Benie Concedes

Allowing Clinton to label herself a "progressive" (because she believed in progress) and conceding that Obama was also a progressive, Bernie all but conceded the nomination.  By failing to distinguish himself and define his cause as something other than what Obama and Clinton have offered, Bernie undercut the raison d'etre of his vaunted "political revolution."

As explained in Chipster's Journal,  the word "progressive" has a defined meaning in U.S. political history.  It includes nice and decent things like raising standards of living, conservation, and so on.  More importantly, however, progressivism was and remains a rejection of Jefferson individualism and its political correlative of State Sovereignty.  It stands for a concept of government as the custodian of common resources and socio-economic welfare with powers to regulate the use as well as the distribution of wealth.   

If Bernie's "democratic socialism" did not mean this it meant nothing.  Clinton and Obama are not progressives but globalist neo-liberals (to say nothing of warmongering).  Bernie was not obligated to delve into the arcana of political philosophy  -- arcana that are beyond the mental capacities of most U.S. denizens in any event.   But it was incumbent on him to draw a line between himself and his opponents and to assert, at the very least, that while Obama and Clinton might like to think of themselves as "progressives" they have both utterly failed at enacting anything on par with either Roosevelt.

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And from Versailles....

Asked the other day, why she ate cake while the people in Paris starved, l'Antoinette replied, "Well, that's what they served."

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Hillary's Inner Goldwater

Recoiling from her victory in Iowa, Hellary Clinton lashed out at Bernie Sanders saying,

“Our founders knew if we were going to survive as the great democracy they were creating we would have to have a system that kept the passions at bay ...”

Oh! the progressivity!  What “the Founders" knew is that if they were to survive as a ruling class they had to keep the populace at bay. Anyone who has gone to law school or studied U.S. political history must know that the Federalist Convention of 1788 was a pre-emptive counter-coup by the conservative elements who feared those populist, democratic movements they called "mobocracy."

There were a several factors which impelled the newly sovereign states toward a “more perfect union.” Among them,  intra-state jealousy which made the newly minted “republics” susceptible to being played off against one another by some foreign power. Settlement of claims and access to credit was another.  But the chief concern was democratic radicalism among single family farmers, indentured servants and a growing number of young, illiterate under-employed hired hands.  

James Madison put it succinctly in Federalist Paper 10, in which he famously discussed the inflamed passions of political factions,

"But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

Madison went on to say that while “the causes of faction cannot be removed, ... relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.” 

Controlling the “effects” of the lower classes was  the principal purpose of the “more perfect union.”

The Federalists succeeded admirably. They resurrected House of Lords (the Senate) and gave it effective veto over the lower popular House. If that didn't work, they concocted a judicial form of Curia Regis, to veto anything that might get by the Senate. From the Holy Roman Empire, they borrowed an Electoral College to insure that no passionate leader would ever really be elected president without approval from the better, cooler class. They dressed up institutional deadlock as "checks and balances" and packaged the whole reactionary affair as "the world's first and best democracy."

Even States’ rights got into the act; for it has always been assumed and understood that the States themselves would be the first line of defense in “handling their own.”  Over and over throughout the course of U.S. history movements for national, popular reform have been broken on the rock of state sovereignty — or “federalism” as it is sometimes called.

On the other hand, the “imperative” of national (“interstate”) commerce got trucked out whenever the issue concerned the facilitation of railroads, industrial development, corporate rescue or the promotion of more innovative financial “products.” The entire premise of F.D.R’s  “national regulation” was implicit in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824)  and  in the Lexicon of Doubletalk that regulates political discourse, “regulation” includes the granting of privileges and immunities to corporate capital. 

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court frankly (and correctly) dubbed F. D. Roosevelt’s reforms as National Capitalism.   But the truth is that national capitalism was always the American Agenda.  When  Calvin Coolidge said that the “business of America is business” he was not being polemical but laconically factual.

Hillary knows all of this  and is perfectly content with it.   She is more than content with the "super-delegate" system which gives 12 to  20 percent of primary and convention votes to unelected delegates, appointed on the basis of their status as "party officials" and "friends of the establishment."  Her unmistakable allusion to Madison's essay on controlling the impulses of political passions could not be more clear.  Anyone who knows Hillary knows that keeping the populace at bay is what she has always been about.

This is the same shameless Hillary who just last Fall was gushing over how much she admired Eleanor Roosevelt... you know that passionate advocate of the not-so-well-off.  But at last Hellary’s Inner Goldwater has burst out.  It could not be repressed forever.   Hopefully people will not forget it in favor of the bullshit she puts on a plate.

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Hillary's Loss in Iowa

There are no Pyrrhic Victories in sports; but in politics, as in war, some wins protest too much.  Hellary's expected three point victory over Bernie Sanders bespeaks nothing but failed leadership and  stunning electoral distrust.

The question is not what Hellary takes out of Iowa but what she put in.   And what she put in was something like a Soviet tank assault.  Hillary went into Iowa with millions of dollars at her back and the Democratic Party machinery fully at her disposal.   Like the legions of the Later Empire, she went into battle with awesome recognition and glittering armour.   And in spite of this terrifying political might, an aged mouse from Vermont pulls within three fucking points?

The Clinton Camp, which is good at nothing if not at self-promotion, will clang, cymbal and gong Hellary's victory for all the ear can bear.  But to anyone of reason it will ring hollow. 

The vote tomorrow is not the national election, which historically is always close.  This is a primary election among a subsidiary part of the electorate that is presumptively well disposed to a person who has been at the centre of the Democratic Party's power structure for two decades and who is, in all but name, the President's anointed successor.    This is not the battle against the foe but rather a rallying of the troops.  And the troops are all but mutinous. 

Hellary may walk away with the prize; but it will be a battered horn. 

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Our Present Future

Manuel Vals, France's prime minister, stated yesterday that France's state of emergency would last indefinitely. It is a total and global war that we are facing with terrorism," he added. "The war we are conducting must also be total, global and ruthless."

Really?

Ah, indeed... and so today we hear,

 

"Total war is the demand of the hour. The danger facing us is enormous. ...  The question here is not one of method, but of the goal, namely eliminating the danger"

Danke, Vals.

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RapsNacht im Köln

One has to sneer at the inconvenient marriage between Germany’s politically correct left and its politically incorrect right, over the “sexual assaults” which allegedly took place in Cologne’s cathedral square on New Year’s Eve.

Even now, no-one - and that includes the police - really knows what happened.   BBC

And yet, without knowing what really happened, the official world, the media and the public have gone off half-cocked over the issue. (Actually, full blown cocked.)

Aside from the squirming as the multi-cultural, Kumbaya Left finds itself embraced-in-schadenfreude by the cultural integrity volk at PEGIDA, the real issue is the danger of language and how our species’ supposedly superior capacity for articulated howling turns us into beasts worse than hyenas.

Shrieking headlines — not just in the tabloid press — have screeched about women “running the gauntlet,” “sexual attacks” and “rape-fests.”  If one asks if anyone was actually “raped,” as in unconsented vaginal intercourse, the answer is an indignant accusation of misogyny.

So let’s go back to basics.

The word “assault” derives from the Latin ad-saltus meaning to leap or jump at.  It does not require any contact because the harm is in the spooking.  This makes the concept of “sexual assault” rather problematic. 

Is rushing to embrace someone a sexual assault? If so, how is it distinguished from a gushing co-sharing of our common humanity?   If “sexual assault” refers to a “jumping at” which is sexually motivated, how do determine a person’s motive?

Unfortunately, to make matters less clear, the word “assault” is commonly used as the equivalent of a “battery” which originally meant a hitting of some sort.

Now, a rape could be called a sexual battery, because the essence of rape is that the male penis is used an instrument of violence on the person.  But in that case the word “rape” is sufficient to describe what happened.

Alas, to make matters even more unfortunate, the legal definition of “battery” is not limited to hitting but encompasses any “offensive touching, howsoever slight.”

This creates a whole host of uncertainties in its own right.  But in the context of “sex crimes” it can be supposed that a “sexual assault” is coterminous with a “sexual battery”

What then constitutes a offensive sexual contact which is not rape?  Well... tit-grabbing, crotch groping and butt slapping come to mind.  An attempt to make close, labial contact might also qualify.

But since an “assault” does not require contact, vague hand motions accompanied by lewd and leering remarks would also qualify. 

The ultimate result is that the term “sexual assault” encompasses a very wide spectrum of conduct. 

The problem with reporting vaguely and amorphously about "sexual assaults" is that people fill in the blank with whatever part of the spectrum they want to imagine, which inevitably ends up being the worst.   And, of course, nothing gets worse than swarthy dark men "sexually [   ]ing and  [   ]ing"  (our) white women... 

This is not to say that crotch grabbing is nice (or, in the current puritanically correct lexicon, “appropriate”).  It is to say that some sexually motivated “offensive” touching is not as serious as rape. 

No one, male or female, likes “unwanted” sexual attention.  A wink from someone we find incredibly hot, is just as incredibly welcome.  Oh lucky day!  That same act — the wink — from someone we are not in the least interested in is annoying, icky, repugnant.  That’s why bitches snap.  It’s natural.  It’s also the luck of the draw.

What distinguishes what happened at Cologne from Rio’s Carnevale?  Not much.  Inebriated, happy males, venting their sexual urges by whistling, making lewd comments and perhaps groping is not the Rape of the Sabines. 

What would the world say of same Pious Nellie, who walked out of the festive crowds at Rio complaining (indignantly) about being “sexually assaulted” ?  C’mon, comes to mind.

In ordinary circumstances, a male butt slapping a woman at work or in the supermarket, without being signaled to do so, could rightly be reproved with a misdemeanor.  But walking into a crowd of foreseeably inebriated party goers on New Years Eve???  What were the women thinking?  That they were going to sing Nun Danket?

Well... this is Germany and not Brazil.  So perhaps a certain Buddenbrooksian Pall hangs over things.  Still it would be nice to know what happened before the press works itself up into a frenzy over the sexual holocaust on RapsNacht.

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Being Reminded

The Archbishop of Canterbury has seized the occasion of the New Year to remind us that “Jesus was a refugee” too — the point being...., uh, that we should welcome refugees into our hearts?

We might remind the archbishop (and other 401k Liberals) that Jesus was also a PWOP — a person without a pension.