StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/opinion/03brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Here is David Brooks exercising his disgust, his contempt for what might be characterized and practiced as necessary political hypocrisy, framed in the bankrupt pieties of the American Political Theology. Here, also, the backhanded apologetics for Israeli intransigence in the ‘Peace Process’, framed in the tired moralizing that dominates the American political discourse, in its American Likudnik iteration. One should not attempt to criticize monstrous political murders and torture, if one is guilty of such heinous crimes against persons and the law, while masquerading as a moral/political exemplar. But most assuredly that is the theory and practice of American Exceptionalism; Mr. Brooks being one of the foremost advocates and opinionators in service to that intransigent, even subversive, instance of simple political opportunism, freighted with self-aggrandizing notions of world leadership. One should not point the bloody finger of accusation at a criminal, if one does not expect the practice of a critical symmetry within a network of honest inquirers.

Political Observer         

…Everything- the drab houses,
   the crude banisters,the doorknockers,
   perhaps the hopes of a girl dreaming on a balcony-
   all entered into my vain heart
   with the clarity of tears. …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jon-huntsmans-thorny-path-to-the-gop-nomination/2011/05/31/AGLPhkGH_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

The Great Will (TGW)  never tires of promoting rich Republican men as the bearers of the mantle of civic republican virtue, as replacements for the corrupt ‘Socialist’ Barack Obama and the clear and present danger of the ‘entitlement state’, as stated with his usual intellectually bloated hyperbole. Mr. John Huntsman meets all of the standards that TGW constantly reiterates: a rich, white , reactionary, anxious to turn back the rising tide of socialism. TGW is acting as the ‘unofficial’ campaign manager for the Republican Party i.e. The Sclerotic Old White Guy Party. Does all this sound like a dull, tired campaign press release endlessly re-purposed?  Even with the usual heavy intellectual garnish. There is only one rather troubling matter, a stumbling block, and that is that Mr. Huntsman is a Mormon and the Christian Conservatives take a dim view of this ‘sect’ or ‘cult’ as illegitimate, TGW fails to even mention this in his long encomium to his latest political romance. Or is the Party so desperate to make an impact, to save America from The Socialist Menace in 2012, that it can stifle its own prejudices in a wager to win?

Political Observer      

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_02/7708

The dubious Mr. Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard and the august Financial Times has taken aim at Bernard-Henri Levy, Fake French Philosopher; Mr. Caldwell and his confreres at The Weekly Standard are notorious for their promotion and shrill advocacy for wars of all kinds. Except in the case of wars led by third rate powers, like France, which makes American hegemony seem like a dead letter. This is all very cunningly accomplished by Mr. Caldwell as he maladroitly disguises this political attack on BHL as an innocuous piece of book chat. While I hold no respect for Mr. Levy or his pedestrian moralizing, his tiresome self-congratulatory chatter, tarted- up with the garnish of the vocabulary of a generation of French Theorists and ‘Philosophers’, one smells a rat. Mr. Caldwell is most bothered by the eclipse of American power that the axis of BHL and Sarkozy, and their involvement in Libya, represent on the world stage, if I’m correctly reading the situation. To see a diversification of international power, outside the reach of the American hegemon, is not at all to the liking of the dregs of Neo-Conservative thinkers. Now, the state of permanent war has become a bitter fact of life for the American Empire, but one need not celebrate that dismal truth: the costs of war are too much to bear alone, our treasury is not inexhaustible.  So enter BHL and Sarkozy to lighten the burdens empire at the cost of our unrealistic self-conception: there are costs to a necessary realism.

Political Observer