StephenKMackSD's Blog

If you read this long article By Walter Russell Mead you must read the devastating reply by Frank, listed as reply #8. It is masterful. Frank is on his game, and takes the space that he needs to really critique Mr. Mead point by point while maintaining his narrative pace. You must read this reply after the post by Mr. Mead. Superb!!!  

Dear Mr. Crook,

Mr. Krauthammer has set the level of debate at the level of the schoolyard taunt and you have followed suit. ‘Stupid Democrats’ has the intellectual patina of Mr. Thomas Friedman’s ‘suck on this’. A  strategy  that generates a great deal of a suspect rhetorical heat, but little light, to lapse in to a well worn cliché, although completely applicable, in this instance. Mr. Krauthammer is a propagandist, without intellectual remorse or apology. And in his column, he is at his usual endeavor of promoting his own political agenda, which may not be readily ascertainable to anyone but himself and his confreres: although the usual degradation of Mr. Obama is the operative strategy, no matter the occasion. Mr. Krauthammer confects his own reality and asks us, his readers, to share in this hasty ad hoc creation. No matter how one may approach this re-imagining of this budget compromise, it is the brain-child of an old pol casting aspersions at the party that was victorious in 2008. Although his party will have a beachhead in the New Year, framing the debate is a never-ending set of opportunities; one must plant the seeds of doubt as a matter of ongoing strategy, no matter the dubious provenance. That, in sum, could be considered the central philosophical idea of this Neo-Conservative thinker.        

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12rich.html?_r=1&hp#

Frank Rich is an indispensable ethical voice in American civic life! 

An American Public Intellectual with the cosmopolitan courage and understanding that an artist, too, has the capacity and the obligation, through their work, to illuminate all aspects of the human endeavor. That Mr. Krugman has the sagacity to remind his audience that Economics is a branch of ethics, and draws its very existence from the thought of the great moralist/ethicist/economist Adam Smith, and his unfulfilled, but commendable, project of a Science of Man. Demonstrating the indispensable notion of the primacy of sensibility and sentiment, in the growth of our individual and civic conception of morality and politics: and deepening our understanding of the vicissitudes of a marketplace, that we find ourselves in, as human and humane actors. Mr. Krugman shows us a direction for our aspiration to the good, if we but take it.