Archives for September 2007
Awwww, Dacity, What Happened?
Netroots want to believe in Obama so desperately. The need to give him his own theme music.
A Hyper Real ‘Event Horizon’ In NYC? How Close To The Other Side?
Physicists tell us there exist boundaries, barriers. Events from one side of a barrier can never affect a viewer, and similarly, those that cross that boundary are never observable again. This is why light is said to be incapable of escaping a black hole. Hence, Event Horizon the term.
Three simultaneous ‘pop culture’ events of the unreal, hyper -real and consensually fictitious blasted New York City yesterday with force of at least three TMZ-type megaton bombs. If ever we teetered on the edge of ‘crossing over’, this might be the night. And perhaps the City would earn the immortal tag “Ground Zero” yet again.
The Manichean Anti-Koniggratz
Of all the offensive things Neocons and their Likudnik partners in arms do, among the most blatant is their cynical pilfering of historic icons and memes to justify their covertly amoral (and clumsy) macht politik objectives.
We all mock their pornographic overuse of Churchill and Lincoln. That’s now so heavy-handed even the “checked out” South Park and Metalpocalypse generations snark it. Still, Neocons are not 10 feet tall in the AgitProp department. Neocon/Likudnik ‘inexplicable’ successes in 2007 largely a gift from philosophically bankrupt Democrats and remnants of the so-called foreign policy ‘Establishment’. Only now, vaguely, do they understand the malignant parasitic ideologies in the regime’s host. And that will remain with the host’s passing.
Democrats and Oppositionists fail and flail. Sputtering in frustration, not knowing why. In politics, empty inertia and the tactical almost always lose to the vigorous (or seemingly so), steering towards a philosophical objective. What must happen until this simple lesson is learned?
We are reminded of all this watching this week’s American, Israeli and Sunni AgitProp posturing over Iran. That Iran strikes are so prominent a topic today just another sign of Democrat ineptitude. Should an unreformed (i.e. rebuffing revitalization by the netroots or embracing other coherent, positive, purposeful philosophy) Democrat establishment gain power in 2008, we suspect there remain good chances it will be subjectively deemed a political ‘failure’ — especially if a ‘naive’ Obama.
One can envision now a philosophically inert (no matter how well intentioned) Democratic Administration bee stung, bewildered, set up, tripped and otherwise sabotaged within and without by the Warlord’s parasites. And shudder at the retributive response by the parasitic ‘Restoration’ successor. Perhaps an inept Democrat Administration in 2008 is the final necessary domino to fall, the unwitting key in the lock. So what better time to convene a national convention to re-open the Constitution, hey?
Was It The Constitution That Failed Us?
The so-called Critical School of Constitutional Theory from several decades ago (perhaps best summed up by then-Georgetown Law Professor Mark Tushnet over the years (now at Harvard and part of Jack Balkin’s blog)) is enjoying a revival. Almost entirely because of the Warlord, his regime and the Judiciary and Congress’ failure to assert themselves as co-equal branches of government.
Over at Jack Balkin’s site, a number of efforts to re-launch and even re-make many of the previous Crit School observations but now with contemporary urgency (and frankly legitimacy, one must confess) are under way. We have enjoyed the analysis over there greatly and during the Dark Years the site was an invaluable resource. Regarding their new discussion, Sandy Levinson put it thusly:
Discussion sites on constitutional change
Sandy Levinson
University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato is about to publish a very interesting book, A More Perfect Constitution, that both critiques the Constitution and, more than my book, offers explicit suggestions (23 of them) for improvment, including the call for a new constituitonal convention. His book is the trigger for a major event in Washington on Friday, October 18 (in which I will be participating on a panel on a new convention). He suggests, as do I, that one way to begin the long overdue national conversation is through dedicated web sites, including his own amoreperfectconstitution.com. I have also created a blog site on my University of Texas page, and I welcome anyone who wishes to particpate in some of the discussions that I have been trying to initiate.
Larry Sabato proposes 23 specific changes to the Constitution in yes, his new book. Sabato, like Louis Fisher in an earlier generation, as noted by Sandy Levinson is a political scientist rather than a legal scholar, and approaches the subject from the external rather than internal (legal) point of view. Here is his list of 23 specific changes to the Constitution.