StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-17/-how-americas-failure-to-knock-out-libyas-gaddafi-emboldens-iran-north-korea/?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BNrCzYB8aZyuWS#

Opinionator Emeritus (OE)  in his latest  essay demonstrates the  seeming aimlessness of The Empire at permanent war, its only real business, after the fall of its nearest competitor and  nemesis  the Soviet Union, in the World Historical Melodrama called The Cold War. OE manages to maintain his chatty rhetorical style, while speaking of the lives and deaths of  very distant Others, as if talking about the latest nugget of Washington gossip. There is a certain comfort to this sort of opinionating pitched to the prejudices of a dwindling bourgeois readership: the last vestiges of a generation brought up on the quaint notion of civic republican virtue, synonymous with the central idea that being informed was an ethical responsibility not to be ignored.  OE is adroit at maintaining his stance as an Old Policy Hand providing a longer view than his less seasoned fellow observers.

Almost Marx

Can anyone take this trivializing political chatter as somehow constitutive of serious political commentary. It is on its face utterly unworthy of  consideration as anything except as the title of his blog states, The Dish. For serious commentary see Paul Krugman, Matt Miller,Robert Scheer. Elizabeth Drew at the New York Review Of Books blog has a sage and through examination of the speech enlivened by her political experience, not fettered by the trivializing political sensibility manifested by Chrysostom. Also see the Esquire's political blog for a very impressive essay on Obama's speech.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/15/obama-house-radicals-budget/#disqus_thread

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-grand-compromise/2011/04/14/AFrSmKfD_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

The political campaign of 2012 is in full swing, one can consider the point of demarcation as the release of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal.  The Good Doctor (TGD) here demonstrates his fealty to the central ideas of Neo-Conservatism,   a now, notorious political theology.  Can one even associate the theory and practice of Neo-Conservatism with the any conception of the idea of ‘Modernity’?  Or can it simply be thought of as a pernicious political nostalgia for what never was:  a kind of Platonic Idealism, echoing the authoritarianism of The Republic? TGD offers proof of his party loyalty in rhetorical form, by this hymn of praise to the central notions of Mr. Ryan’s budget: that maintaining the deficit to 1.6 percent of GDP by 2021 is a laudable goal. One might just ask at what social cost? But is the Neo-Conservative thinker even able to frame such a question as legitimate, even as mere policy conjecture?  Other more able economic thinkers and policy planners, like Paul Krugman and Matt Miller, have answered questions about the social costs of the Ryan Plan, in some detail. We can only expect from TGD a very real campaign document, a set of arguments putting in the best light, a ‘forward looking’ even ‘ visionary’  set of economic proposals. TGD’s title ‘The grand compromise’ has a bloated  histrionic ring, perfect for  the striking thirty second television spot , attacking the trans-generational economic irresponsibility of the Democratic Party and, of course, the perennial other Barak Obama.  As demonstrative of a pernicious   American Socialism, that saps the initiative and innovation of its citizens.  Rep. Ryan then becomes, in the essay, the bearer of Puritan Virtue : the mythical center of our national life.