StephenKMackSD's Blog

'I don't believe Obama is guided in these efforts by any principled concern or moral empathy for the plight of Palestinians or the injustice of the 45-year-old occupation; it seems clear that he isn't ever driven by considerations of that sort.  But what he is, at least compared to the prior President, is a competent technocrat, a more calculating imperial manager, able to rationally assess costs and benefits with a ruthless analytical stoicism.' 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-news-in-obamas-speech/2011/05/19/AF4dFN7G_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions#weighIn

Here is The Good Doctor (TGD) manufacturing more backhanded apologetics for the War on Terror, masquerading as ‘Democracy Promotion’ in ‘The Arab World’. The linchpin of this ‘Bush Doctrine’ is the barrel of a gun and whatever weapon of war need be pressed into service, no matter how heinous. TGD is unapologetic about the costs of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ in a currency that he finds baffling, even incomprehensible: human life. That human life is the life of the great other, who does not register as of value or worth, in the world view of our honored physician. Only certain forms of sentient life qualify as of primary importance. Callous, inhuman might be a response to his deeply held views, or could we name it American Exceptionalism? The question of Assad and Gaddafi as murderers of their own peoples begs the question of the murders of America and our agents in the countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Democratization, the ‘Bush Doctrine’, in American terms has been bought by the barrel of a gun and a seemingly endless stream of borrowed money, wholesale bribery renamed, in a propaganda coup, the ‘Surge’. Our moral bankruptcy is assuredly upon us, it is our fiduciary collapse and utter decline that awaits , stage right. But more importantly TGD continues to argue from his deeply held notion of Jewish Exceptionalism, that Israel has a right to lands it has stolen: a matter already ruled upon by The International Court of Justice and not in Israel’s favor. But this is a matter of little consequence, to the argumentative brio of our thinker, who allows his rhetoric supremacy over the empirical.            

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-16/israels-dilemma-in-policing-the-palestinian-border-protests/

Opinionator Emeritus (OE) reminds us with every word, of his recent essay, of his contempt, even his unbridled hatred of Palestinians and their aspirations to statehood, as being in the arena of the impossible dream of the benighted, the utterly unworthy. The Nakba demonstrations are evidence of the hand of the usual manipulators and not a measure of the new independent spirit of the Arab Spring, and its diversity of voices and  leadership models,  and the possibility of some break with the history of those benighted ‘infiltrators’ about to overrun the land of the just. The rhetorical frame is the usual one of the beleaguered Israelis fighting off the hoards of Islamic haters whose actions threaten the very existence of the state itself: not with the billions that America annually contributes to the care and maintenance of this state, the conservative estimate is 114 billion dollars since 1949. Israel has the best equipped and trained military, second only to America. So Israel has many problems but one it does not have is running out of our money, a measure of our unstinting support.  OE is representative of the sclerotic wing of American policy hands trapped in notions of half a century ago, still reciting propaganda about the aspirations of the great unwashed Palestinian hordes.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-16/bernard-henri-lvy-the-dominique-strauss-kahn-i-know/

One is forcefully reminded of two things when reading any essay by BHL: he is living his notion of being the ethical heir to the mantle of ‘The Committed Public Intellectual’ made famous by Jean Paul Sartre, and his notoriously bad political judgments. And in a more American context, one is also reminded of Norman Mailer’s bad impersonation of Ernest Hemingway, for his almost interminable career in American Letters. But BHL manages to outdo the bad judgment of these two argumentative antecedents by having a gift for ‘friendships’ with a number of dubious men with a penchant for the exploitation of women, in subservient positions: pending, of course, the judgment of a court of law in the Strauss-Kahn case.  BHL is just another ‘media intellectual’ celebrated for his first book Barbarism with a Human Face, and its successors and a healthy dose of money from the family business, to buoy his climb to the top of the world of ‘Intellectual Media Stars’. BHL is best at articulating indignation in all its permutations, and reinforcing those observations with seemingly trenchant philosophical garnish, cribbed from the rich tradition of postwar French theory and thought:  one is reminded of the philosophical/literary rambles of Jacques Derrida, echoed in the essays of BHL.