is without doubt the best I’ve listened to. And the interview was a fascinating look at Russian politics through the lens of literature, with a person with a wealth of knowledge about both aspects of Soviet and Russian life,she even adds to our idea of what it means to be an American, while maintaining her cultural roots in her homeland . The advantage of her dual citizenship and her ability to bridge that gap between the two disparate but contiguous worlds, makes this modest book worthy of the time to read and reflect on, not to speak of the pleasure of wonderful writing, full of insights into Russian,Soviet and American lives,values and the intersections of these in the person of Vladimir Nabokov. Prof. Khrushcheva, while telling her story, also gives the reader a glimpse into what one variant of an emergent American cosmopolitanism might look like, in our benighted era, this is an aspiration that borders on the unpatriotic, as conceived by the ascendent No-Nothings.But Prof. Khruscheva brings this practice into vibrant life, on the page, as she quotes from the writings of Nabokov and a long list of Russian writers. Here is Nabokov’s struggle, his metamorphosis from writer in Russian into English, an adaptation necessitated by his leaving Russia and eventually settling in America, as teacher,literary critic and author. Here is a book that demonstrates to the reader the possibilities of remaking the self, while maintaining what could be called a dual identity. This book is rich is relevant quotation that brings into focus the struggle to build bridges to a plurality of worlds, a project, a challenge that now faces us all, even though not as sharply focused, whether we choose to engage or ignore is perhaps the ethical challenge of the 21st Century.
Stephen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-half-trillion-plan/2011/07/21/gIQA0gnhSI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

Here is Charles Krauthammer’s latest collection of statistics proving that President Obama is a liar and that The Republican Party is the Party of Political/Economic virtue.  Should any reader of this bold, even impudent, political essay be at all impressed about the statistical data that he so glibly fashions into an indictment of the fiscal sincerity, indeed the fiscal probity of a New Democrat, who surrenders before the battle begins? This President is not Franklin Roosevelt but rather Bill Clinton: a leader who has taken the Gospel of Markets and the political ascendancy of Wall Street as a necessity over the welfare of The Republic, The People. The New Democrat has willfully forgotten the New Deal as excess baggage, while the manufacture of a happy nostalgia for that time yields votes, simply put. All this is but the New Democratic party line on the way to power, for power is all there really is, heavily garnished with a re-manufactured New Deal: expressing the demands of a new time and place and the new realities of global corporatism.

Almost Marx         

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sustaining-the-unsustainable/2011/07/21/gIQAI6mtRI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

‘The Tea Party, the most welcome political development since the Goldwater insurgency in 1964, lacks only the patience necessary when America lacks the consensus required to propel fundamental change through our constitutional system of checks and balances. If Washington’s trajectory could be turned as quickly as Tea Partyers wish — while conservatives control only one-half of one of the two political branches — their movement would not be as necessary as it is. Fortunately, not much patience is required.’

‘Thanks largely to the Tea Party, today, more than at any time since Reagan’s arrival 30 years ago, Washington debate is conducted in conservatism’s vocabulary of government retrenchment. The debt-ceiling vote, an action-forcing mechanism of limited utility, has at least demonstrated that Obama is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.’

Mr. Will in his latest column of political opinion makes it abundantly clear, please see the above quoted paragraphs, that The Tea Party Jacobins are in full control of the Debt Ceiling debate, all accomplished with a breathtaking précis of recent Conservative  Political History, narrated as the victory of The Goldwater Insurgency transmogrified  into The Reagan Revolution, following in a great linear path to The Tea Party Jacobins: all completely self-serving, in the manner of political propaganda by the numbers. But then he asks the Jacobins to think and act on that knowledge in a politic way, which is antithetical to their raison d’être, to the very central tenet  of the practice of ‘insurgency’, as opposed to the practice of governance. There are a great number of garnishes to enliven this rather stolid recitation of Conservative Triumphalism blended with the tone of a hectoring pep talk: a standard that the great authoritarian Mr. Will has perfected over time, as the possessor of some superior knowledge that the rest of us find baffling, as being in the province of theology rather than that of political science. In this episode, President Obama remains the Great Socialist Vampire sucking the lifeblood out of the Republic, a standard trope of the No-Nothing Republican Party, and Mr. Will presents himself as the good gray Professor Van Helsing, with some strategic advice for defeating this inhuman monster.

Political Observer         

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&hp

 

This Dramaturge, this master of Platonic essences, confects for his readers amusement another installment of The American Political Melodrama set against the imminent collapse of the The Empire’s good faith and credit.  This essay resembles thinking as a form of schematics, all intersecting lines and angles as in an architectural blueprint, a demonstration of his idiosyncratic formalism.  And, I might further speculate that the abstract nature of his thought, of his reductionist stance leads to a demonstrable ignorance, even a self-willed blindness, to any notion of nuance, political or historical. There are the names of the significant political actors pinned at their places of intersection but this is inert, static yet imbued with an ideological energy. The title, The Grand Bargain Lives, is a bloated , capacious  metaphor, filled with historical portent.  As if Wall Street, the ultimate paymaster, of the whole of the political establishment, would allow a default to interfere with their obscene profit taking. Is it naïve of Mr. Brooks to assume that a default is even possible? Or simply a dreaded eventuality, that adds a certain frisson, in terms of the melodramatic action.       

What escapes the notice of Mr. Brook is the basic conflict between the Establishment Republicans and The Tea Party Jacobins, but that is of no interest to our writer, since the imperatives of the political propagandist takes the lead.  The dismantling of what is left of The New Deal and The Great Society is the commitment of the Right, as a matter of policy, this time under the banner of ‘reform’ of ‘austerity’ of living within our means: as an antidote to the unlikely possibility of an ascendant  Neo-Keynesian government policy, a checkmate ,as it were. After positing the existence of Leftist Democrats and Tea Party Jacobins as the extreme positions in the debate, it is easy to congratulate your confreres on the fine art of compromise, which is the heart of democratic governance, while staunchly maintaining your Conservatism as synonymous with the National Interest. But as usual with Mr. Brooks,  it simply too tidy, too well managed, for the political world as it is, for human actors as they are. It glibly imitates reasonable discourse, it takes it’s measure inaccurately, of lived reality and revels in its’ inaccuracy, as demonstrative of its’ correctness. Can thoughts, completely disembodied and nebulous, ideas as separate entities, with the capacity to act in historical time, while maintaining a separation from the beings who conger them, then make history?

Political Observer           

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/18/debt-ceiling-crisis-gop-has-double-amnesia-on-deficits-regulation.html

Here is one of Mr. Beinart's best, most informative, most rigorously argued columns, that I can recall. Really worth your time,attention and most importantly food for thought.
Political Observer