Before you read Stephen’s polemic, or my comment, it might help the reader to view Brian Lamb’s revelatory interview of 2006 with Bret Stephens.
Q&A
Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens discussed how he became a member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, his interest in political philosophy, his thoughts on the various opinions about the Iraq war, and other topics in the news.
Headline: The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
Mr. Stephens is insufferably arrogant, I will save the word ‘hubris’ for its place in the critical evaluation of Greek Drama. Mr. Stephens is a propagandist, who was Editor of the Jerusalem Post, the propaganda arm of The Zionist State. And then a member of the Editorial Board for the Wall Street Journal. Then to the New York Times, where he demonstrated that talent for arrogance, by no longer posting at twitter. He was used too having that ego stroked- the unsparing, unvarnished critical evaluations of the lesser beings of Planet Earth, sent Mr. Stephens into a tizzy!
Note: The first three paragraphs of Bret Stephen’s … where he walks among ‘The Great Unwashed’:
On Saturday morning in southern Israel, Hamas murdered hundreds of people at a music festival and kidnapped others at gunpoint to serve as human shields in Gaza. On Sunday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, a speaker at a rally of pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups celebrated that atrocity — one of thousands suffered by Israelis over the past few days, which we later learned included the killing of babies and toddlers.
“As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker said. “But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what The New York Post says.” He was met with cheers.
I went to see the rally for myself: Would there be even perfunctory condemnation of Hamas’s methods? A brief nod of sympathy to Israel’s anguish? Some banal nod to the cause of peace and nonviolence? Not that I heard. What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric.
Before you read Stephen’s polemic, or my comment, it might help the reader to view Brian Lamb’s revelatory interview of 2006 with Bret Stephens.
Q&A
Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens discussed how he became a member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, his interest in political philosophy, his thoughts on the various opinions about the Iraq war, and other topics in the news.
Headline: The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself
Mr. Stephens is insufferably arrogant, I will save the word ‘hubris’ for its place in the critical evaluation of Greek Drama. Mr. Stephens is a propagandist, who was Editor of the Jerusalem Post, the propaganda arm of The Zionist State. And then a member of the Editorial Board for the Wall Street Journal. Then to the New York Times, where he demonstrated that talent for arrogance, by no longer posting at twitter. He was used too having that ego stroked- the unsparing, unvarnished critical evaluations of the lesser beings of Planet Earth, sent Mr. Stephens into a tizzy!
Note: The first three paragraphs of Bret Stephen’s … where he walks among ‘The Great Unwashed’:
On Saturday morning in southern Israel, Hamas murdered hundreds of people at a music festival and kidnapped others at gunpoint to serve as human shields in Gaza. On Sunday afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, a speaker at a rally of pro-Palestinian and left-wing groups celebrated that atrocity — one of thousands suffered by Israelis over the past few days, which we later learned included the killing of babies and toddlers.
“As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker said. “But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what The New York Post says.” He was met with cheers.
I went to see the rally for myself: Would there be even perfunctory condemnation of Hamas’s methods? A brief nod of sympathy to Israel’s anguish? Some banal nod to the cause of peace and nonviolence? Not that I heard. What I saw was giddiness and gloating, as if someone’s team had won the World Cup. Hamas had perpetrated the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the crowd was euphoric.
Note: It doesn’t quite reach Stephens’ consciousness, whatever that might be? that cell phone recordings of Israeli Soldiers kidnapping children, attacking Palestinian worshipers, Israelis Invading and desecrating al-Aqsa Mosque, shooting to death Palestinians in the street, and letting them die, denying them lifesaving Medical Aid, settlers eviting Palestinians from their homes, and myriad other Crimes against other human beings- this collection of savagery goes against the deeply held beliefs of human beings across the World! Should it surprise that a propagandist, Stephens is unable to connect, to that singular belief in the dignity of the person, as the sine qua non of the Human Endeavor? And that the Story of a Victory of The Slaves, over their Masters is a part of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious traditions. That Slave/Master dialectic is even an intergyral part of Hegel’s Phenomenology of The Spirit.
Stephen’s favorite role is to play victim, yet as David Klion points out, he is a child of privelidge,
…
Conservative pundit tropes weren’t the only thing young Bret absorbed while growing up in Mexico City. Speaking at an interfaith conference in Jerusalem in 2003, Bret recalled being raised by secular Jewish parents and receiving no religious education or Bar Mitzvah, but nonetheless confronting “a hostile environment for Jews.” This, at least, was how Bret justified what to me reads as contempt for the vast majority of Mexicans. According to Israel Insider, “Stephens saw Catholicism as practiced in Mexico with its heavy pagan influences as ‘primitive.’” He changed his mind when he left Mexico for university and met American Christians.
“It was a revelation to me that you could be a sincere Christian and not be a peasant,” he said. According to Israel Insider, “As he became more committed to Israel, it was hard not to notice […] that it was Christian conservatives who were amongst the most supportive of Israel.”
In other words, Bret came around on Christians after he met some who were white (and pro-Israel). But while Bret’s views on Christianity may have evolved, his subsequent publicly expressed opinions of Arabs and Muslims seem to echo his earlier attitude toward the “primitive” Mexican “peasants.”
Bret spent most of the first 14 years of his life in Mexico, but then attended an elite boarding school in Massachusetts, followed by the University of Chicago. He initially hoped to major in anthropology (he wanted to be Indiana Jones) but found his first course in the discipline “kind of grim and political and tedious.” He therefore opted for political philosophy, which allowed him to stay comfortably within the Western canon under the mentorship of the neoconservative scholar Leon Kass, who would eventually become known for advising George W. Bush to ban stem-cell research.
Political Cynic comments, and contemplates the toxic Legacy of Leo Strauss.
The New York Times has become the Official Newspaper of The American National Security State. David Brooks is one its many apologists on the ‘Editorial Page’. Yet nothing quite prepares The Reader for this maladroit political kitsch:
Headline: Can We Talk About Joe Biden? Oct. 6, 2023
Where might The Reader begin her political archology of Brooks’ 3368 word political hagiography of Biden? Recalling that the Neo-Conservative/Straussian propaganda strategy, is to exhaust the patience, in tandem with the critical faculty of The Reader, with an avalanche of words, ideas, speculations, and worshipful commentary, not to mention a Cast of Characters almost worthy of that Hollywood Hack, Cecil B, DeMille.
These paragraphs is what Raymond Chandler would have called ‘Hollywood Vomit’, adhering to the ‘Hollywood Theme’ :
Nearly two decades ago, I tried to write a group biography about the senators whose offices happened to be on the second floor of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. The group included John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel. I got to know and study each of those senators during that long-ago-abandoned project.
The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.
Our politics have gotten rougher over the ensuing years but that hasn’t dampened Biden’s basic humanity. When he was vice president, I remember a searing meeting with him shortly after his son Beau died, his grief raw and on the surface. And like many, I’ve felt the beam of his empathy and care myself. A year and a half ago, the day after my oldest friend fell victim to suicide, Biden heard about it and called me to offer comfort. He just let me talk about my friend and through his words and tone of voice joined me in the suffering. I experienced the solace of being seen.
He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.
…
The video from 1993 contradicts Brook’s apologetic, from the mouth of Biden!
Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon.
Identify this paragraph as what? The Powerful comforting each other? And Brooks’ ‘experienced the solace of being seen’, more moralizing chatter. Think of Mitt Romney’s sons hurt looks, in their eyes, as another teachable moment in the Moral Awakening of Brooks, through the ‘camera’ of his opinion column.
When he was vice president, I remember a searing meeting with him shortly after his son Beau died, his grief raw and on the surface. And like many, I’ve felt the beam of his empathy and care myself. A year and a half ago, the day after my oldest friend fell victim to suicide, Biden heard about it and called me to offer comfort. He just let me talk about my friend and through his words and tone of voice joined me in the suffering. I experienced the solace of being seen.
Yet The Reader has just reached 311 words, of this 3,370 word, what to name it?
Might a list of the Cast of Characters of this Political Melodrama be instructive as to the intent of Brooks?
John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel
Beau Biden
my oldest friend fell victim to suicide,
Donald Trump
Democrats
ABC poll
three-quarters of American voters
Democrats under 30
a Trumpian Götterdämmerung.
The Conversation over and over again
Some Democrats
Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, California
Ted Kennedy weakened Jimmy Carter in 1980
Pat Buchanan hurt George H.W. Bush in 1992.
rank-and-file Democrats
Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey
Note: Brooks political moralizing:
I’ve tried to set aside my affection for the man and look anew at the question of Biden and 2024: Should we really do this?
Note: Biden’s age
he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87.
he is more crisp and focused than he used to be
Biden is fit, does not smoke or drink alcohol
both men could qualify as “super-agers”
public anxieties on this front will diminish.
Note: Bidens accomplishments:
Biden’s domestic legislative accomplishments are as impressive as any other president’s in my adult life.
Biden’s team overlearned the lessons of the Obama years.
Anger about inflation is ripping across the world,
Note: Approval Ratings:
Biden’s 40 percent approval rating may look bad
Justin Trudeau 36 , Olaf Scholz29,Rishi Sunak 28, Emmanuel Macron 23, Japan Fumio Kishida 23.
Trump 38 on leaving office, Today, 48 percent.
Americans now trust Trump
Inflation: American Jaundice.
Note: The American Mood
Bitterness, cynicism and distrust pervade the body politic.
At 3.8 percent, America’s unemployment rate is objectively low, but 57 percent of voters say that the unemployment rate is “not so good” or “poor.”
The nation’s bitter state of mind is a self-perpetuating negativity machine.
The bracing reality is that Trump’s cynicism and fury match the national mood more than Biden’s faithful optimism.
“They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently.
Note: A return to Politics
“They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently.
First, there is the Kamala Harris problem
People can make an all-star wish list of other Democratic nominees, but in the real world there is simply no easy way to push Harris aside.
As a former Obama administration official, Dan Pfeiffer, has pointed out, Biden has higher favorability ratings among Democrats than Trump does among Republicans
Finally, and most important, when you really start to imagine what it would look like if the Democrats didn’t nominate Biden, one whopping issue becomes clear.
Note: Brooks puts The New Democrats and Republicans on The Couch?
A lot of the dump-Biden conversations are based on a false premise
But Biden is not the sole or even primary problem here.
…it’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s ailing
…Morning Consult poll, Americans rate the Democratic Party as a whole as the more ideologically extreme party by a nine-point margin.
In a recent Gallup poll 53 percent of Americans say Republicans will do a better job of keeping America prosperous over the short term while only 39 percent thought that of the Democrats.
Note: Performative Narcissist
Here are the hard, unpleasant facts: The Republicans have a likely nominee who is facing 91 charges. The Republicans in Congress are so controlled by a group of performative narcissists the whole House has been reduced to chaos. And yet they are still leading the Democrats in these sorts of polling measures.
Note: Political Nostalgia appears:
When I think back to the glory days of the Democratic Party, the days of the New Deal and the Great Society, even to the days when Joe Biden was a young senator being mentored by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party was at its core a working- and middle-class party. Over the last half century, the Democrats have become increasingly the party of the well-educated metropolitan class
Note: ‘The well-educated metropolitan class’ is another way of saying the obvious, that Brooks hasn’t the balls to make, that The New Democrats, in the Persons of the Clintons, betrayed the New Deal Tradition, and became full fledged partners in The Neo-Liberal Swindle: that Crashed with a thud in 2008.
Note: The political watershed of The New Democrats:
It is not news that the Democrats have been losing white working-class voters ever since the emergence of the Reagan Democrats. But today, the party is bleeding working-class voters of all varieties.
Note: The New Democrats on the Couch again, with a nauseating dose of Brooks’ Old Time Political Religion
But Democrats are losing something arguably more important than a reliable base of supporters. The party is in danger of letting go of an ethos, a heritage, a tradition. The working-class heart and soul the Democrats cultivated through the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy years rooted Democratic progressivism in a set of values that emphasized hard work, neighborhood, faith, family and flag. Being connected to Americans’ everyday experiences kept the party pinioned to the mainstream
Note: The Patient Reader is near the end of this -diatribe is the wrong word , as Brooks mimes the journalistic ethos, while writing unconvincing political propaganda. He was the political protégé of William Buckley Jr. whose very politics were steeped in mendacity. Reader your are close to the end’ so let me clear away the underbrush?
As the party became dominated by the more educated activist and media sectors, it lost touch with some of what can be called its psychological and emotional power sources.
This is what happened in 2020. There were moments in that campaign when it looked as if Bernie Sanders was going to run away with the race, sending the party into uncharted ideological waters. Most of the other candidates sprinted leftward.
Joe Biden was nominated in 2020 because he was the cure to this malady. He was the guy most plainly with roots in the working and middle class. He was the guy who didn’t engage in the culture war and identity politics theatrics.
And that is the fact I keep returning to. Biden is not what ails the party. As things stand, he is the Democrats’ best shot at curing what ails the party.
There is no other potential nominee who is so credibly steeped in knowing what life is like for working- and middle-class people, just as there was no other potential nominee in 2020. After watching him for a quarter century, I think he is genuinely most comfortable when he is hanging around the kinds of people he grew up with.
These cultural and spiritual roots give him not just a style but a governing agenda. He has used the presidency to direct resources to those who live in the parts of the country where wages are lower, where education levels are lower, where opportunities are skimpier. Biden’s ethos harks back to the ethos of the New Deal Democratic Party, but it also harks forward to something — to a form of center-left politics that is culturally moderate and economically aggressive. Aggressive in investing resources in the left-behind places, aggressive in using industrial policy to revive manufacturing, green tech and other industries, aggressive in using federal largess to bolster the care economy. His administration has put racial justice at the top of the agenda. It has moved the party beyond the technocratic centrism of the Clinton-Obama years.
But I also find myself arriving foursquare at the conclusion that rejecting the president now would be, in the first place, a mistake. He offers the most plausible route toward winning the working- and middle-class groups the Democrats need, the most plausible route toward building a broad-based majority party.
But it would be worse than a mistake. It would be a renunciation of the living stream of people, ideas and values that flow at the living depths of the party, a stream that propelled its past glories and still points toward future ones.
Political Observer wonders at this political intervention.
Recall the ascent and reign of Janan Ganesh,of another time? Those apt quotations from an obscure L.A. restaurant critic ? Or even a quote from American Silver-Fork gargoyle Tom Wolfe? In his latest essay he resorts to a map, from that 19th Century Antique, The Economist. This is his framing device for a convoluted apologetic for the Tory leaders: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak as not ‘hard right’. Should a report on the malign incompetence, of these political actors be forth coming? Certainly not from Mr. Ganesh, whose desperate search leads to a critique of ‘hard right’ , ‘Populist-governed’, ‘Rassemblement National’, ‘Alternative for Germany’.
‘Europe Since 1989’ offers an invaluable history of Europe, and the long term political toxin of Neo-Liberalism.
…
Philipp Ther—a firsthand witness to many of the transformations, from Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution to postcommunist Poland and Ukraine—offers a sweeping narrative filled with vivid details and memorable stories. He describes how liberalization, deregulation, and privatization had catastrophic effects on former Soviet Bloc countries. He refutes the idea that this economic “shock therapy” was the basis of later growth, arguing that human capital and the “transformation from below” determined economic success or failure. Most important, he shows how the capitalist West’s effort to reshape Eastern Europe in its own likeness ended up reshaping Western Europe as well, in part by accelerating the pace and scope of neoliberal reforms in the West, particularly in reunified Germany. Finally, bringing the story up to the present, Ther compares events in Eastern and Southern Europe leading up to and following the 2008–9 global financial crisis.
…
See Chapter 4 : Getting on the Neo-Liberal Bandwagon, and Chapter 5: Second -Wave Neo-Liberalism, for the toxic legacy of Neo-Liberalism, in the former satellites of the Soviet Union.
The opening of the Ganesh’s essay:
I am looking at a map of Europe from a recent edition of The Economist. Each country is rendered in a shade of red according to its level of public support for the hard right: the higher, the darker. Populist-governed Italy is Ferrari-red. So are Poland and Hungary. France, where the Rassemblement National might win the next presidential election, and Germany, where the Alternative for Germany is polling second, are a sort of trout-fillet colour. Spain, Portugal and most of Scandinavia are one shade lighter.
Britain? Barely as pink as this newspaper. Only Ireland, Iceland, Lithuania and Malta (combined population 9mn) are paler still. If we define the hard right as a force outside, and more extreme than, a nation’s traditional centre-right party, then Britain hasn’t got a hard right to reckon with. One MP out of the 650 represents a movement of that description, and he is a Conservative defector who has never won election under his new banner. In the local elections of 2022 and 2023, extremists got almost nowhere. Make fun of the UK’s unbuilt train lines. Despair of its featherweight politicians. Just give the country its due as Europe’s haven of moderation.
…
A selection of Ganeshisms:
…
But conflating it with Viktor Orbán, or Giorgia Meloni, is whataboutery at its sour and desperate worst. Which hard-right party in Europe would fill three of the great offices of state with non-white descendants of immigrants?
… It shouldn’t be a liberal taboo to say that Britain outdoes the continent at some things, including, for now, the containment of extremists. Or to ask how the country has done it.
…
Those in the UK who campaign for proportional representation should view contemporary Europe as a warning, not a template.
… We could go into the yet deeper past to explain the failure of the UK’s hard right. The nation has for centuries had a relatively weak church. (French, Italian and Polish populists are often tied up with a certain kind of Catholicism.) Then there is the capacious nature of Britishness itself. Because of the creation in 1707 of that single state, from the kingdoms of England and Scotland, the country had early exposure to the idea that nationhood needn’t be grounded on common ethnic stock. Throw in sheer geographic distance from the “east”, and Britain is unpromising soil for a faith-and-flag, Russia-smitten, Orbán-style movement.
…
Well, the spread of plausible outcomes at the next UK election is a centre-right government or a centre-left one. It shouldn’t feel as transgressive as it does to say that Europe’s other democracies should be so lucky.
As a measure of the misrule/ incompetence of the reign of the Tories: Here is an issue that would never occur to Janan Ganesh!
Headline: One in seven Britons faced hunger in 2022, says food bank charity
3 mln food parcels provided by Trussell Trust in 2022/23 year
Ineffective social security system blamed
LONDON, June 28 (Reuters) – One in seven people in the United Kingdom faced hunger last year because they did not have enough money, according to a report published on Wednesday by food bank charity the Trussell Trust.
It said this equates to 11.3 million people, more than double the population of Scotland, and blamed a dysfunctional social security system, as well as a cost of living crisis that is showing little sign of easing.
Britain is the world’s sixth-biggest economy but its citizens have been pressured for more than a year by high inflation which has outstripped pay growth for almost all workers.
Government forecasters estimate UK households are in the midst of the biggest two-year squeeze in living standards since comparable records started in the 1950s.
The Trussell Trust’s network of 1,300 food bank centres across the UK provided a record 3 million food parcels in the year to March, up 37% and more than double the amount provided five years ago.
“This consistent upward trajectory exposes that it is weaknesses in the social security system that are driving food bank need, rather than just the pandemic or cost of living crisis,” it said.
The charity said that 7% of the UK population was supported by charitable food support, including food banks, yet 71% of people facing hunger had not yet accessed any form of charitable food support.
It also noted that one in five people forced to turn to food banks in its network are in a working household and called on the UK government to ensure the benefits system covers essential costs.
In the Political/Moral Universe of Gideon Rachman ‘The West’ is a place holder for the American Hegemon, and its imperial self-delusions- yet the record of the utter incompetence of this hegemon is instructive: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and this latest debacle in Ukraine! The watershed of America’s ‘War On Terror’ was catastrophic:
This paragraph, my or may not place my thought, about Rachman’s attachment to The West/American Hegemon, in doubt?
But this argument misses a vital point. The US killed dangerous enemies, such as Osama bin Laden, when they were in countries where it was regarded as futile to try and use the local justice system. But the Americans do not kill alleged terrorists when they are on the territory of allied democracies. Even the Israelis are not believed to have assassinated anybody in the west since a killing in Paris more than 30 years ago
I have put in bold font the final sentence of the above paragraph. Rachman has missed and or avoided these revelatory reports? The West does not include Iran? Since Iran is beyond the pale, in that ‘rules based order’ ?
This final sentence of Rachman’s demonstrates his deep attachment to the passé mythology, of that hallowed ‘order’.
The “rules-based order” may turn out to have some meaning, after all.
Final thoughts: Rachman’s tepid critique of Narendra Modi, reminds this Reader of Isaiah Berlin’s test of a person, a male, was weather he was ‘clubbable’… this is the political territory that fellow Oxbridger Rachman- the thin ice that he skates over. In the process the Reader is not reminded of the Pogram’s committed against Muslims in India , nor the punishment/shaming of Muslim children in Indian schools!
Some excerpts from The Politico obituary byDavid Cohen;
…
She actually had come close to giving up politics in 1978, convinced she was never going to be elected mayor of San Francisco. Instead, she was thrust into the position that November when Mayor George Moscone and fellow City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected official, were shot to death in City Hall by a fellow politician. After that horrifying event, she would lend a healing calm to her city — and then guide it through the AIDS crisis that followed.
“She turned out to be the right leader for the time,” David Talbot wrote years later in “Season of the Witch,” a chronicle of those harrowing days.
“The hatred was so big,” Feinstein said years later, “we really had to bring the bricks of the city together again, and it was difficult.”
Editor: 1978 Political Melodrama doesn’t age well, but in the care and maintenance of Politico, it blossoms in to an ersatz hagiography.
The trail-blazing Feinstein
“Toughness doesn’t have to come in a pinstripe suit,”
Feinstein “got shit done by working with people on both sides of the aisle and refusing to get caught up in unnecessary nonsense,” John Burton, a former California Democratic Party chair, said when Feinstein had announced her intention to retire from the Senate on Feb. 14, 2023.
“As a woman who stormed into the male world of city and national politics when it was an actual boys’ club, she’s had to put up with more rudeness and bullying than many of us can imagine,” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan wrote in 2019.
Progressives in California didn’t always find her sufficiently liberal, but her work ethic was widely praised. Feinstein strove to be seen as a consequential senator who passed legislation.
…
P.O. Not one word about Feinstein Iraq War vote.
Headline: War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan
WASHINGTON — I’ve always said that the Washington Monument is an apt symbol, a Freudian obelisk redolent of all the male egos that have shaped our capital.
To appreciate what Dianne Feinstein accomplished, you need to know how male this city was in 1992, when she was swept into Congress in the “Year of the Woman” as the 18th female senator in history.
That wave was buoyed by women’s anger at the vicious Republicans and inept Democrats on the white male Judiciary Committee overseeing the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. A sexual harasser lied his way onto the Supreme Court, and now he is doing his best to corrupt it.
These women arrived on the Hill, home to historic man caves, as the journalist Jackie Calmes called the hideaways where male pols horse-traded, sipped whisky and played poker. When one new lawmaker stepped into the House elevator, the female operator said icily, “This elevator is for members only.”
…
Several years ago, Senator Feinstein invited me to her house one evening for a drink. I was very excited. I’d watched male columnists play golf with presidents and go drinking with male lawmakers for a long time, and now at last I was going to be ushered into an inner sanctum.
The very proper senator sat with a small dog on her lap in her elegant living room as we had a glass of wine. She didn’t want to spin me on anything or break news. She just wanted to chat. It turned out that DiFi, as she was known, regularly organized dinners with female journalists and mentored women in Congress; she often said that Washington could be a lonely, hard and mean place, especially for women breaking barriers.
…
P.O. Not one word about Feinstein Iraq War vote.
Headline: War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan
P.O. After Ted Kennedy Death, he was dubbed ‘The Lion of the Senate’, its not a honorific, but an expression of political kitsch!
This historic figure of the Democratic Party and dean of the US Senate died on Thursday, at the age of 90. In 1978, she became the first woman to become mayor of San Francisco, before serving as a California senator for over 30 years.
…
A few hours before her death, after a final vote shortly before 2 pm, she had received her former colleague Jane Harman, elected like her in 1992, known as ‘the year of women’ due to the number of women entering Congress. An emotional Harman showed what is probably the last photo of the California senator. She is seen standing, thinner, but with glasses in hand and adorned with her customary string of pearls: at work. On Friday morning, a bouquet of white roses was placed on her desk in the Senate. “We look at that desk and we know what we’ve lost,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the upper chamber, her colleague of 30 years. “Today, there are 25 women serving in this chamber,” he said. “And every one of them would admit they stand on Dianne’s shoulders.”
…
P.O. Jane Harman was a notorious Neo-Con War Monger, ‘the year of women’ proved that Women, can be as corrupt and malfeasant as any man. Note that Feinstein had to be coached to say ‘ay’ to a vote, in her finale days. The Reader is rewarded in the remainder of this Funeral Oration chock-a-block with personal/political melodrama. Not one mention of :
Headline: War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan
She actually had come close to giving up politics in 1978, convinced she was never going to be elected mayor of San Francisco. Instead, she was thrust into the position that November when Mayor George Moscone and fellow City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected official, were shot to death in City Hall by a fellow politician. After that horrifying event, she would lend a healing calm to her city — and then guide it through the AIDS crisis that followed.
“She turned out to be the right leader for the time,” David Talbot wrote years later in “Season of the Witch,” a chronicle of those harrowing days.
“The hatred was so big,” Feinstein said years later, “we really had to bring the bricks of the city together again, and it was difficult.”
…
Editor: 1978 Political Melodrama doesn’t age well, but in the care and maintenance of Politico, it blossoms in to an ersatz hagiography.
The trail-blazing Feinstein
“Toughness doesn’t have to come in a pinstripe suit,”
Feinstein “got shit done by working with people on both sides of the aisle and refusing to get caught up in unnecessary nonsense,” John Burton, a former California Democratic Party chair, said when Feinstein had announced her intention to retire from the Senate on Feb. 14, 2023.
“As a woman who stormed into the male world of city and national politics when it was an actual boys’ club, she’s had to put up with more rudeness and bullying than many of us can imagine,” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan wrote in 2019.
Progressives in California didn’t always find her sufficiently liberal, but her work ethic was widely praised. Feinstein strove to be seen as a consequential senator who passed legislation.
Editor: More Feinstein Political Melodrama:
It was Feinstein who found Milk after White had shot him five times, and it was Feinstein who desperately tried to save him.
And then it was Feinstein who went out to meet the assembled press and then announced: “Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.” Some gasped, some cried out. And Feinstein then added: “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”
“In the course of that terrible day, Feinstein had become the leader the city needed,” Talbot wrote. “As she began to speak, she found the right words to express San Francisco’s howling pain and to make people believe that the broken city could be put back together.”
Bill Carrick, her longtime campaign consultant, said in 2023: “She basically did a really good job of keeping the city stabilized.”
“Feinstein is sometimes described as a centrist, but it is because her views are varied, not because they are mild; she thinks of herself, more accurately, as a pragmatist,” The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck wrote of her in 2015.
Feinstein also became an influential figure through her role on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Generally, she was supportive of the needs of American intelligence and the institutions themselves. She was, for instance, critical of Edward Snowden when he leaked NSA secrets and fled the country. “He has taken an oath,” Feinstein said in 2013. “These oaths mean something. If you can’t keep the oath, get out. And then do something about it in a legal way.”
For six years, she found herself at odds with the Obama administration and the CIA over her efforts to compile and release a massive report on interrogation tactics that the Bush administration adopted after 9/11. In particular, Feinstein was disturbed by the existence of “black sites,” where torture could be practiced on terror suspects far from official eyes.
“It was six years of work, it was staff that worked, you know, night and day, weekends on this,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash. “The report itself is over 7,000 pages, over 32,000 footnotes.”
Editor : On and on the careful, and selective reportage, on the political virtues of Feinstein… yet one very important aspect of her Senate tenure is missing. What of Feinstein’s vote on the Iraq War, she delayed the vote , what might her reasons have been?
Headline: War brings business to Feinstein spouse / Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan
When it comes to scoring mega-military-related contracts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein‘s multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, is right in the thick of things.
First up: a contract announced last week between the Army and URS Corp., the San Francisco planning and engineering company that specializes in defense work — and that happens to be partly owned by Blum’s investment firm.
The contract — which could grow to $600 million — is to help with troop mobilization, weapons systems training and anti-terrorism methods.
That’s on top of a $3.1 billion Army contract that URS snared back in February for weapons systems and homeland defense.
Next up: Perini Corp., which qualified earlier this month for as much as $100 million of defense work in Iraq and elsewhere. The Massachusetts-based company is already busy building barracks and other facilities for the new Afghan army — a separate contract worth $28 million.
Blum’s investment firm controls about 20 percent of Perini’s shares, with the majority held by a group of investors led by company chairman Ron Tutor.
Some of Perini’s stock is also held by Tutor’s West Coast construction company, Tutor-Saliba — the firm that built the Los Angeles subway system, rebuilt the Oakland Coliseum and put BART into San Francisco International Airport.
Headline: Whether it’s 2030 or 2035, if we don’t have enough electricity we’ll never get to net zero
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As recent events have made abundantly clear, our modern economy runs on energy. The net zero agenda involves three simultaneous, enormous transformations in how that works. First, a massive increase in the amount of electricity we use, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of our energy mix. Second, a massive increase in the amount of it generated by nuclear and/or renewables. Third, a massive decentralisation of the National Grid, to accommodate numerous tiny power sources and storage media (solar panels, car batteries, etc) rather than a few big power stations.
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But that’s only the start of the obstacles. We need to create the right investment incentives, at a time when everyone in the world is competing for green projects — which is putting a corresponding crimp on supply chains.
Note that Colvile stays close to the Globalist Agenda, of ‘Western De-Industrialization’ as the future: rather than a Re-Industrialization, as the antidote to the utterly botched ‘Supply-Chain’ once the cornerstone, of the Neo-Liberal Mythology during the Covid Epidemic? Consider also the political consequences of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak: this New York Times report of by Emma Bubola reporting from London of Jan. 25, 2023 provides an answer.
Headline: In U.K. Cost-of-Living Crisis, Some Workers Struggle to Feed Children
Sub-headline: As inflation hits the pockets of families who already had little to spare, food banks say they are getting much busier and seeing more people with jobs.
As the cost of grocery shopping and heating homes have hit records in recent months, the signs of distress are everywhere. The BBC has published dozens of online recipes costing less than a pound, or about $1.23, per portion. Some schools have turned down their heaters. And many communities have opened “warm spaces” — heated public rooms for people with cold homes.
But in Britain, one of the world’s richest countries, among the most shocking signs of the cost-of-living crisis is that a growing number of workers are struggling to feed their children.
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Employment growth has left Britain with fewer out-of-work households, but many of those who found work still did not reach a decent standard of living, which left them vulnerable when inflation hit a 41-year high a few months ago, and wages failed to keep up.
Austerity measures under a decade of Conservative-led governments have also eaten away at the benefits paid to many low-income families, including working households. Since 2016, Britain has had one of the highest minimum wages in the world for most workers, benefiting some of the lowest earners. But many of them still cannot find enough hours of work, and the income of low earners has grown more slowly in Britain than in some other Western countries including Germany and France.
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To Colevile The Hungry Masses lacks the journalistic appeal of Policy?
Michael Flavin offers in his ‘Benjamin Disraeli : The Novels as Political Discourse’ :
some insights into an alterative view of Colevile’s addiction to high-flown Neo-Liberal Policy Chatter. Can Disraeli’s novel Sybil offer substance, as opposed to Colevile’s self-serving commentary?
Sybil
Page 97
Morley’s contributions contributions to this first conversations could have come from Disraeli himself, or from the heroes of his many novels: ‘it is a community of purpose that constitutes society…. In the great cities men are brought together by the desire for gain. They are not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation , as to making fortunes; and for all the rest they are careful of neighbors’ (pp. 75-6). Morley argues for the alienating effects of industrialization and the morally corrosive nature of the blind pursuit of profit. When Morley replies to Egremont’s observation that ‘we live in strange times’, stating , ‘when the infant begins to walk, it also thinks that it lives in strange times, (p. 76) the reader could be forgiven for thinking of Sidonia. Morley’s address concludes with the most well- known passage in the whole of Disraeli’s fiction.
‘Well, society may be in its infancy, ‘ said Egremont, slightly smiling; ‘but say what you like , our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’
‘Which nation?’ asked an young stranger, ‘for she reigns over two,’
The stranger paused; Egremont was silent for but looked inquiringly.
‘Yes’ resumed the young stranger after a moment’s interval. ‘Two nations : between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are dwellers in different zones , or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding , are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws’
‘You speak of ______’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.
‘The RICH AND The POOR’ , (pp 76-7)
The formula , attributed generally to Disraeli (but has been shown , originally constructed in essence by Carlyle), caught on: ‘the “two nations” became a household word, perhaps the most famous of all Disraeli’s inventions’ according to Blake. Furthermore, Disraeli utilized the image again in a speech in Lady Londonderry’s grounds in 1848, using an architectural metonym to convey the same principal; ‘the palace is not safe when a cottage is not happy’,
Moreover, Disraeli’s dualistic formulation had (according to to Kathleen Tillotson) a considerable influence throughout the novel genre : ‘ this then came more and more to occupy novelists in the forties.
Most novel-readers belonged to the other nation; the novelists were scouts who had crossed the frontier or penetrated the iron curtain and brought back their reports. In this sense , prior to the exotic geographical journey described in Tancred, Disraeli had undertaken a similarly thrilling journey in Sybil , bringing to his middle and upper-class readers an insight into the strange and dangerous world which threatened to destroy their sense of stability, ‘Two Nations ‘ implied antagonism , suggesting that society was in a perilous condition.
Did Janan Ganesh read David Brooks’ essay in praise for Mitt Romney of September 14, 2023? Its a pressing question? Or just a question of ‘Great Minds Think Alike’ ? probably a question that will remain unanswered ? Brooks essay is a narrative about his own personal redemption, from his own prejudice against Romney, framed by:
I crossed paths with two of Mitt Romney’s sons, and they looked at me with hurt in their eyes, which pierced me. I’d ridiculed people for the sin of being admirable.
This model of Political Kitsch, is a denatured version of Johnathan Edwards!
Editor: a sampler of Ganeshisms
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At least he doesn’t have to podcast. The king’s ransom he made at Bain Capital will ensure that. Whatever disappointments, indignities and mortal threats US politics has visited on Mitt Romney, his retirement needn’t be spent asking people to leave a review on iTunes.
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There are no prizes for being right. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney made healthcare reforms that inspired Obamacare, which now commands about 60 per cent public support. And this isn’t the biggest vindication on his record. A decade before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he identified Russia as a geopolitical threat. The response of the sitting president was to crack a joke.
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Then there was his (eventual) opposition to Donald Trump. It won’t do to overpraise him here. In 2012, he crawled to the then host of The Apprentice for a presidential endorsement, and got it. He was still shilly-shallying as late as 2018. But, when moral clarity came, it was acted upon with physical courage. Romney voted to convict Trump in both impeachment trials.
Editor: I stated that I would restrict my comments to the American context, but Ganesh’s lack of credibility on Stewart’s suggestion about Corbyn, I can’t resist pointing to Stewart, as presented by Ganesh, as the worst of all possible political creatures, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn . ‘This month, he suggested to what is left of the Jeremy Corbyn movement that their man was hard done by’. Mr. Ganesh is incurious? He might read another Newspaper, as a check against his employers publication… ? But The Reader is witness to the whole of the British Press’s dishonesty, that amounts to a conspiracy against Corbyn!
Headline: Anti-Corbyn Labour officials worked to lose general election to oust leader, leaked dossier finds
Sub-headline Call for investigation into ‘possible misuse of funds’ by senior officials on party’s right wing
Labour party officials opposed to Jeremy Corbyn worked to lose the 2017 general election in the hope that a bad result would trigger a leadership contest to oust him, a dossier drawn up by the party suggests.
A huge cache of leaked WhatsApp messages and emails show senior officials from the party’s right wing, who worked at its HQ, became despondent as Labour climbed in the polls during the election campaign despite their efforts.
The unreleased report, which The Independent has seen in full, was drawn up in the last days of Mr Corbyn’s leadership and concerns the conduct of certain officials, including some who were investigating cases of antisemitism in the party. Labour has confirmed the document is a genuine draft, though it is not clear who it was commissioned or written by.
The 860-page document claims that “an abnormal intensity of factional opposition to the party leader” had “inhibited the proper functioning of the Labour Party bureaucracy” and contributed to “a litany of mistakes” in dealing with antisemitism, which it admits was a serious problem in the party.
But the Campaign Against Antisemitism said the document was a “desperate last-ditch attempt to deflect and discredit allegations” and amounted to “an attempt to imagine a vast anti-Corbyn conspiracy”.
Stewart is not, ultimately, of nation-leading fibre. Like lots of lone wolves who become popular later in life (the podcast he co-hosts, The Rest Is Politics, is a monstrous success), he is too anxious to remain so. This month, he suggested to what is left of the Jeremy Corbyn movement that their man was hard done by. Pandering like this doesn’t exude, to use his favourite word, “seriousness”.
But if these aren’t tragic men, exactly, their stories do reveal politics as a tragic craft: one that offers no incentive to be right.
Editor: I’ll resort to a bit of rhetorical pruning, in the face of Ganesh’s political fabulism:
This newspaper, being at the hinge of politics and business, is a good place from which to observe what each world misunderstands about the other.
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But the larger error is to believe that politics is as meritocratic as business: that one’s record of decisions must determine one’s career prospects. Why this is nonsense shouldn’t need spelling out.
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If there were Russian tanks on Constitution Avenue, Romney would still be accused of not seeing the Kremlin’s point of view.
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Like a Frank Capra film, it suggests that natural justice governs the universe.
Editor: Reader consider ‘Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success’ Mr. Ganesh qualifies as novice, but an avid fan of Hollywood Kitsch. Compare this to his celebration of American Silver -Fork Novelist Tom Wolfe.
“But history will be kind,” he and Romney must hear all the time. So what? In which celestial bank are they meant to cash that particular cheque? And of what solace is it to we who live in such ill-led countries?
Editor: The Philosopher/Banker pose ill suits Ganesh. Long gone are the beguiling apercus.
Philosophical Apprentice & Political Cynic collaborate!
The Reader doesn’t have to wonder at the title of Niall Fergusons’ latest 1,884 word essay in The Dailymail:
Secret obsessions that drive the new Napoleon, by his friend and confidant: NIALL FERGUSON’s VERY revealing insight into the dark forces that forged Elon Musk – and fears for the maverick’s own Waterloo downfall
Mr. Ferguson has a habit of writing about powerful men: Siegmund Warburg and Henry Kissinger, he now adds Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, while assuring his reader that : ‘I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade’. Proximity of one kind or another, to The Great Man is an essential to the gain the ‘trust’ of his readership?
I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade. We have exchanged ideas, drunk whisky together, met one another’s children, and debated everything from the war in Ukraine to the future of American education.
I have long said he is the Napoleon Bonaparte of our times. Walter Isaacson’s new biography, based on two years of shadowing Musk, reaches a similar conclusion.
And at a time when the richest man in the world is being transformed in some quarters from hero to villain, this historical analogy should not be ignored.
In 2017, Musk and I went for a drink in California’s Menlo Park with one of my sons, then 18 and about to embark on a gap year in Africa.
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Ferguson quotes and riffs on Isaacson
Musk more than once makes Isaacson aware that he identifies with France’s most famous ruler.
‘If they see their general out on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,’ Musk tells his biographer, explaining why he likes to appear without warning on the Tesla and SpaceX factory floors.
‘Wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best,’ Isaacson explains.
The resemblance doesn’t end there.
Hegel – the 19th Century German philosopher – famously said Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback. Elon is the world spirit in a cyber-truck.
Editor: I’ll engage in some self-serving reductionism, of Ferguson’s derivations of Isaacson:
Musk is also a micromanager, another Napoleonic trait.
He is pitiless when he senses that someone is not ‘hardcore’ and reserves respect only for those who are ‘ultra hardcore’.
‘Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart,’ he once told Tesla employees in an email.
Editor: Ferguson as moralizing sexual conformist, who not only underlines, but places in bold font his observation on Musk’s ‘unorthodox family life’. Ferguson’s notorious 1995 Spectator essay on Keynes, demonstrates that sexual conformity is Ferguson territory.
Like Napoleon – who cheated on his first wife (who also cheated on him), then divorced, remarried and had more children by his mistresses than his wives – Musk has an unorthodox family life.
Musk now has 10 children by three different women, most recently twins with Shivon Zilis, the 37-year-old director of operations at Neuralink (his company developing computer chips that can be implanted in the human brain).
Like Napoleon, Musk also has a weakness for imperial overextension.
Like Napoleon, too, Musk has moved politically from Left to Right
Like Napoleon, Elon has accumulated enemies over the years
Riffing on the nearly anguished themes of Mr. Rachman’s September 11, 2023 essay, that seeks, yet doesn’t quite find the possible/probable value of ‘whataboutism’ ?
The Financial Times is the defender of America’s Proxy War, that seems to be failing, except for the propaganda offensive, of this newspaper and other news outlets. The Reader needs to look for alternative sources. Might that Reader look to the current situation on Maui, as an utter failure of Biden Administrations to address a pressing internal crisis? How might ‘whataboutism’ apply in this instance?
Gideon Rachman ends his essay here:
It is unrealistic to expect that reasoned argument can defeat all forms of whataboutism. But the surest way to lose the debate is to refuse to engage in it in the first place.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor offers a telling analysis of the continuing Ukraine debacle, and its flaccid leadership’s opportunism.
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