Posted on 02/03/2016 1:01:12 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
It was getting on toward 2 o'clock on Tuesday morning after the bewildering Iowa caucuses, so I can't be too sure about anything. As the TV coverage wound down into nothingness, Chris Matthews of MSNBC became increasingly disgruntled about the lack of clear winners and losers in the Hawkeye State, at least in the Democratic photo finish between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Getting to hear the losers make concession speeches is what makes our democracy exciting, he insisted. Iowa in 2016, according to the Matthews worldview, was not exciting. "This was just vague," he muttered.
He may actually have said, "Democracy is vague." I hope he did. But Matthews looked even more than usual as if he had been sitting on a venomous sea creature for three hours and the toxin was slowly paralyzing his brain. He was pretty difficult to understand and quite likely I am projecting that marvelous observation, which would easily be the most profound thing he has ever said. Brian Williams leapt in with one of those one-word questions that make him the most puckish news anchor ever (in his mind): "Unsatisfying?" And then Rachel Maddow flooded the zone with super-engaged freshman seminar personality: Gosh, she thought it was very exciting that Clinton and Sanders had finished in such a dead heat that people were arguing over whether coin flips and untended precincts had affected the outcome. (Probably not. But also: What outcome?)
But the moment was one of those tiny "tells" where you see something that ought to be obvious. (When we observe the observable, in Joan Didion's famous phrase.) Democracy is indeed vague, more so than Chris Matthews consciously observes. Its vagueness is not random or without purpose. One might describe democracy, as practiced in the United States at present, as a deliberately vague process meant to obfuscate the machineries of politics and power. When the third-place finisher in an arcane electoral procedure held in 99 Corn Belt counties is the night's big winner on one side, while the big winner on the other side is the overwhelming favorite who squeaked out a statistically insignificant victory over a left-wing insurgent, it begins to look as if winning and losing are questions of theological exegesis, rather than matters of fact.
It goes without saying that someone like Matthews is only in it for the blood sport, the hurly-burly, the endless pseudo-analytical debate about tactics and strategy and who's up and who's down. He barely pretends to care about outcomes or policy. But for him to admit that what he really likes is watching someone lose, seeing those rare moments of honesty and vulnerability (as he put it) in which the manufactured personalities of electoral politics have to go onstage and eat crow - or eat something with the same number of letters as "crow" - was revealing and oddly affecting.
I'm picking on Chris Matthews here because he's such a glorious manifestation of what's wrong with political journalism, and in the Tuesday small hours he came off more than a little like a high school football coach in 1986, explaining that soccer will never catch on in America because there are so many ties. (Yes, footy fans, I know the term is actually "draws.") But that doesn't mean he's alone on this, or even wrong. I remember Mitt Romney's brief and agonized concession speech from 2012, in which it became clear that he had actually drunk the "unskewed polls" Kool-Aid, and believed he was going to win, far better than I remember whatever Obama said. John McCain's 2008 speech, against the slightly surreal context of some palm-frond plaza in suburban Phoenix, was one of his best moments as a public speaker. (Of course I remember the spectacle of Obama in Grant Park, but not the words that came out of his mouth.)
Hell, I can remember standing there in awestruck teenage horror when Jimmy Carter delivered his concession speech from the White House while it was still daylight outside in suburban California. I remember my dad's behemoth color TV from Montgomery Ward, whose picture dissolved into indecipherable lines and blotches if you got within 18 inches of the screen. I remember the backyard pool (heated to 76 degrees year round) dappled in November afternoon light while I tried to reckon with the inconceivable fact that the retired movie actor loathed and mocked by my parents and all their friends has been overwhelmingly elected president. Actually, no - most of that is imagination. I'm not sure where I was that afternoon, but I remember the frozen expression on Carter's face and my own emotions of terror and despair as if it all happened yesterday.
So, yeah - we are storytelling animals who crave moments of hubris, catharsis and crisis. (There's a reason those words stretch back to antiquity.) Politics is packaged and delivered as unscripted or semi-scripted human drama, and we delight in seeing the mighty brought low, whether that means Don Juan dragged down to hell, Superman enfeebled by Kryptonite or Mitt Romney weepily telling us that his wife would have made "a great first lady." (Go back and look at it! Throwing shade on Michelle Obama while losing was the consummate Romney douche move, up there with that dog on the roof of the car.) In what may be the masterstroke of English literature, Milton begins "Paradise Lost" with the greatest concession speech of all time, in which Satan faces the scale of his downfall from the "happy Realms of Light" into endless torture and "darkness visible" ("If thou beest he; but O how fall'n! how chang'd") and vows to keep on fighting a war he can never win.
Matthews is right that Donald Trump's relatively gracious Iowa speech on Tuesday night, after losing a caucus he expected to win (but had previously expected to lose), made the billionaire populist appear more human than at any time in recent memory. If that was a gratifying moment in dramatic terms, it was also a dangerous crack in the Trumpian facade, a glitch in the software package driving his idiot-Nietzschean persona.
Those of us who sit behind computers and write about this stuff have said over and over again that something was the beginning of the end of Donald Trump, and so far we have been wrong. But losing and playing humble about it - in effect, playing by the Chris Matthews rules of politics as theater - is a major blow to the notion that Trump is special and different and unstoppable. If I were advising Trump on strategy and branding, I would tell him to steer the hell away from "more human" and go full Miltonic Satan, although admittedly I might not put it that way. Trump's supporters don't want him to say nice things about Ted Cruz and put a happy spin on a disappointing second-place finish. They want "the inconquerable Will,/ And study of revenge, immortal hate,/ And courage never to submit or yield."
Trump's true nemesis is the irritatingly angelic visage of Marco Rubio looming up behind him, not the alien entity who actually won in Iowa. Ted Cruz has variously been described as the villain of a movie whose hero is a dog and as a third-grader whose mom bought his clothes out of the Sears catalog. In either case the people who don't love him hate him worse than plague rats or Hillary Clinton or socialism, and this week's glorious victory is likely to be the high point of his political career.
As for the diminutive College Republican twerp who just gave the most exuberant third-place victory speech in political history, that sound you heard was the "mainstream conservative" movement coalescing around Marco Rubio with a soft wet thunk, like a bag of dog crap hitting the weird old rich guy's front door. If Rubio can win in New Hampshire or manage a close second - and Granite State voters are known for such switchbacks - it will suddenly be as if the Trump moment had never happened and the Koch brothers' Sun King-like reign over the Republican Party had never been threatened.
As for the lack of clarity when it comes to winning and losing on the Democratic side - well, it's all a matter of perspective, am I right? For leftists and liberals, the choice between Clinton and Sanders comes down to what you make of America's broken system in the 21st century and whether you think it needs minor repair or an engine overhaul. Who you believe won Iowa reflects a similar division.
If I were explaining European soccer to Coach Matthews in 1986, I would tell him that draws are almost never neutral outcomes. For an underdog playing on the road, they can be inspirational breakthroughs, not to mention unexpected points in the standings. If you are Manchester United or Real Madrid playing at home - which pretty well describes Hillary Clinton's situation in Iowa - a draw falls somewhere between disappointment and disaster.
Clinton has now been declared the victor in Iowa, albeit by an inconsequential margin. (Not that that is likely to stop the tides and eddies of social-media disputation.) In objective terms, that hardly matters. Indeed, it hardly counts as a fact. But it immediately becomes a central plot element in the Chris Matthews media narrative, evidence that Clinton goes into New Hampshire with "momentum" or, to put it another way, that Man U did not actually draw at home against an obscure provincial opponent. If I were really feeling cynical about this whole spectacle - heaven forfend! - I would say that the pseudo-fact of Clinton's Iowa victory was not just politically helpful but ideologically necessary. It serves both to bolster and conceal another observable but widely ignored fact, which is that the Democratic Party's nominating process has little to do with democracy.
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon - Feb 1, 2016: Why I'm supporting Sanders over Clinton: This could be the moment to reclaim the Democratic Party and reshape history
"...........Is this a moment for realpolitik, as Amanda suggests? Is it a moment to stand outside the tides of populist fervor that threaten to give us Trump vs. Sanders, which would definitely be fun but would also be the weirdest and scariest general-election matchup since at least the middle of the 19th century? Is it a moment to soberly weigh the good with the bad, to embrace the long-delayed promise of a female president and to stand with competence and experience and the withered husk of the party of FDR and JFK?
Or is this, in the words of French philosopher Alain Badiou, a moment that demands a "politics of emancipation," a politics that imagines a world founded on social justice and an equality that goes beyond consumerism, "a world that has been freed from the law of profit and private interest"? Because "if we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy and the parliamentary politics that supports it" - and that is precisely the position of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party - and if we do not put an end to the "linguistic terrorism" of the neoliberal age, which has forbidden words and ideas like "socialism," we cannot imagine such a world, let alone create it. But I don't know whether this is that moment. I don't think anyone could possibly know that."
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Matthews is right that Donald Trump's relatively gracious Iowa speech on Tuesday night, after losing a caucus he expected to win (but had previously expected to lose), made the billionaire populist appear more human than at any time in recent memory. If that was a gratifying moment in dramatic terms, it was also a dangerous crack in the Trumpian facade, a glitch in the software package driving his idiot-Nietzschean persona.
Persona: the way you behave, talk, etc., with other people that causes them to see you as a particular kind of person : the image or personality that a person presents to other people
[Nietzsche's place in contemporary ethical theory]....Sometimes Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what he regards as moral or as immoral. Note, however, that one can explain Nietzsche's moral opinions without attributing to him the claim of their truth. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it expresses something false. On the contrary, he depicts falsehood as essential for "life".
Interestingly enough, he mentions a "dishonest lie", (discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner) as opposed to an "honest" one, recommending further to consult Plato with regard to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work."
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[In his 1987 book Art of the Deal, Donald Trump put it bluntly: "I play to people's fantasies. ... I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion."]
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Game Theory: Persona 4, Nietzsche, the Self and its relation to the game's ending
[SNIP]
"...............Again returning to [John] Adams, he predicted this:
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
And he even provides a description as to how it would happen, which, again, is eerily similar to Sanders's proposed policies that have his flock so incredibly excited: Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavily on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. [emphasis added]
The question is not whether the outcomes Adams predicts will come to pass if Bernie Sanders is elected president. The question, rather, is how much of what he predicts has already come to pass, for we have long ago admitted and accepted as law the notion that "the right to property is not as sacred as the laws of God." Furthermore, what might further infringements upon property rights, much less Sanders' suggestion that we abolish them, mean for our culture and our country?
Just as any reasonable person might understand why a home loan poses less risk for a lender than a student loan, any reasonable person should also recognize the danger in a government with the power to rob successful individuals in order to provide for a preferred class of idle, entitled, and envious grumblers."
This is babble for babble’s sake. Gotta fill the space. Gotta post the post.
Good morning.
Perhaps it will “speak” to others.
: )
Good morning.
Not clicking on it. It might have VD.
It might have some “Python” humor.
You seem to need an argument.
Yes.
“Salon.”
Did you read my comment about it?
".... It's a truism that Iowa doesn't matter. But it's only true until it no longer is. Democrats and Republicans fought hard for Iowa. The amount of energy and anger expended here was not a hollow pursuit.
The battle has shown weaknesses and strengths in all the campaigns that will serve as a learning opportunity.
The Democrats will enter a bitter battle as more left-wing support will begin flowing to Bernie Sanders while the Clinton campaign will go to the mattresses. After Iowa, Trump will likely begin investing in a more conventional campaign. As a successful businessman, he's capable of analyzing what went wrong and drawing the right conclusions. Rubio's momentum has often been mocked in the past week, but he proved that he could take the third spot in a three man race. If Jeb Bush and some other establishment candidates drop out, the momentum could become big enough to take him all the way to the top.
For Ted Cruz, Iowa showed that he could win even while under attack from every direction. This was his test of fire and he survived it. Whatever else happens, he won Iowa despite rejecting ethanol, shrugged off attacks from a popular Iowa governor, not to mention Bob Dole and Sarah Palin, and scored a big victory.
If anyone doubted that Cruz could do more than just talk, Iowa settled that question.
But all three Republican winners in Iowa surprised everyone. Trump, who had not run a gracious campaign, managed a gracious concession speech. Rubio achieved a surprising momentum. And Cruz beat the predictions and the polls, rising from political death to achieve an impressive victory.
All three Republican candidates have been energized by Iowa in their own way. And a clear resolution allows them to move on, even as the Democrats will still be stuck arguing over who won Iowa.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans have entered an unexpectedly competitive primary season, but while the primaries are strengthening, training and energizing the Republican candidates, they are weakening the Democratic candidates. Before Iowa, the media narrative was that the Republicans were coming apart. Now it appears that it's the Democrats who are coming apart instead."
: )
Thanks for stopping by.
Maybe it will come to you on the bus.
So now we are posting articles from Salon? What there were no Trump hating articles at DU? Stay classy CW.
"On December 2, 1991, National Review published a cover with the headline "Honey, We Shrunk the Party." It featured "The Two Bobs" - the Senate's Dole and the House's Michel - examining a dwarf elephant under a magnifying glass. Inside were four pages lamenting "The GOP's Good Losers." In the wings waited Newt Gingrich, who had risen to prominence hammering not only the Democrats but also the GOP leadership in Congress, a familiar litany: insufficient conservatism, insufficient steel, excessive generosity in compromise, moral and political sloth.
The more things change . . .
Gingrich would go on to become speaker and to instill in congressional Republicans a more vigorous and confrontational attitude that for better and for worse (mainly better) survives to this day. After a series of frustrating failures, he eventually beat Bill Clinton into submission on welfare reform and won a great deal in a series of compromises that more or less balanced the budget.
Dole and Michel are still with us (both are 92 years old) and Dole has made an ill-advised sortie out of retirement to inveigh against Senator Ted Cruz. The old bulls of the Senate revere the institution itself and its courtly habits, and they detect in Senator Cruz a certain contempt for its traditions, particularly its tradition of collegiality. If Republican senators hate Senator Cruz, well, he hated them first.
But Senator Cruz, the ardent constitutionalist, has performed in office precisely the duty for which senators are empowered and distinguished from the members of the House. The House of Representatives is a steering wheel; the presidency is an accelerator; the Senate is a brake. Shutdowns, gridlock, obstruction, mulish foot-stamping opposition to the president's agenda: These are not defects in our system of government - they are why we have a Senate. Ted Cruz may have rubbed many of his colleagues the wrong way, and some of them resent that he started running for president about eleven seconds after he was sworn in to the Senate. (Presumably, Senator Paul and Senator Rubio will forgo that line of criticism.) If you care a great deal about who sits at which table in the Senate cafeteria, that matters a great deal. Ted Cruz, well aware that he is nobody's ray of senatorial sunshine, has wisely declared that while he may not be the guy you want to have a beer with, he's your first choice in designated drivers........"
http://www.decisiondeskhq.com/
Interestingly, the Democrats stopped counting with Hillary ahead by 0.2%, and they still have not finished counting the last 3.1% of votes. The Democrats are as corrupt in their own voting as they are in national elections.
Thank you for this. I've been thinking that what we call "capitalism" is actually just respect for property rights.
Why do Bernie and Donald vie for each others' followers, while attacking Sen. Ted Cruz?
"Never let a crisis go to waste."
[SOCIALISM/Sanders]<-------->[REPUBLICANISM/Cruz] <-------->
[NATIONALISM/Trump]
Heavens! I offer some clarity. Delegate count Cruz 8, Trump 7, Clinton 23, Sander 21. Next time Andrew should stay away from a keyboard and just gaze into the mirror for a couple hours. And we already KNEW Mathews was a jerk. Geez.
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