Will be back with an item shortly but in the interim . . .
They’re Both Right
Rush and Steele make great water cooler gossip. What optics! Their exchange also offers a more revealing glimpse on contemporary American politics. To wit, the current health of the host-parasite dynamic between the Republican Party as organizational identity and the Movement exemplified by Rush through default.
We’ve all together here in our cozy family discussed this parasitic relationship for some time. What’s changed? All can see, even Entertainment Tonight. The Republican Party host is seen in public doing the walk of shame home. Or twitch on camera as an enfeebled desiccated husk, drained and discarded. The parasite, while chagrined and reduced, is remarkably vibrant still. Movement activists of all stripes note with wonder the new reserves of energy tapped from fury and no longer constrained destructive impulses.
Dear Readers you’ve all observed here before how the Republican Party began its eclipse as a separate and viable entity in 1994 until reaching its current nadir. So objectively one has to concede the truth of what Rush says: Steele does head the hundred plus faceless nobodies that elected him through exhaustion recently. Rush’s also correct that it’s now an almost entirely irrelevant position.
Obama in November extinguished any Republican Party hopes to exist without the Movement parasite for the foreseeable future. Moderates and independents who once might have voted Republican are so far firmly in Obama’s suprisingly centrist camp. As the NYT piece on Newt reported, Newt’s own view was that Obama’s inaugural address was the ideal Republican message and it and he should be studied and supported. As long as Obama governs in this fashion, the Republican Party — and Michael Steele – have only one option: subordination to Movement parasitism.
Eventually the Movement will find an actual political actor as its front. Defeat is too recent, anger too blinding for that process now. CPAC straw polls are meaningless. That individual will lead by default the expiring host as well. Steele is not even a footnote.
David Brooks et al. also are irrelevant. He’s largely viewed as a Neocon and effete Other – someone who pals around with Mark Shields, PBS and the NYT. That’s about the trifecta of communism right there. Movement people might now and then point to a Brooks thing for validation but if Brooks changed his last name to Gergen no one would care or notice.
Oddly, almost everyone wins in the current political alignment. Obama has an ideal foil to placate his Left. Rush keeps his demo in the current ad market collapse. Movement elected officials are amazed their base is so energized, fired up. Re-election is simple and clear cut. Career Republican Party institutionalists are the only losers. They’re a lonely bunch and Tom Davis’ fate awaits in due course. They lost the war for their future over a decade ago. The Movement just isn’t going to be down following Michael Steele bringin’ da noize, bringin’ da funk into the urban.
From a politcal science point of view, it would be interesting to see the Republican Party as an independent entity choose to reclaim itself from the Movement. A new beginning charting its own destiny, returning to liberal democracy with a constructive alternative to Obama. Derisively one could think Bob Michels. There are more dynamic, growth-oriented alternative outcomes. The enfeebled host would start from scratch. Build their own ground game. Identify and nurture cadres. Create new fund raising networks. Be on guard for infiltration. Accept initial defeats as antes in the game. And try to remember the time when the host controlled the parasite.
We don’t count on it. Neither should you.
Top Ten Emperors
The CSPAN ‘historians’ list of presidential rankings offers the usual suspects:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Harry S. Truman
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Ronald Reagan
As usual, the ineffectual Kennedy is vastly overrated for specious reasons. People clinging to Camelot AgitProp like Gollum and his Precious. Cuban Missile Crisis aside his legislative and international accomplishments are essentially nil. And one can make a compelling case that Kennedy’s own callowness led directly from Vienna to the Berlin Wall to Cuba (and let’s overlook Vietnam out of politeness).
We would rank Washington ahead of hollow Lincoln gushing so much in vogue in Sally Quinn’s universe. First, few Americans understand he told the U.S. Army to stand down, not overthrow the Congress in Philadelphia and obey civilian government. He also declined the crown and did not want it offered three times. More importantly, he later stepped down voluntarily. Creating is so much more difficult than preserving or destroying.
Jefferson was actually a calamitous president and his Neo-con-esque Jacobin policies largely not understood by modern scholarship. Points for the Louisiana Purchase geopolitically — although students of republican theory then and today understood the expansion meant inevitably some form of political decay devolving inexorably to an imperial endgame of some sort.
Woodrow Wilson? Please explain to the Stiftung how this disaster is not in the bottom 20.
Overall, morons like Tweety who purport to be be pros with his fluffer Howard Fineman miss the fundamental dynamic with this pseudo intellectual exercise. Tweety suddenly blurts he’s mystified how ‘liberals’ made this ranking. Fineman gushes his number one president would be JFK. Allowing these people more air time is crime against the future.
Contrary to what Tweety and Fineman claim, the Eisenhower re-evaluation began in the early 1980s. The Stiftung had many a conversation back then with Princeton Professor Joanne Gowa about her research on this very topic. Sabato and Brinkley should know better when they did their Mutt and Jeff turn on the Tweety obscenity. Is truth determined by what popularizers like Ambrose churn out? It continues to boggle the Stiftung’s mind how vacant, shallow and superficial our self-styled media (cough) intelligentsia remains.
Modern individuals are given more credence — either way — because of the imperial dimension. Teddy marked a turning point, but FDR marked the dawn of President as Global Emperor. The throne by necessity elevates those upon it, even those named Bush. This essential geopolitical reality can’t be escaped. Hence the Warlord’s ranking.
What will be interesting is to see how the diminished presidency and dissipated American global hegemony affects the re-evaluation prism going forward. Perhaps C-SPAN will be wise enough to allow our Chinese landlords to have input on the next round.
Beyond Bush: Holding His Enablers To Account
Today’s Warlord press conference was a bizarre affair. If you saw it surely you, too, have your own take.
How convenient then that his enablers in the media escape scrutiny yet again and pose as judges and jury on this once mighty socio-political edifice. Who cheer led the war in Iraq? Not just with the late David Bloom’s ‘Bloom Mobile’, etc.? Judy Miller for sure. But she didn’t put her stories on the front page by herself.
Who helped Dairy Queen patrons in Strawberry Point, Iowa believe they needed protection against ‘terrrists’? Kids at roller rinks in Salt Lake City? Who trumpeted Talking Points as ‘reporting’ and mocked skeptics as unpatriotic or worse, effeminate? Who was caught on tape metaphorically pulling Tom Delay’s zipper down?
Who fired Phil Donohue as inconvenient during the run up? Who refused to offer (or put on) skepticism (which they claimed to have all along) until the obvious handwriting on the wall in Fall 2006?
How refreshing if some of *them* could be held to account on national television. And then fired.
To Paraphrase Dean Wermer, ‘Lazy, Violent And Stupid Is No Way To Go Through Life’ (Let Alone Steal It From The Innocent)
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