Continuing to Impress With Their Choices

Condoleeza Rice and John Kerry? Is this supposed to balance things out? I expect more silence from the archbishop.

Post by The Cardinal Newman Society.

Where's Francis Urquhart When You Need Him

We are arguably the most profligate country in history. Choosing the candidate put forth by the duopoly who will enable that that profligacy will be continued? That's supposed to be a plan for the future?

I will grant that one party is worse than the other with respect to actively advancing an agenda destructive of traditional morals and community. But the Republicans will do nothing to stop or turn it back.


Edit.
The Dangerous Alliance of Big Government and Big Business by David Masciotra

I find that the homepage for FPR is not updating properly. The newest articles and posts are not being shown. Is anyone else seeing this?

Ralph Nader on the Two Conventions

Profiles in Decadent Cowardliness

The Republicans put three themes in just about every speech. Tell your personal story, recount your humble beginnings, and describe how you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. Show the people you’re human or at least humanoid, not corporatist. Keep heralding small business so you don’t have to talk about Big Business which has bad vibrations these days around the country. Also, praise, praise, praise Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as family men with family values. Imagine Republicans telling the press that the convention was to “humanize” Romney and give the voters a warm, fuzzy feeling about their candidate so as to forget that his campaign is a clenched-teeth mouthpiece for Big Business.

The Democratic Convention evokes pity. They too had similar scripts at the podium – narrate your humble, hardworking family lines, talk incessantly about jobs so you won’t have to talk about wages. Especially muzzled was the willing Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, who, since 2009, has been given the back of Obama’s hand on “card check organizing rights” and on an inflation-adjusted minimum wage. His staged remarks even withheld any mention of a $10 minimum wage (See H.R. 5901 bill “Catching up with 1968”) and the raiding of worker pensions by corporate raptors.

Daniel Larison on Limits

Temperamental Conservatism and the Importance of Limits

If there is one thing truly alien to a conservative temperament, it is the rejection of limits. The Republican nominees believe that there ought not be any limits to American power in the world, and if they do exist at the moment they ought to be overcome. They are convinced that growth can be without limit as well. As far as they are concerned, acknowledging and respecting limits are the equivalent of embracing national decline. Unfortunately, it is exactly their rejection of limits that exhausts national strength and natural resources more quickly and hastens the coming of decline in the future.

See also his The Shrinking Foreign Policy Debate, examining the differences between the two candidates.

JHK's latest is relevant on the point of limits.

An Anarchist's View of Voting

Just Say “No” by Gary Chartier

Misc.
A Case for Classical Education

A cynical view of American politics from someone on the left

Dear Democrats, 2012 By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
A Checklist for Political Survival

Much of the public has the mistaken belief that the purpose of political parties in the United States is to consolidate a set of broad consensus on national issues, such as the economy, the mechanics and economics of food production and distribution, the structure of national defense forces, and the implementation of social services: education, health, retirement and elder-care; so as to craft legislation that governs how these and other matters are to be dealt with for the public good.

It is amazing that such a mistaken and inverted view of reality could ever have become common. Of course, it is the parties that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government action, and the public whose purpose is to ensure that beneficence by suppling the labor and capital needed to implement government action (or inaction) mandated by the bipartisan directorate. For example, it is the public's duty to:

-- provide a mass base of unthinking public approval for the status quo, such as by voting for Democrats and Republicans only (and so helping decide the biannual and quadrennial local and national contests selecting which partner will be the respective pork barrel meister-in-chief for the term), by manning party and race rallies (to maintain public social disunity), and following directions en masse in the many sanctioned corporate-financed political campaigns;

-- supply the living and future dead soldiers for the ongoing foreign wars;

-- buy products and services as directed by the entertaining and instructional advertisements in major media;

-- assume the tax burden necessary to underwrite the profitability of otherwise failing corporations, which profitability the bipartisan directorate deems to be a "national interest";

-- be an absorptive market for the waste production of national security industries (e.g., assume liability for civilian nuclear power; sustain the use of high-tech para-military cop equipment);

-- sustain the operation of a wealth-based adjudication-prison system, a corporate-government partnership and punitive element of social control;

-- support by every thought, word and deed the primacy of national security needs, as defined by the Pentagon and the bipartisan directorate, to the access of national resources over any selfish humanitarian or public social considerations (e.g., expending tax revenues -- "emergency war supplemental" -- to continue funding the bombardments in Central Asia and East Africa, instead of profitless subsidies for continuing unemployment benefits or a variety of public social services);

-- remember that the nation is defined by its national security tasks framing its corporate financial capital essence, NOT by the massed and, by definition, petty concerns of its self-absorbed "rubber bumper" population.

At this time in U.S. history, the Republican Party commands the loyalties of those motivated by simple white Judeo-Christian supremacy, finance capital greed, and hegemonic US militarism. Humanitarian, cultural, artistic and environmental considerations are absent, except when seen as impediments. This is the mindset of social inertia supporting exploitation full speed ahead. The Democratic Party captures the hopes of people who want to live like Republicans, but want to think of themselves as nice. It is easy to see how minimal intellect presents few problems in maintaining a Republican mindset, yet how helpful intellectual agility can be for a Democrat, whose self-image can require considerable mental gymnastics to maintain. In both cases, the identification with a party is usually reduced to a habit, because most people try to minimize their amount of thinking (which is sad, because this popular lack of thought is a very useful lever exploited by the manipulators of social control).

So, Democrats tend to "reach out" to leftist political outcasts, presumed to be politically homeless without them (intentionally so, as the Democrats work to suppress "third" parties), in an effort to produce electoral majorities that will gain Democrats pork-barrel-dispensing seniority when in government. Of course, the purpose of the voter is to promote the interests of the party, and not vice versa; so after the electoral victory the leftist issues and vote-seducing party rhetoric are expeditiously excreted, to trim the party for its primary purpose of implementing its previously agreed upon corporate agenda.

The author can't but help reveal his own habits of thought, which could be characterized as biases and prejudices. Who isn't a snob when judging the commoners?