StephenKMackSD's Blog

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.     

Is the point of Mr. Gelb’s encomium to Richard Holbrooke to satirize a whole literary genre? Or is it a tribute of one public intellectual to a man who wielded power and so a tribute to a sort of corrupt deference to a man of power by a man of the intellect? The question can remain open but it qualifies as a question worth asking. If one really wants an honest assessment of the public career of Mr. Holbrook rather than a record of his unapologetic arrogance and its attendant unbridled egotism, Robert Scheer on the truthdig website has provided the necessary antidote to the maladroit apologetics of Mr. Gelb.

https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/speaking_ill_of_the_best_and_the_brightest_20101221/?ln

Mr. Gelb can be informative as to certain fascinating details of Mr. Holbrooke’s role in the continuing American Political Melodrama and his aspiration to greatness; and the call to service in the New Imperial Mandate of the Post Cold War, but this is directly attributable to Mr. Gelb , the historian and litterateur.   

The salient points of Mr. Holbrooke’ diplomatic career are the untidy masses of corpses,  that act as makers for each one of his diplomatic endeavors. Mr. Gelb’s piece can be viewed as the tribute of one member of the American Foreign Policy establishment to another.      

The real enemy of progress is the Public Sector Unions as argued by dalelama and Mort Zuckerman among others. This is simply the tired but necessary next step in the 'starving the beast strategy' of Grover Norquist and the usual collection of political reactionaries. Add to that the New Democrats, and their conscious surrender to a 'Neo-Reaganite' politics of self-willed ignorance of the political necessity of the New Deal. And we have the bankrupt politics of the present: an amalgam of Political Romanticism and just plain greed! The attack on Public Sector Unionism is a direct and frontal attack on the central power base of the Democratic Party and is the next strategic step that The Party of No is taking, and will take, to destroy that very real and effective power of the Democratic Party. The stirring up of political hysteria is a specialty of the post-war Republican Party and they are very effective in using that strategy to meet their political objectives. dalelama is just one of the chorus of voices we will be hearing for quite sometime, till the social and political menace of Public Sector Unionism is expunged from our national life.