StephenKMackSD's Blog

" But the deception may lead men beyond the point of illusion. Assuming that it is the property of man as a rational political animal to rule with an eye to the common good, and assuming that this state of mutual political dependence will compel men so to rule whether they intend to or not, such a distribution of functions(Gionnotti calls it amministrazione) will make men rational; umori(moods) will become virtu(virtue).But the agency precipitating them from unreason into reason is a structure of powers,arranged so that they depend upon and condition one another. Once these powers are exercised rationally, they become faculties in the individual whereby he acts rationally and politically and governs the actions of others(as they govern his) so that they act in the same way"    

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/03/AR2011010302422.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Here is Marc Thiessen returning to his weekly column at The Washington Post with a certain political swagger, as he argues for the political rehabilitation of Jesse Helms. Mr. Helms is the political precursor to the Tea Party rebellion as Mr. Thiessen argues it. Both share a penchant for a particular brand of political nihilism; but as Thiessen argues it, that is what made Mr. Helms so powerful: his ability to go for broke and dare his opposition and then to triumph over them using their willingness to compromise with his dictates, in order to move certain legislation forward. I am reminded of Trent Lott's remarks regarding Strom Thurmond's presidential run of 1948 as the same sort of wishful thinking,less maladroitly argued by Mr. Lott.
Mr. Thiessen, I think, is a speech writer of talent, which might be described as the fomentation of a usable political hysteria: using guilt by association and rabble rousing, and the versatile 'us vs. them' gambit in all its variations, to effectively neutralize opposition, in the tradition of Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. But in the case of the rehabilitation of Mr. Helms, a person whose whole persona was, to put it kindly, prickly:he was, most aptly, a precursor to the Neo- Confederate Movement. An attempt to rewrite the history of the Civil War in terms of valorizing Southern Victim-hood. Mr Thiessen is a speech writer but the job of this rehabilitation will take a concerted effort of many individual voice, working in harmony to effect this kind of revisionism. Mr. Thiessen has begun this process, inauspiciously, but his column is the first and probably not the last, to cast the public person of Jesse Helms in the light of the civic republican hero.    

     

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/scalia-women-discrimination-constitution_n_803813.html

Let me disagree with the characterization of Marcia Greenberger in regards to the comments of Justice Scalia as ‘shocking’. There is nothing ‘shocking’, prima facie, in the comments of Scalia regarding women, women’s rights etc., they are in fact totally predictable and Ms. Greenberger doesn’t use the opportunity to speak to the intelligence of her audience but panders to level of propaganda; the stilted language of the ‘press release’. Scalia is a political romantic and his ‘philosophy’ flows from the concept of unbridled male power and its care and maintenance. ‘Originalism’ then grows out of that romanticism as simply a reification of his naturally felt and expressed superiority. What counts here is not appealing to an utterly bankrupt press but to historically verifiable actualities. Conservatism is by its very nature about the privileging of male power as beyond the appeals of reason or even the changing nature of our political/ethical world as it evolves into the future: heedless of the political or moral will of a minority of ‘thinkers’ and ‘activists judges’ who resemble King John ordering the tides to cease: this being a definition of the utter futility of the sovereign male in all his guises.