StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/opinion/01brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Here is the opening paragraph of Cockeyed Platonist’s (CP) column for February 28^th 2011:

‘We’re going to be doing a lot of deficit cutting over the next several years. The country’s future greatness will be shaped by whether we cut wisely or stupidly. So we should probably come up with a few sensible principles to guide us as we cut.’

If you are looking for something even resembling an apology or even the slightest contrition for his unstinting advocacy of ‘Free Market Economics’ and the resulting collapse of 2008, it is your own self-created mirage, a belief in a nonexistent political/intellectual good faith.  CP sounds the note of ‘shared sacrifice’, but his Republican allies are gravitating to the natural idea of the sacrifice of the many for the few. CP rehearses the notion of calm, reasonableness. The intellectual pose seems especially hollow.  Here is an example of his witless irony: ‘The future has no union.’ Yet he pleads for an ‘enlightened austerity’ to a party that has long since left the quaint notion of ‘reasonableness’ behind, as excess baggage, on the way to power. The Crash of 2008 is by omission argued as resembling a natural disaster instead of the watershed of unregulated markets lost in malfeasance, lawlessness and greed. But still the arguments for  the ‘Market’ as ultimate rationalization shines through the rather lamely constructed arguments as somehow credible, substantive and worthy of due consideration: after his bleak recital of the non-rational budget cuts being made at present. I’ll end with the two concluding paragraphs of this inexcusable, maladroit dreck.

‘During the fat years, nobody bothered to link pay to performance. Government workers and government programs got funding increases no matter how they did. This model is anathema to most Americans, especially those under 40.

This period of austerity will be a blessing if it spurs an effectiveness revolution. It will be a disaster if the cutting is done politically or mindlessly. Unfortunately, that’s often how it is being done now.’

Should we be at all surprised that Mr. Marc Thiessen’s latest column of March 1 2011, “Wisconsin and the GOP revolution” sounds all the tired notes of a perennial campaign speech? The Democratic Party’s retreat from the political battlefield in Wisconsin is celebrated as not as an adroit strategic withdrawal, but as a defeat in the hyper-masculine world of politicking. This is set against the triumphalism of a vaunted Republican Revolution winning across the country, in the House of Representatives and the acquisition of many Governorships, state legislatures and state attorney generals : these attorney generals being key to defeating ‘Obamacare’! As a seasoned political operative, Mr. Thiessen never lets an opportunity to propagandize elude him and the hyperbolic mode is the essential rhetorical pitch of the whole of his essay.  We might simply look at these mid-term elections as a mark of dissatisfaction rather than the grandiose notion of ‘revolution’. Mr. Thiessen cannot resist the urge to engage in congratulatory encomiums to the Republican leadership, to their prescient strategic acumen and wise investment of funds in the defeat of the Democrats. But we must, ourselves, put these arguments in a perspective of the turmoil Madison, Wisconsin and the echoes of ‘reform’ as argued by leading Republicans.  Here is a sample of the language of that ‘Republican Revolution’ from his essay:

“Enacting conservative reform”

“A true grass-roots policy revolution”

“Restrictions on collective bargaining”

“Collective bargaining reform”

“Push right to work legislation”

These ideas seem to be well worn arguments made by several generations of ‘Conservatives’, at least in my memory. Collective bargaining by Public Sector Unions is now seen, by some, to be unnecessary to the public welfare and an impediment to an indispensable austerity, while giving tax breaks to the top one percent of the economic strata. Hardly equitable, might be the rejoinder to these arguments. But the promotion of equity, of any kind, would surely not be the argument of any branch of extant Conservatism. An attack on Public Sector Unions, in sum, is simply an attack on the power base of the Democratic Party. It doesn’t take  political sophistication to come to that conclusion; in a time of severe economic want, it seems maladroit of the Conservatives, to attack a group so interconnected to the communities that are served by these unions. Mr. Thiessen never flags in his boldfaced Boosterism of the campaign stump, yet he focuses on the campaign year of 2016 rather than 2012. What of Obama in the year of 2012? Is the Republican Revolution not yet strong enough to contemplate or even articulate the political notion of Obama’s defeat?