StephenKMackSD's Blog

“The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made “to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Here is Cockeyed Platonist ( CP)  acting, in this episode of The American Political Melodrama, as Paul Ryan’s campaign manager . He issues this memo to the campaign staff, in preparation to the big announcement,  that Mr. Ryan will run for President. Now, we must all stick to the script, is the imperative in this unapologetic encomium.  The temptation is too great to pass up quoting the first short sentence of this document.   ‘ It was the season of fiscal perestroika.’  Why limit yourself to a simpler word, when this beauty is waiting to be used, as the rhetorical luxury item that it is? Why, it could dress up even the most dismal essay! The title of his opinion piece is truly a nonpareil: ‘The Moment of Truth’’.  Savor it’s redolence, out of the comic books of your childhood, of super-heroes and villains locked in mortal combat.

The need for Austerity is the key idea that CP and Mr. Ryan adopt: but we can look to American Capitalism as a measure of the ethical/political necessity of the practice of that puritan virtue?  Let us take the case of General Electric which paid no Income Tax for the year 2010 but, in fact, claimed a 3.2 billion dollar tax credit. One might observe that G.E. didn’t even count it ‘offshore profits’ in this calculation, which is within the law, but none the less telling.

Next let us review the costs of our Colonial Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; but where can one find, accurate, up to date information? How many trillions of dollars will be spent? We do not know exactly but we have a very good idea, given the pioneering work of Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. Does the necessary austerity even touch these self-destructive, reckless and fiscally imprudent foreign entanglements?  Let me surmise that these expenditures are sacrosanct and absolutely necessary, in the Conservative World View. As to what one of CP’s colleagues at The New York Times, Paul Krugman, has to say of Mr. Ryan and his austerity plan, I have provided a link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opinion/06krugman.html

Hardly surprising that Mr. Krugman holds a less adulatory view of Mr. Ryan’s talent as economic planner, theorist, and legislator. But his essay needs no extraneous comment, pro or con. The last two sentences of CP’s latest essay are rich in his particular variety of rhetorical gems: ‘Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.’ The American Political Melodrama embraces The American Political Romance.

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.