Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "The Bulwark"
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Ayn Rand's "Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" were common reading among Paul Ryan's staff all the time he was in Congress. They are cult reading for boys in the las couple of years before they discover girls -- but so-called "conservatives" have funny ideas about women, so there's a lot of Ayn Randism out there.
These people have other distractions, of course. They spent the entire decade of the '50's, while Europe was building the mighty machine it is today, emoting over making the marigold the national marigold or vice versa. LBJ kept things running o the Hill, and Ike blessed it all.
There's nothing new about these guys. There have been lots of individual right-wingers good at whatever they did, but America has never seen a minyan of them together.
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The policy of the Obama-Clinton Democrats is free enterprise armed to the teeth. You know, the Lions Club after the second drink. There is no viable operating policy to the right of that for anything bigger than, oh, how about Delaware?
The United States is the only country that has ever tried to run an industrial and post-industrial or electro-informational economy on those lines. All successful modern political-economies run on social democratic lines.
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To understand the small scale stuff, e.g. three hundred squabbling small town politicians, just run the paragraphs above through your Vonnegut-O-Tron.
You do have a Vonnegut-O-Tron, don't you, Charlie? The man was from Wisconsin, even if probably from down South in Eugene Victor Debs and Abbie Hoffman country...
You're welcome.
Next question?
-dlj.
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But, David, you're not quite right about Britain "suspending elections for ten years." Byelections went on regularly, and there were seven while Britain was at war.
In every one, the main candidates were the National Government and the Commonwealth Party.
The National Government was supporters of the War Cabinet, i.e. "the Churchill Administration"; in the large, it was a formal, go to meetings together, alliance of Labour and the Conservative Party, with individual Liberals involved.
Commonwealth was a temporary alliance of Independent Labour and the Communist Party with, I imagine, some Trotskyite/ist involvement.
The results: Commonweath 7. National Government Zero. A 7-0 shut-out.
This, incidentally, should have warned Churchill that he was on ver-ree thin ice -- and given that back in his first election campaign, in Hammersmith, a multi-member constituency, as barely an adult, he had cooperated with Labour and written sympathetically about them -- this is the Keir hardy era, remember -- it is surprising how oblivious poor old Winnie was in '45.
The Communists, foolishly, took this to mean England was on the cusp of The Revolution. It was nothing of the sort. Independent Labour simply walked away from the thing some time around Portdam, and the Communists went back to drinking too much with coal miners.
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@sharondavid-melly1498
My boss, John Brademas (D-Indiana) was a Deputy Speaker -- and for that matter I've been "Speaker" in a number of studenty things, including head of the city-wide High-Schol UN Assembly, which put a photgraph of me in the Speaker's chair of the Provincial Assembly out in the local daily, the Globe and Mail. A bit of a giggle, really. But from my Washington years I know a little bit about the whole thing.
Yes, Nancy was an excellent Speaker -- but that's because she is tough, very smart, and decent. She was certainly the best Speaker since Mister Sam, Sam Rayburn.
Newt is intelligent, but aggressive more than tough. He is stunningly dishonest in a succession of interesting and differing ways. Through all his early years, for instance, he pretended to be an independents and futuristic politician when in fact he was the bought and paid-for pet of the guy wh made those excellent Cannon Mills towels.
(One of the interesting side-lights of American politics is the number of men in business who make absolutely first rate products, but then indulge in infantile and ignorant versions of right-wing politics -- undoing in the public world all the good they had done in the private. The guy who made Smucker's superb jams is another. Buy their jam. Don't buy their founder's damfool politics. Henry Ford was perhaps emblematic of the type.)
John Bohner and Paul Ryan are no Einsteins, but they are both decent human beings, at least once Ryan got through his teen-age Ayn Rand fixation which lasted into his forties. Both are also well informed, sane, and thoroughly competent at their jobs.
Kevin McCarthy? A wondrous being! The original gen-you-whine fool. Incompetent, stupid, and ignorant. A man with an idyllic smile, he lights up a room. This beautiful half wit wanted to be Speaker, was willing to humiliate himself without limit to get the job. He did so and he got it. Then showed the rest of us -- though he never figgered it out himself -- that he didn't have Clue One about how the job worked or what its purpose was.
The present two, Jordan and Scalise?
Forgive me the horrible insult: they are typical of the current Republican Members of the House.
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The question for you professional commentators, Tim, Bill, and Charlie, is not "Is Trump guilty, cluck-cluck-cluck?"
It's what is the responsibility of the commentariat to get objective information through the heads of the third of the population whose brains have been rotted out not just by Trump but by Fox, and by Ayn Rand.
{A couple of Ayn Rand notes for you all: "Atlas Shrugged" had sold 700,000 copies in Hungary by the time the Communists went down. Paul Ryan -- who may very well be responsible for the defenestration of Tucker Carlson from Fox, used to make the book "recommended," at minimum, for his Congressional staff.
{I read all of her stuff in a three or four month binge when I was 17, and adored her for a summer -- exactly until I met some grown-ups when I hit university. I suspect the same thing has happened to Paul Ryan. He's outgrown her. I also suspect that she is the subterranean influence accounting for a great deal of America's current sickness, as, perhaps, in Hungary.}
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But, but, but Tim, are you telling me all those MAGATypes only know how to break stuff?
That's, that's, that's, well I'm just so kerflustered, Tim. I would never have imagined such a thing possible of upstanding folks like the Trumps. Donnie, and Eric an junior Donnie. An' fer shure there are kinder people in there, too, you know. you know.
I mean they have a deep bench of intellectuals, Tommy Tuberville an Stephen Miller, and people like Charlie Kirk and Dinesh D'Sousa to give the whole thing a depth and breath of patriotism with that strong administrative competence America needs to run its guvvermint...
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There are still a tiny number of Trotsky's followers out there. There also exists a tiny cult of residual Leninists who believe the slogan "le pire le mieux." (The worse the better). Their theory is that bad things will make their imaginary "The Revolution" come faster. Think of them as 666ers who have read Das Kapital. In the original German.
The loony right, fertilised with Trump's adequate supply of ordure, magnify these tiny cults, and falsely call them "the Left."
Even Charlie, to his shame, does this, maybe once a month. Remember, he's from Wisconsin, Senator Joe McCarthy's old stamping grounds. Some of us accidentally step on dog turds (or used to: we've beaten dog owners into submission at last, so there's less of it around than there used to be.) in the streets as children.
With Charlie it wasn't dog turds, it was the politics of some of the grown-ups down the street.
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Antisemistism is stupid, and so are many antisemites.
(I don't know whether it's still there, but before Wikipedia became very large, and recently pretty competent as well, there used to be a good memo floating around on the then much smaller 'Net, an explanation of the differences between anti-semitism, antisemitism, and anti-Semitism floating around.
Very long story short: "antisemitism," one word, no caps, no hyphen. is best in general usage.
The hyphenated form is people not being sure what to do.
Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, never really existed, but Semitism, with a capital S, was a European, mostly French, antisemitic cult and theory of the 19th century. There may have been, I forget, a deliberately formed group of people working to defeat them. They would have been "Anti-Semites," I suppose.)
Because they are stupid, they think that saying they are anti-Zionist fully expresses their opposition to, and/or hatred of, Jews and all things Jewish.
This is of course nonsense.
Zionism has several meanings at different times and places, and is always a trend within Jewish thought and politics. From the Victorian Age through perhaps 1967 or so, it meant support for the creation of the State of Israel. It was for many years, probably right up to the Holocaust, a minority position of a minority of Jews.
The Orthodox Dogma, back through the centuries, has been that the re-creation of Israel should be in abeyance until the return of the Messiah. This somewhat itchy-scrathy feeling in the back of one's mind, that maybe we shouldn't be doing what we're doing, remains the among many politicians of the Orthodox stream who in fact hold power in that state, the State of Israel which has come into being despite their grandfathers' teaching and political opposition.
Today, in the context of Israeli pollitics, "Zionist" means one of a shifting array of centre-left and liberal democratic politics blocs or schools. To my, older, generation, it means the same thing as Mapai-Mapam used to mean.
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@davidobriend8560
You're not counting votes out there, David.
Trump has been very quiet about Ukraine, and until he decides which way to jump, his people -- 15%, not 37%, of Republicans -- are genuinely split on Ukraine.
No more than half of them , say 7% of all Republicans, are committed Putinite slime of the Bannon type.
These are noisy, but their numbers are declining, and they will vanish back to their variety of Birchite holes by six months after Trump's defeat or jailing, whichever comes first.
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