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Books of Interest:Amazon.com: Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) (9780521709859): Stephen E. Hanson: Books
via amazon.com
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The Good Doctor and Anger:Supporting cast including Hillary Clinton,Barack Obama and the Libyan Rebels
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.
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“Camelot” and “Borgias”: Blood, boobs and costume drama – The Borgias
via salon.com
Great writing by Matt Zoller Seitz!
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epoddle’s Channel
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Books of Interest:Amazon.com: Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (9780618267460): Jack Rakove: Books
via amazon.com
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Books of Interest:The Ideological Origins of American Federalism – Alison L. LaCroix – Harvard University Press
Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia.
In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system.
Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.
via hup.harvard.edu
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The Disorders of Capitalism: God’s Worker (GW) and Overcompensation?
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?
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The Many Faces of the Arab Spring by Shlomo Ben-Ami – Project Syndicate
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Opinionator Emeritus on Obama, The Pentagon and the Libyan Rebels: Episode XXXIII in The American Political Melodrama
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.
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