StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/us/politics/18leak.html?_r=1&om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BN-KmkB8bzy2Uo

President Obama maintains his status as Timid New Democrat with something to prove regarding his 'toughness', his 'resolve' about the 'subversives' who maintain an a priori notion about the public's right to know what government is doing in their name: a frontal attack on the very practice of government paternalism. The strategy is to indict the 'whistle blower' and depend on the compliant media outlets to do the rest.It's 1950 all over again and we ordinary citizens, of the now utterly dead Republic, can sleep peacefully knowing that the evil doers are being brought to a kind of rough justice;using baseless manufactured accusations and that still vital American Institution of The Witch Hunt.
Publius  

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/14/the-gop-masters-of-the-credible-threat.html

Exclusive from HeddaAndLouellaAreDead.com : Stephen L. Carter has just penned a screen treatment for a new half hour comedy series about the zany goings on of Daniel Ellsberg and the Seven Republican Stooges, it’s  a comic fantasy, sci-fi, political melodrama kind of thing, that Fox Entertainment Division will co-produce with the people who brought out  Atlas Shrugged, the movie, to great acclaim. Also in the works for Mr. Carter and Fox will be a proposed new series with the Atlas Shrugged crew, tentatively titled John Galt: The High School Years, kind of like One Tree Hill only overtly pro Capitalist, for the younger set.

Myra Breckenridge     

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&hp

The comic potential of Mr. David Brooks is here manifest in his self-description as ‘Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective’ in his latest essay in The New York Times titled Pundit Under Protest. An observer might comment on the Olympian proportion of his self-conception and its rhetorical expression, which allows him to heap scorn on the bankrupt two party system and its lack of ability to fully engage with the vital project of an American Renaissance, with the proviso that The Free Market take the lead. One might try two other names for Mr. Brooks: Wall Street Valet or Capitalism’s Intellectual Poodle, it is a choice fraught with the recognition of power of metaphor to shape intellectual/political debate. A quote from this essay is demonstrative of his singular idea:

‘This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from this anxiety.’

 Mr. Brooks as thinker is obsessed with the singular idea, the sometimes tellingly simplistic notion is his intellectual bread and butter, the play of the many forces in the political/ethical life of Zoon Politikon is utterly foreign, even subversive of his limited imagination. He is, in fact, a political conformist masquerading as thinker and which leads him to garnish his limited, stunted commentaries with pertinent factual data, while never engaging in a germane commentary or critique of his closely held notion of the supremacy of ‘The Market’, which failed utterly to demonstrate its’ efficacy or viability in any way but as a simulacrum for theft. We are in our present condition of decline because of that failure, that Mr. Brooks is incapable of discussing honestly, while he condemns the Republicans for Rigid Political Orthodoxy and the Democrats for engaging in New Deal Nostalgia. The brief political description of each is a wonder of his clueless reductionism, making caricature into political reality. But The Answer is in the Hamiltonian Party a product of his political speculation, or more accurately of an ersatz ‘political idealism’. In this part of the essay he attempts to reframe the idea and practice of Conservatism as somehow dynamic, innovative and forward looking.  Conservatism in its’ American iteration is about two nostalgias: Constitutional Originalism and Free Market Romanticism, both inherently static and backward looking, solely, resolutely  about the past, not the potential dynamism of an active present or future, in the life of the Republic. While others may play Fantasy Baseball or Football this thinker conjures a Fantasy Political Party i.e. the game of the restive Opinionator. One feels his deep discontent with the Party machinery and its addiction to ‘Old Thinking’ as opposed to ‘New Thinking’, or even that old American standby ‘Thinking outside the Box’. He wishes to emancipate American Politics from an addiction to the outworn ideas of Right and Left, of The Oligarchs versus The Progressives.  Mr. Brooks is just a run of the mill rationalizer for a Conservatism whose singular economic idea, an abiding faith in the Free Market, went utterly, criminally wrong. He possesses a great deal of intellectual pretension and a delusion that he has a mind of his own, that manifests itself in these small fits of rebellion against his masters. 

Political Observer    

        

 

Don't talk on your phone when you are at the Library. Turn it off and act like, or even pretend that you give a shit what others think about you, and your lack of consideration. Please don't tell me Grandma fell down and can't get up and called you to coordinate her rescue!! You can't even read a sign that's in front of your face, because it's all about YOU!!!
Pissed Off Library Patron 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marco-rubio-takes-on-medi-scare/2011/06/13/AGL5N5SH_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

Here is Marc A. Thiessen demonstrating his value as Republican Party propagandist. Yet, this encomium to the political virtues of Marco Rubio is, in sum, an introduction to a stump speech by that candidate, delivered by an important someone, but not the candidate himself. This is merely a complimentary introduction: Mr. Rubio will use this rhetorical frame to then address the audience on the importance of each of the questions and assertions raised by it. Mr. Thiessen has perfected his animus toward Democrats and the dangers of Obama’s New Deal recrudescence, answering it by asserting the political/fiscal necessity of austerity, in the face of demonstrable fiduciary irresponsibility, indeed utter self-willed ignorance of a looming disaster. Paul Ryan and his gifts as the great fake Republican Budget Guru is the main protagonist in this episode of The American Political Melodrama, predicated on the dichotomy between Republican fiscal probity and Democratic fiscal recklessness.

Political Observer