StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/opinion/28brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The latest David Brooks column titled 'Convener in Chief'' needs a set of definitions for key terms to make comprehension a real possibility:
David Brooks: A full time apologist for Plutocrats,Cleptocrats,Wall Street Thieves and both wings of America's only real political organization The Property Party.
The Age of Austerity: A definition and a political convenience that allows obscene corporate profits while the people foot the bill. This is brought to you by the same people who brought you the Financial Reform of 1999 and the Crash of 2008.
Management Styles : A way of rhetorically framing your bald-faced apologetics for demonstrable Republican Party incompetence. 
Chris Christie: A brash outspoken authoritarian personality with notes of corruption, double dealing and contempt for the law; a perfect candidate for the admiration of our esteemed scribbler.
Insurgent Approach: A handy metaphor, a bloated rationalization for corrupt intellectuals, who front for thieves and liars
Rahm Emmanuel: Another authoritarian from the other branch of the Property Party, carrying the Summers/Geithner baggage with pride and, of course, arrogance.
Power and Mass: Intellectual bloat masquerading as thought.
Speed and Dexterity: Another instance of intellectual bloat masquerading as thought.
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, unrealistic, immature vision of the power of the presidency: Ah, the pleasures of partisan attacks against this liberal icon and the National Hero Myth.
Henry V at Agincourt: Historical bloat in service to partisan polemic.
President Obama has renounced that approach. Far from being a heroic quasi Napoleon: Irony and rhetorical indirection meaning it’s opposite.
All his life, Obama has worked in nonhierarchical institutions — community groups, universities, legislatures — so maybe it is natural that he has a nonhierarchical style.: No Real World experience running a company dedicated to profit at any cost. He is not an aggressive, unapologetic Capitalist.
Obama’s actual governing style emphasizes delegation and occasional passivity. Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis. He makes you want to sit down and discern.: Leadership is always Authoritarian, Aggressive and Masculine never Feminine and Passive.
(Obama) He has ceded the initiative to the Republicans, who have dominated the debate by establishing facts on the ground.: The Paul Ryan Fake Economic Proposal and the political necessity of Austerity as the key to our National Greatness as argued and advocated by both wings of The Property Party.
Now Obama is compelled to engage.: Become more Aggressive i.e. Masculine.
If he can overcome his aloofness and work intimately with Republicans, he may be able to avert a catastrophe and establish a model for a more realistic, collegial presidency.: Republican self-congratulatory hyperbole mixed liberally with the magic of indirection and conscious deceit.
The former messiah will have to become a manager.: The coup de grace of this political homily, framed by platitudes drawn from American Political Theology.    
Almost Marx

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-takes-us-to-war/2011/06/23/AGwFS4hH_story.html

I’m just catching up on my regular reading of the political columns and here is another gem of Conservative thought from Mr. Charles Krauthammer, thoroughly scolding President Obama for his bad behavior regarding The War Powers Resolution. I read this yesterday and decided to let it percolate a bit, before rereading it and then attempting to comment.

Being Commander in Chief is a rather heady business leading to a very well defined hubris and Mr. Obama is not averse to that temptation, in fact, he is right in line with his predecessor and his intellectual theorist John Yoo and his opportunistic positing of the ‘Unitary Executive’. The Right is in a dither, here, exemplified by Mr. Krauthammer about a serious constitutional issue, yet they hardly mentioned it when their party held the Presidency and he committed the same offence more than once. That is just stating the glaringly obvious, but when used as part of a cumulative indictment of the Constitutional Usurper Obama, the Socialist Obama and his various politically exploitable incarnations, it could have the crudest kind of political resonance; for crude political resonances is what the Republican Party has been about since the turn of the century. Should we attribute this very reasonably sounding column by Mr. Krauthammer, although larded with his usual attempts at telling sarcasm, which simply fall flat, to a victory of reason over political passion? The issue seems quite simply to be that some impediments in the communications between the Executive and Legislative branches of the government exist as a matter of practice and even of policy, related in part to the very concept of Commander in Chief: a military designation that reeks of authoritarianism, and does not express any tolerance for the republican practice of power sharing and divided responsibility.  Not even to speak of the ‘Imperial Presidency’ as an evolving problem, exacerbated by the very concept of the ‘Unitary Executive’, as political rationalization for tyranny, for authoritarian rule within the frame of a politically superseded Constitutionalism.        

Political Observer

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/26/niall-ferguson-the-real-costs-of-isolationism.html

Here is America’s favorite import next to Rupert Murdoch and Ahmad Chalabi, Niall Ferguson. He has something important to tell us about ‘The American Empire’ and how we really can’t afford to give up the burdens of empire, just because it’s bankrupting our treasury and demoralizing our national life, after the failure of the Free Market Experiment in 2008. It’s only costing us 4.7% of GDP for the entire ‘Defense’ Budget neatly contrasted with 10.3 % of GDP for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Mr. Ferguson never fails to engage statistical power when the defense of ideology demands it. Mr. Ferguson is the ardent defender of America as the successor of the British Empire with all the attendant baggage, like endless war on populations that are resistant to the benevolent guiding hand of their imperial masters.  Mr. Ferguson enjoys being a well placed academic, an Expert, in the parlance of the triumphant Technocratic Mythology, with no real experience of the costs of war, which insures that he can romanticize about that singular imperial pastime, with a kind of mindless joy, as he moves the pieces on the board, in his well insulated study.

Publius