Political Ops.
What is signifiant in POTUS Obama address to West Point this year, his second, is that POTUS knows that he no longer enjoys the confidence of the retired uniforms and that the officer cadre has taken a step back after the White House abuse of Stanley McChrystal. POTUS does not share his foreign policy genius with the uniforms, but the uniforms do read books and entrails. The speech at West Point is indistinguishable from POTUS Bush, so there is nothing to be gained by quoting POTUS's predictable language of national security and diplomacy. What is different is that POTUS does not now have a coherent national security team. SecDef Gates is said to want out pronto. Admiral Blair is retired again. General Jones is said to be a potted plant. What is left around POTUS are political actors such as Leon Panetta, Eric Holder, John Brennan, Janet Napolitano, all of whom correctly derive their perception of power (mostly network TV access) from POTUS. Even VPOTUS Biden depends upon POTUS for authority and themes; and StateSec HRC is isolated, frustrated, busy elsewhere. The White House has made its choice. POTUS is the sole director and manager of foreign policy; all the rest is show biz, misdirection, flackhood, vanity.
Afghanistan.
POTUS aims to start the withdrawal from AfPak in summer 2011 regardless of the Karzai brothers and Al Q -- and also to begin the PR handover of Pashtunistan frontier security to Pakistan and what is called the Afghan National Army in time for the Iowa caucus in January 2012. POTUS foreign policy keeps a domestic political timetable, following the savvy of most of the presidents in the 20th century (Wilson, FDR, Truman, Ike, LBJ, RMN, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes). The election timetable requires POTUS to demonstrate diplomacy through handing off. POTUS hands off Iran to the Kremlin. POTUS hands off the Kim regime succession troubles to Beijing. POTUS hands off Eastern Europe to Berlin. All this is meant to clear out the friction before the re-election campaign season begins summer 2012. The debate continues as to whether POTUS goes to Tehran before the election, February 2012, or after the election, February 2013. Tehran becomes the Cold War adversary that empowers POTUS's diplomacy. This electioneering by foreign policy is a credible, sophisticated, passionless, icy formula of Realpolitik. (And electioneering by domestic policy is stymied by the long-term joblessness and the likely GOP obstructionism in the 112th Congress.) Can POTUS manage the tensions of dictators abroad and polling at home? Unlikely, but the dare is presidentially bloody-minded, something that rises to the level of the willful imperialism of FDR and Nixon. And the downside? The uniforms will challenge the presumption that fate can be managed with talk. The 20th century teaches that power comes out of the barrel of a gun -- and that American must never, ever be outgunned. POTUS plays for November 2012 -- 29 months from now. Grown-up stakes.
Religion, like language, is hard-wired into the human psyche. At their core, all religions are the same. Religion typically splits into two aspects: spiritual and political. The spiritual aspect of religion is straight forward. Its ‘signature’ is tolerance. It deals with questions regarding faith, God and eternity. The political aspect of religion currently draws most of our attention because it has the potential of affecting our immediate circumstances. The same is true for ‘isms’. We can say that man is in essence a religious animal. Or we can say man is in essence political. Both statements accurately reflect a singularity of the human condition.
While it is true that equating man’s spiritual nature with his political nature is paradoxical, the two are nevertheless inseparable. Mankind is most at ease when the political aspect of whatever his primary concern may be (as Alfred North Whitehead suggests) is benign. A wizened curmudgeon professing his belief in Marxism within the confines of an ivory tower suite is no threat to anyone. Man suffers when such concerns become militant as has happened during the crusades and is happening now as militant Islam makes its moves.
The constant striving of religion is to reduce all the divergent aspects of life to one. People who may be several happy meals short of enlightenment do not recognize the essential oneness in what they see. They fail to make the connection that ties everything together. There are two ways to force the issue to its resolution. One is persuasion (proselytizing), militancy and violence; the other is tolerance.
Tolerance is the more difficult nut to crack. We have chosen the easy path. It is easier to lop off the heads of non-believers. It’s easier to ban conservatives from speaking at universities. It’s easier to call for jihad. It’s easier to cause havoc and break things, and then pick up the pieces of whatever is left and cobble these into a single atrocity based on the principle of exclusion. It is also easier getting people to submit to outrage.
We here in the West have chosen submission. Our enemies attack us and we submit. In order to rationalize our cowardice, we change the language. We blur the line between good and evil. We assume our enemy’s narrative and admit that we are at fault; that it is we who must adjust or even erase ourselves. Our mea culpas – and even our sacrifices in this regard - are flawed; it is only ego that speaks. We abandon our principles; our allies. We no longer tolerate ourselves.
This is the mindset of our current administration. It pays no mind to the violence, pain and dislocation that is certain to ensue. For them, all these comprise the necessary gateway through which we all must pass in order to achieve a more perfect union – the Utopia that is envisioned in James Hilton’s Shangri-La, in B.F Skinner’s “Walden Two”, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc.
In today’s world the concept of tolerance has been all but abandoned. Political strife has taken its place. Unfortunately, just as religion cannot be exorcised from the human psyche, we cannot fight ‘isms’ with ‘isms’ and nope to win. Religion has always been a double-edged sword. We have chosen to place our chips on the blunt edge of brutality.
Neither we nor the world can take another term of this crowd. I've run out of adjectives to describe how clueless and careless and juvenile they are collectively and singly. I never thought I'd live to say this, but HRC would likely have a far better president, even with Bill attached like a vestigial organ.
Of course HRC would have been a far better president. That's why it was so vital for conservatives that BO win the nomination. We need a repudiation of the liberal agenda once and for all. HRC would have mixed in enough moderation and horse trading that we would have never been able to expose them for the socialists they all are. BO doesn't have the good sense to hide his love for socialism like the Clintons did.
BTW, once again I have to take issue with JB's calls for Rand Paul to "shut up". That is so degrading to the libertarian principles. John, Rand Paul didn't get elected in spite of his libertarian principles, he got elected because of them. Don't you understand that the purpose of the Tea Party is to END business as usual? We don't want conservative business as usual, and we don't want liberal business as usual. We want an end to it. It will end one way or the other, either in government default, or revolution, or both. The present system cannot stand.
John, very impassioned speech after Al last night about Rand Paul and the history of the Republican Party. You ended with a vigorous list of what the Republican Party stands for. I'm confused. Just a few months ago you were saying the Republican Party was dead. Has Rand Paul brought it back to life, at least in your eyes? If so, don't we owe him a vote of thanks?
As someone who agrees with Rand Paul, I understand why you're upset. I understand how someone could construe opposition to the Civil Rights Act as being racist. However, it's not. To call opposition to the CRA racist, you make the rather large leap in logic that absent federal intervention, people would naturally behave in a racist fashion. If that's true, the problem isn't solved by force. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." Racism still holds the day everywhere in the U.S. It's just gone underground.
You and your guests frequently make the point, when speaking of the bailouts, that in order for capitalism to work, a meltdown has to be allowed to occur and the sick banks have to be allowed to die. You have faith in market forces there. So why not have the same faith in market forces in the private sector with respect to discrimination?
I agree with Rand Paul, and always have. The federal government has no business interfering with the rights of individuals to contract with whomever they choose, or choose not to. That doesn't mean I'm a racist - I'm not. Far from it. I just don't take kindly to being told what to believe or how to act. If I'm only nice to you because Federal Law requires it, am I really nice to you?
I agree with you, however, that Rand Paul doesn't belong in the Republican Party. He's too good for it. He should run as a Libertarian, or if the Libertarians don't want him, start a new party, and I'll join it.
P.S. If you think Rand Paul is ignorant, you must think I am ignorant as well. And you are wrong, sir.
The estimable Mr. Batchelor publicly criticizes Rand Paul for his lack of enthusiasm with regard to the role that the GOP has played in emancipation, civil rights, affirmative action, and a host of other Federal policies intended to promote racial equality.
What, then, must he privately think about the ingratitude shown by the 90% of Black voters who continue to cast their ballots for the Democrats during each and every election, even if it means voting for crackheads and homicidal thugs such as Marion Barry and Kwame Kilpatrick rather than for the Party of Lincoln? I wonder how Mr. Batchelor copes with the cognitive dissonance.
Peter, though I find your commentary somewhat mesmerizing in its brilliance and rhetorical fluorish, I think it suffers from a tendency to broad generalization and lack of attention to the subconscious and thus psychological underpinnings of the human tropism to religiousity. I'm not sure of what you mean when identifying tolerance as a "signature" of religious spirituality except maybe in the sense of a communal conveyance of thought and feeling. Religions historically have promulgated anything but tolerance and it is usually only arrived at by the force of legal mandate as in the formation of the US constitution and its attention to placing religion outside of the realm of government and jurisprudence.
As prelude to religions inceptions we always find the fear of death and the human urge to significance and immortality. This is axiomatic and universal and perhaps goes a long way in understanding and not overstating much of what goes on in its realm and its perpetual allure.
As to those benign "wizened curmudgeons" I think they do a lot more harm than you give them credit for as they are extremely influential on the future generations of "intelligent" thinkers. This is something that has had and has an a continuous and perpetual accumulative effect on the nature of the body politic, which brings me to the point of the larger problem I have with a lot of the principled admonitions I read here which, for all their sophistication and erudition fail to exist effectively in the unfortunate reality of the world we are currently inhabiting. Your focus on Marx ignores the more important need to realize the Machiavellian game at hand. This is why the politics of principle suffers if it is not infused with a dose of double blind mechanics and the wisdom of understanding the nature of both adversary and those you wish to win over.
This Rand Paul flap is a trap,where much ado about nothing is met with a dose of "doth protest too much" It is always a mistake to go on the defense with the LWmedia machine. Also to expect African Americans to be grateful to the RP for its role in civil rights is to ignore the reality of the transformation of southern democrats and dixiecrats into the RP (Re Nixon"s Southern strategy, and the psychologiical tendency of "biting the hand that feeds"
If all conservatives got up at the same time and said, "Yeah, we're racists, so what. Ho hum. What's your point?", this nonsense would end pretty quickly. Of course, it would be replaced by other nonsense, but it would be nice to get some fresh nonsense through these parts for a change.
You're kind of close to what I was thinking. I was more thinking, "Since we're going to be called racists no matter what, we might as well say what we believe." Even if all of John's claims about the Republican Party were completely true, look what it's gotten us from the liberals? Just more disdain. We could collectively kiss Jesse Jackson's patootie for the next 5 years and they'd still hate us. They being the liberals and not the blacks; the latter group, I believe, is "on" to the scam. Finally.
dr.yo – First of all, let me tell you that I do so appreciate your reading my posts with a critical eye, worthy of one who has given the issues that confront us much more than just a cursory glance. Perhaps one of the failings of language is – and there are many – that words are perhaps not sufficient to explain paradox. Let’s just say that ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are two sides of the very same coin – like heaven and hell; life and death; etc. Again, the illusory difference emerges in where we choose to place our focus.
A holy man wandering the plains of India toward Varanasi on the Ganges, begging for his sustenance along the way, has totally abandoned politics. That is to say, he has ceased to think of himself as a separate and distinct corporal entity. He is nothing; he is also everything - and quite without bias toward any one thing that can be assigned a name. In this way, he has become like a newborn that has not yet learned to distinguish itself from what it sees. It’s interesting that the first thing we do when a baby is born is give it a name.
Alan Watts speaks of man’s internal and external organs in an effort to blur the basic rhetorical divide that gives rise to the political “I”. As the child grows and learns the names of more and more things, so also increases the distancing and fracturing that some vital part of us always feels compelled to call home. Politics is the process by which we count our possessions; by which we seek to validate our right of ownership; by which we work, litigate and fight for what we say belongs to us. The holy man has found a shortcut that bypasses all the strife, all the exertion, all the pain associated with political maneuvering. He has learned that by simply letting go, all things automatically come back to him.
I agree that the “wizened curmudgeons” in the ivory towers of our universities are doing us irreparable harm. This is only because they have become shamelessly political and we were foolish enough to place our emphasis on their degrees and rhetorical skills. But, short of killing them, they will always be with us. It is we who have afforded them undue importance. We were told that one of Obama’s many virtues was that he was a constitutional scholar at University of Chicago Law School. That was enough to disarm many of us. Now, as the rubber is hitting the road we realize how little academic titles actually mean. The University of East Anglia e-mail revelations should only broaden our doubts.
All this stuff, however, is self-correcting. We just happen to be coming down from the apex of a trend that was never sustainable.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Just cause I write short doesn't mean I'm wrong.
(Feigned insecurity used to better fit in with locals .....)
Lou,
I am not sure where you are coming from on this matter of race except that I perceive you are clearly and perhaps understandably unhinged. It is understandable in the sense of the absurdities which abound where race is used to promote a silence by fear of pariah-hood and other forms of social isolation. To revert to " yeah, we're racists,so what " is a submission, a surrender to thuggery quite akin to the adolescent Eminem's "I am whatever you say I am"-If you believe that racism seethes beneath the surface of American life and that we should just "cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war" admit it and get on with it I wonder what you think that resulting chaos would be like. To me its like bringing on the dystopic vision of hellish society we have seen in many of our more dire and pessimistic visions of the future world. Repression, however, as all civilized people know is a necessary mechanism to the advancement of humanistic societiesand one that despite its inherent neuroses must remain as a necessay evil of our civilization (with its discontents)
Peter,
Your last post is difficult for me to understand. It attempts to encompass too much territory to be coherent. The study of religion on an anthropological/philosophical level is fascinating and revealing to our comprehension of our social integration. It touches upon the historical and psychological and perhaps biological aspects of our makeup as human beings with our peculiar and unique ontological necessity. I myself prefer and approach these matters in a more detached and objective way,almost as an observer seeing the folly in attachment to any and all of the specific interpretations of the divine. I think often in Taoist terms and the quote of the Buddha "Do not confuse my finger for the moon". We are all so fallible so many desperate souls groping and grasping in the dark for some understanding of some truth that must invariably remain incomprehensible and beyond us. That we believe that there is or may be something beyond us is what separates us from those who have abandoned all belief systems as superstitious, and sunk into the nihilism that has created so much of the chaos and depravation we have witnessed in the past century. But remembering that this too is rooted ultimately in an understandable despair of deprivation and hopelessness. Literary examples such as Dosteyevsky's Hippolyte (The Idiot), or the Chilean poet Cesar Vallejo -"Beyond,beyond there is nothing...", Becketts characters waiting for GODot abound. These precursors and many others are a testament to the failure of belief systems and the societal mores they supported when overwhelmed by the indicting power of such massive misery and degradation of human aspiration.
I think what I am trying to say is that one must always remain aware of the underlying root causes of the madness that accompanies human affairs in order to better process and thus act proportionately both as adverary and proponent. It is also very important not to overreact,and to remember that there are things that we are powerless to change but may learn to at best manage for the time being, as in riding out a storm, remembering always that "this too shall pass",and it shall, and then will return and pass again.
"What, then, must he privately think about the ingratitude shown by the 90% of Black voters who continue to cast their ballots for the Democrats during each and every election, even if it means voting for crackheads and homicidal thugs such as Marion Barry and Kwame Kilpatrick rather than for the Party of Lincoln?"
I don't know what Batchelor thinks of it, but I chalk it up to political immaturity induced by 60 years of dependence cultivated by the Democrats and savvier black civil rights pimps. Frankly, blacks were politcally smarter before the civil rights movement than they have been for the last 60 years. Urban blacks probably were always Democrats because the Democrats have always run the cities' hand-out machines. But there's no excuse for the rest of them except they have been radicalized by a bunch of self-serving hacks and media mongers. Organizations like ACORN, founded merely to create a pool of Pavlovian voters and operated to the detriment of blacks by Marxist whites, are a disgrace to both races and should never have become as influential as they have. Democrats have kept blacks as docile and dependent as the plantation owners of 150 years ago. Yes it was reprehensible that Republicans abandoned them in the 1870s for merely for the sake of taking the presidency, but that's no excuse for their not now understanding that a smart political block plays the parties off against each other so that the block can be courted by both. As it is, the block is taken for granted by one and ignored by the other.
Anent Batchelor's broadcast 5/21, 3rd hour, with Vlahos.
From John Fund @ WSJ Political Diary:
Eric Massa, the upstate New York Congressman who resigned in March amid allegations he had groped his male staffers, is back -- and apparently craving attention. Mr. Massa, a former Naval officer, tells Esquire magazine that General David Petraeus has held secret meetings with former Vice President Dick Cheney about running for president in 2012.
Mr. Massa says he was told of the meetings by military sources and believes such discussions represent a threat resembling the coup d'etat depicted in the movie "Seven Days in May." "There is a reason that we have in this country civilian leadership of the military. It is, among other things, to avoid something like this," Mr. Massa told Esquire. "Because in order to succeed electorally, General Petraeus must fail militarily. You understand? In order to succeed electorally, he must fail in his mission. Were he to run and win -- and if he were to run, he would win in a landslide -- we would be witness to an American coup d'état. It is the functional equivalent of the political overthrow of the commander in chief."
Does this mean the Obama administration has targeted Petraeus to go the way of Blair?
dr.yo - I'm sorry, I missed your comment until just now. If I were inarticulate, would you read what I have to say? Would I even write anything for you to respond to?
It occurs to me that God has a problem. He does not speak as we do. Yet, some say He is truth. If true, truth cannot be found in words. Truth must be seen, felt, acknowledged or simply accepted on faith. Words can negate God. But what of it? Saying something is or isn't essentially amounts to the same thing.
The word ‘Tao’ literally means 'path'. I loved what Thomas Merton was to have said about it: "If you see a field of snow and you are looking for a path, walk across it - and there is your path."
We all are dancers on the point of a needle. To presume we are more than simply that makes us appear foolish. Authoritarian regimes, as you suggest, will come and go. We all know they are foolish. So why do we keep reviving the concept?
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/