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more on perceptive commentary
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:36:50 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Chris Beck <cbeck () pacanukeha net> Date: October 9, 2005 1:18:17 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] perceptive commentaryDave - the first one was sent by mistake. Sorry - here is the real reply.
Ummm, OK, I will agree that Bush has done and will do a pathetic and destructive job as President. We can then divide the rest of this "perceptive" screed into 3 parts - a section on bloated and corrupt government which everyone but
Halliburton shareholders can agree on, a completely misguided rant onunconstitutional judges and then a heart-warming we're- all'conservatives-here-
y'all-best-git-out rant(1).Others more capable than I can and have dealt with the unconstitutionality
arguments[http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/10/interpretive-means-agrees- with.html].
It is also amusing to note that this farcical polemic sounds rather a lot like the language used in Charles Krauthammer's op-ed piece in the Washington
Post[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/06/ AR2005100601468.html].
I wonder who plagiarised who.(1) To avoid complaints of an ad hominem attack I present to you "The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in modern Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping to explain the country's exceptionalism"(2) which states a fact and then draws 3 faulty conclusions: a) the changing face of politics is a constant rather than a unique event; b) the author's Russian friends seem to be going through something of a right-wing revival at the moment; c) that the US is exceptional cannot be denied, that this is due to recent growth in right-wing politics is clearly false in that it assumes that
"exceptionalism" is a recent phenomenon.(2) My spell checker denies the existence of this word. As it should - a poor, clumsy-sounding thing that should be put out of my misery and expunged from the
English language. Cheers, Chris Rumour has it David Farber, on or about 09.Oct.2005 09:25, whispered:
IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court,thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few decades,as only a few presidents have done before him. Instead, President Bush�s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to nominate a close colleague with no judicial track record for the Supreme Court, following an earlier uninspired choice, risks condemning his administration to being remembered as the most debilitating since the sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.... But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass andhis superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs �all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America�s post-Vietnam decline, than anyleft-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of....Last month�s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O�Connor was a unique opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right, completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted underPresident Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr Bush�s conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies were anopportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the unconstitutional judicial activism which has dominated the Court since the Roosevelt years. Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has blown it: instead ofthe conservative intellectual jurists that his supporters had the rightto expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre John Roberts, a moderate conservative with an undistinguished legal track record, the new Chief Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for the O�Connor vacancy....The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America�s lesser courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change, forwhich Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from schoolbussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most recentlythe powers of the President versus those of Congress in times of war). An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in June illustrates its power and the controversial nature of its decisions: it ruled five to four that local governments could force property owners to sell theirhomes to private developers whenever officials decide it would �benefit the public�, even if the property is not blighted and the new project�ssuccess is not guaranteed....They were already furious at the President�s incompetent selling of his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the collapse ofhis plans for major tax reforms through White House neglect; they have watched in despair as the President�s upbeat rhetoric in Iraq was confounded regularly by tragic events, including an appalling American death toll and a neo-con mission clearly adrift; those who fought the good fight to restrain government in the Reagan years stood by in disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic spending faster than at any time since President Johnson�s Great Society; and the nativist right isincreasingly and dangerously surly at what it views as the President�s failure to tackle illegal immigration and secure the country�s borders....Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: whensenior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy ofpublic spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left tocut in federal spending and that �after 11 years of Republican majority we�ve pared it down pretty good�, it was clear that the inmates hadindeed taken over the asylum. ...Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they want to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle, especially given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which isincreasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of freshor stimulating ideas. The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in modernWestern politics; it is unique to the United States, helping to explain the country�s exceptionalism and its growing cultural divergence withEurope. The damning charge against Mr Bush is that, instead of using the continued dominance of the right to finish the large amounts ofuncompleted business from the Reagan revolution � sorting out the social security system, simplifying the tax code, tackling America�s abysmal primary and secondary schools, reforming corporate welfare with the samegusto as welfare for the poor was reformed, forging a new consensus towage the war or terror � Mr Bush has failed in all these areas, and insome has taken America backwards.
-- Chris Beck - http://pacanukeha.blogspot.com "You are going to run out of denial long before this world runs out of storms" - Bruce Sterling ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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