StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/how-high-were-the-pharoahs.html?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BNmhfUB8aFIWCT

 

Before our very eyes Chrysostom (C)has transformed himself into an armchair general with sources in the White House, whom he can contact at will: this is an accretion of power that his colleague Cogitating Peter can only envy, from a distance. Yet we can rely on our former scholarship boy to take the rhetorical highroad, here are some of his latest gems : Popping the Qaddafi Zit, Libyan clusterfuck, pop the zit strategy. Call it impressive? Or call it a lot of trendy rhetorical flash, barely aping the imperatives of actual thought: perfect for a Tina Brown publication. Regarding his literary style; a breathless combination of Hedda Hopper, Walter Lippmann and Carrie Bradshaw; now, don’t pretend you don’t know Hedda and Walter! And Policy never had it so good? But a salient question remains to be answered: dare we trust C, whose lack of judgment proved calamitous?   

    

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/syrias_reformer/2011/03/31/AFy4JFCC_story.html?nav=emailpage

‘Anger and indignation are tender blossoms that need care and cultivation to thrive, yet one must recall that their life and strength are short.’

Asian Proverb

 

The Good Doctor (TGD) has yet to learn that his employment of anger as his augmentative tool of first and last resort has reached the point of diminishing returns. He seeks always to destroy rather than rely on the telling question or even the insinuating statement. His rhetoric is a reminiscence of the raised voice as a methodology;  that speaks of a demonstrable weakness of argument. Perhaps this is a revelation of the weakness of Neo-Conservative bellicosity as answer to any question? Or is this strategy a tool of the intellectual bully, and as such a glimpse into the Nihilism at the ethical/philosophical center, of our thinker and his thought?

On the question of the uncertain and fractured leadership of Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the face of the unprecedented ‘Arab Spring’, TGD offers no information that could be of interest to policy makers or even concerned citizens. But he does offer hope to his partisans, that the  New Democratic rule of the President is an issue to keep alive, as part of a list of moral iniquities: to be cited in the 2012 Presidential Campaign, as a betrayals of the basic tenets of The American Political Theology.  

 

 

Here is a fractured modernist tale, a pastiche of Horatio Alger. The title ‘Postal Worker’s Son Makes Good’; does that seem appropriate? GW, even in the face of a 38% fall in profits, managed to garner for himself and his fellow managers rather tidy bonuses. Does it inspire confidence that the Ethos of Capitalism stands in stark contrast to the cultivation of civic republican virtue? Can these two seemly antithetical concepts be mediated for the greater good of our common political/economic destiny? Or is the ‘philosophy’ of what ever the traffic will bear our guiding principle that dimly lights our path to the future?

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-31/us-military-not-happy-over-libya/?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BNlcRyB8aAHTDq#

Revised

Opinionator Emeritus (OE) has a few thing to say about the Pentagon’s dissatisfaction with President Obama’s unsteady policy decisions regarding the Libyan political and human rights crisis: to support the ‘rebels’ or not to support the ‘rebels’, Islamic radicals or true democrats, how many armies must we train and materially support with our vast yet not inexhaustible treasury, will the sorties engaged in be enough, does the defense of innocent human life constitute a policy? vexing questions needing answers.  One might excuse the President for his seeming faltering, indecisive political position, as an expression of not really knowing ; what the situation, in actuality, is.(Excuse me, your writer’s usual lucidity has surrendered to the crisis mode.) Even though we are possessed of the most well financed and equipped spying agencies in the history of the modern nation state, as the narrative of American supremacy, in all things, goes. Be that as it may, OE in this installment of The American Political Melodrama, speaks with the voice of his Pentagon sources, allies and friends, off the record, of course. But OE’s essay reflects a certainty, a conviction of not a mere reporter but of an advocate reflecting a kind of lived experience, or is this simply deft literary sleight of hand. We have reached another denouement, as the screen fades to black.