StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/calling-jim-demint–to-warn-gop-on-debt-plan/2011/07/18/gIQA4d2zLI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

This opinion piece by Mr. Marc Thiessen demonstrates, if there was ever any doubt, that the Debt Ceiling debate is about the internal conflict between The Wall Street Republicans and the Tea Party Jacobins. Mr. Thiessen presents Mr. Jim DeMint as the Establishment Republican willing and very able to challenge all the those who follow the political lead of Mitch McConnell, and vote for compromise: an absolutely verboten concept to the Tea Party. The speculation that Mr. DeMint will use his Senate Conservatives Fund to campaign against any who might be tempted by the political mirage of compromise,although inherent in the very notion and practice of politics is the centrality of idea compromise, this fact has escaped the notice of these political purists. Mr. Thiessen and his allies Mr. DeMint and The Tea Party should more aptly be called Robespierreists or Maoists rather than the Tea Party, for the state of permanent revolution,of insurgency as politically viable, has proved to be calamitous, without question. So what is left to us as readers to consider, of these strategic speculations, is that the Debt Ceiling will be passed and that the Wall Street Republicans will win, and that the purists will continue to practice their nihilistic, purest politics within a Party already deeply fractured, but undaunted in it's cultivation of the American perennial, political hysteria and it's permutations.
Political Observer         

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/opinion/19brooks.html?hp

 

Ladies and gentleman, Mr. David Brooks constructs, for your edification, another political homily featuring  such characters as Disingenuous Democratic President(A New Democrat who surrenders before the fight) , The trusting but naïve Speaker of the House John Boehner , The Beltway Bandits(Grover Norquist),  Big Government Blowhards (talk radio jocks), The Show Horses(Palin, Bachman), The Permanent Campaigners( Romney etc.) . He lists the impediments to the pursuit of Conservative Greatness, to reform of the Welfare State, meaning the end of what’s left of The New Deal.  The American Political Melodrama continues as the real fight is between the Tea Party Jacobins and the Wall Street Branch of The Republican Party. Mr. Brooks assures us, at one point, of the fact that he is a ‘reporter’. Now that qualifies as a story.

Political Cynic

     

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2011/07/18/arianna_huffington_vs_frederick_douglass&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110

 

Here is Joan Walsh in a meditation on the Debt Ceiling debate, a roundabout with plenty of stops along the way, to bring as many political actors into this intellectually messy, nearly historically incoherent, and interminable essay.  I am grateful that to have finished this 2,212 word monster and learned some interesting things, so that my time wasn’t completely wasted.  One such ‘fact’ is that the President believes that the Huffington Post is ‘The Left’ or represents ‘The Left’: Ms. Huffington lost whatever credibility she had with that political faction upon the sale of her site to AOL, and with the subsequent dismissal of all those ‘citizen journalists’ she once praised as the key to an emancipation from the old political paradigm of left and right, that afflicts our political culture. It played out that Ms. Huffington was not really ‘an entrepreneur of ideas’ but just another acolyte of  Mr. Milton Friedman looking for a way up in the pecking order of Corporate America.  She was shrewd, careful  and rather brilliant in annexing the lead  under the banner of ‘Progressivism’;  neither Left nor Right but transcending both to arrive at the election of Mr. Obama.  Ms. Huffington was very effective at helping to shape the politics of 2008.

As to the question of Fredrick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation debate Ms. Walsh has been involved in politics long enough to know that the shaping of public debate, which is simply the practice of effective political propaganda, is the tool of all politicians. The issue is not her revelatory history lesson about what actually happened, but how President Obama was rhetorically able to give an historical frame to his political position as superior, as patriotic, as historically justifiable, even inevitable. To understand it in this context makes it comprehensible in political terms, although Ms. Walsh’s points are well taken, they seem to miss the political point entirely.

Political Observer  

Mr. Runciman is a Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. The jacket photo gives Mr. Runciman the appearance of a rather austere even intimidating person, but his book filled with a sense of the joy and exaltation in the act of critical inquiry, a very rare occurrence. Although only 127 pages long it is a challenging, revelatory experience. The point of this tart polemic,he even engages in the use of mild profanity, seems to me to be that he challenges the status of these three philosophical texts and by definition the notion of sacred texts, generally. There can be no text that cannot and must not be subject to deep searching critical scrutiny, and that the notion of classic or sacred texts that have reached the status of an unquestioned reception is antithetic to the project of free critical examination. Mr. Runciman's writing is both elegant and spare and is not concerned with critical fads or an addiction to any critical theory, but is based in a concern with the critical examination of the arguments of the books under review. It is all very straight forward and refreshing for that very reason.
Stephen         

What can one lone voice of a reasoning Socialist ideologue do to ameliorate our present Economic Quandary.To raise the Debt Ceiling or not to raise the Debt Ceiling. (My apologies,the demands of Literary desperation must be served!)  One could almost sound like a feckless Hamlet or even like our leader President Obama, whose strategy when faced with an implacable enemy is to apologetically wave the flag of surrender, and compromise before any engagement takes place. We need a Franklin Roosevelt, even better an Elenore Roosevelt who isn't afraid to fight when it becomes obvious that that is what is called for! The Jacobins and their leader Senator DeMint are ready and able to prove themseves capable of destrutive acts of Political Nihilism in service to an unreflective fixation on Ideological Purity,as a first order question. Will the Republican Party leadership of  Mitch McConnell and John  Boehner be able to cobble togehter something like a 'compromise' in defense of The Republic? We can only watch and wait as this episode of The American Political Melodrama unfolds.
Almost Marx   
    

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

Mr. David Brooks in his latest essay, an installment in his signature series of Platonic Melodramas purporting to be about Politics, the title of which is ‘The Magic Lever: sounds almost like the title of a fairy tale, rather than a serious meditation on serious matters of import. Considering that Mr. Brooks is specialist in a particular kind of self-serving intellectual reductionism, political actors acting in historical time are neatly and very handily taken out of that dimension, and in their places are the ‘ideas’ that he congers, in service to his propagandistic meditations.

 ‘The world economy is a complex, unknowable organism.’ This capacious cliché is the opening gambit of this essay. Followed by this choice historical description, sans the actual actors, and it neatly frames his opinionating: “ But a few years ago a group of bankers thought they had the magic tool to help them master financial trends and predict the future. Sophisticated risks assessment models would enable them to rewrite the rules and make more money.’ That The Financial Reform of 1999 was signed into law by Bill Clinton and a bipartisan coterie, that included among its prominent supporters David Brooks, enabled the bankers mentioned  to , now, ignore the important even singular lesson of The Great Depression and the economic /political necessity of Glass-Stiegel and it’s annulment  should be noted as the antecedent cause of the Economic Collapse of 2008. But Mr. Brooks as a  poor, but experienced, propagandist needs to point the accusing finger at The Democrats and their modified Keynesianism, as a central concern of the Free Marketers, who have shifted political focus from the notion of economic rescue of malfeasant American Capitalism,  to the dire necessity of Austerity, as the key to future prosperity.  But Mr. Brooks must maintain his bourgeois respectability for the readers of The Good Gray Times, by taking to task The Republicans who are convinced that the key to prosperity is a tax policy that favors the ruling plutocrats. As a dramaturge, he now has identified the three protagonists: Bankers, Democratic Keynesians and Republican Tax Cutters; each group believes that they have found ‘the Magic Lever’; was this intellectual terminus unexpected? But here is the stirring summation: Mr. Brooks and his compatriots are the Rational Conservative Centrists who possess greater knowledge and can critique secure in the notion of that superior knowledge. Mr. Brooks is nothing, if not utterly dependable, in his intellectual self-congratulation.

Political Observer