YESTERDAY -- POLITICAL HI JINKS
TODAY -- JENKEM HI POLITICS (wow, what a head...but that taste in your mouth! lasts forever)
The following remarks have been prompted by open talk that
a 'sting' operation lay behind the sex scandal that removed ex-Governor Spitzer from office. Merely considering the possibility opens a can of worms some might regard as unnecessary. Part 1, however, argues on Kantian grounds that there is a moral and legal imperative to address and correct it with legislation.
Carrying through the moral imperative to consider the possibility it was a sting entails confronting the political mentality behind it. It is a concerted act of enormous consequences. A sitting Governor has been replaced literally overnight. His name and image turned into that of a disgraced laughing stock. The collective psychic system, already overloaded with momentous issues and frayed to the breaking point, is delivered another mega-shock. The moment is not so much a legal one as a political one, as Brian Lehrer observed. And it is already fading, itself. Simply too painful to dwell on. Nevertheless, Part 2 argues that
that the remarkable similarity of Spitzer's and Larry Craig's double lives cannot be ignored bit, in fact, reveal the psychodynamic core of the mentality.
Finally, Part 3 is the illustrative example of the stinger mentality, if it can be called that. It comments on John Podhoretz' article in Thursday. March 13 New York Post, "No Gov For Old Men", lambasting ye sinners with uncontrolled appetites, who punish old men, like Hank Greenberg..
1.
A Moral-Legal Imperative following the resignation.
Main argument:
Eliot Spitzer's resignation in disgrace as Governor of New York must not be allowed to sanction use of sting operations, in which information gathered by federal or state agencies about the private lives of individuals are used to bring charges against them. This will happen willy nilly, however, if what is being openly spoken of as such is allowed to be glossed over and left as a mess for history to sort out.
There is a gradient of moral-legal issues linking enticement, entrapment, instigation, ex-post facto framed constructions; dirty tricks operatives, agent provocateurs, and out-and-out false flag ops (such as occurred in the '01 anthrax letters framing Muslims). The last, degenerate case, is impossible to will as moral, that is universal, law. It's maxim amounts to "let anyone commit any atrocity in anyone else's name, including mine", which would open every man up to revenge for any and everyone else's violence. One may question whether or not Kant's conception of morality in accordance with ure reason is the basis for legal proscription, it is nevertheless evident here that the consequence of everyone's acting on the above maxim contradicts the possibility of each one's will-to-live free of the consequences of other's misdeeds.
Extenuating circumstances might be imagined to justify stretches of criminal law enforcement in the other cases ("dire straits" scenarios), but it could never be accepted practice to allow these to be used when they create criminality that would not otherwise exist in oder to fight it. A legal system that perpetuates itself by passing laws people are pretty much assured to break, "given human nature", aided by a string of embedded counter-agents to do geopolitical spade work in the 'burbs; and a good police force....presto! appear a military dictatorship and police state.
Enforcement of any system of law must of course allow for extenuating circumstances, and allowing for borderline areas always invites abuse. Dirty tricks by rogue conspirators may be inherently unpreventable. However, they cannot be winked at, ignored, tolerated in principle, or left unpunished. Since the cost of punishment of such white collar crime is so enormous, society, as a Group Process held together communication -- the way we talk -- must resolve unto itself a a law-of-laws commitment, that government processes be protected at all costs against such corruption.
******
Elaboration.
There is a principle of moral reasoning under which rational systems of law and justice are possible, namely the law cannot be legitimately used to subvert itself. The paradigm worst-case scenario is if one branch of government used its legitimate authority to stop another branch from using its legitimate authority to function. Worst cast scenarios must be proscribed as both illegal and irrational. The rule of reason extends over, is more comprehensive than, the rule of law. A principle of rational law is that law cannot be legitimately used to subvert itself.
That is what is being done implicitly in the case of both Eliot Spitzer and Larry Craig. Both men were pursuing their own business, such as it was, arousing no complaints about their personal behavior to alert authorities of threats to society. In fact, both were nabbed by sting operations, carried out with one jurisdiction interfering with the officials of another authority . The mantra "but no man is above the law" cannot be argued in these cases because in them the law has been stretched to such limits that to use it reverses it's import to "the law is under the thumb of whoever uses it.".
(Note: exceptions to this should be rare and specified before acting on, to leave an unmistakable trail of evidence, and sources, for any charges brought.)
The chain of announced evidence in Spitzer's case used "the war on terror" mantra to justify spying on Spitzer's private affairs. By rational precedent, this places the privacy of whoever moves money to make discreet arrangements, as he did, which are of nobody's business but his own, as this was, under surveillance, as possible sleeper cell of extremists. In other words, vulnerable to political opponent's dirty trick and shenanigans. A meta- law against that is imposed by the principle of consistency of the law, itself, as a branch of positive legal discourse (whatever its basis as regards reason and morality), as a categorical imperative. Acts such as 'sting' operations which interfere with the official function and exercise of personal choices are illegal, in principle, and the mentality of those defending their use either fails to understand or does not appreciate what the American legal system hasve traditionally assumed regarding freedom and justice.
.
2
A PSYCHOPATHIC ANOMALY: MATCHING MISOGYNISTS - Archetypal SYZYGY (conjunction of anti-feminist opposites)
The case of Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, matches that of New York Democrat Govenor Eliot Spitzer, as different styles of male sexuality, neither of which is woman-friendly,
....Two politically opposed worst-case scenarios, pivoting on right-wing vrs. left wing mens sexual styles.
HOWEVER ...the argument to advance here is: No moral conflation of 'extremes'!
Although the cases of Spitzer and Craig are most similar in respect to the purity of their values- reversal, both presenting one face for public, another for private consumption ("Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Spitzer," one wag had it), The Governor ought not to be put in the same moral category -- the same shower stall, as it were -- with the Idaho Senator. His sex was orthodox, probably considerate and surely good. This well contrasts with the other's wide-stance style. This may not be a moral difference (that can be left open), but it is character issue for the manhood vote, particularly sensitive among redneck conservatives.(paleo-, not neo-: they've gone modern). The left-wing crusading sinner is a normal, if somewhat split-off, Archetypal avatar. Warriors deserve women. The right wing analogue does not come off nearly so well as an archetype, I'm afraid. We've talkin' Cap'n and the Pogues (rock band)
It could be argued, of course, that since both are worst case scenarios, it is irrelevant to distinguish between them. This would be a fallacy, however, one that a majority of Americans can be easily manipulated into falling for. Extremist are extremists, and is is is, and not another thing. The fallacy cannot go unanswered. One extreme can be more right (in this case, the political left), the other more wrong (in this case the political right). Lumping them together as "extremes", as if the difference didn't matter, narrows the acceptable non-extreme alternatives, plus divides-and conquers the remainder. The linguistic manipulation is the same as lumping Hamas and Hezbollah who have legitimate grievances against Israel with "terrorists". Indeed, any opposition to an established regime becomes "terrorism". Thus to allow the two self-abnegating positions, undistinguished in value, to become foils for necessary steps against "extremism", narrows the scope of democratic freedoms. Sometimes, like now, the system* as a whole needs changing. Working within it becomes a way of perpetuating what the work is against. The psychodynamic reversal is the same as the move The Thing. IT* was an overpowering anti-human force field fed -- given energy to grow stronger -- by the inner state of determination to "fight it". In Jungian terms, treating the projected Shadow as an objective reality.
This same sign-use structuring* (*the term used for reporting how Spitzer organized bank accounts to conceal money movement) is in play in the national election choices. The group psychological terms used by identity politics, in accord with the pervasive sense of narrative history unfolding in the dynamics of competition/conflict, has narrowed the choices to a generic frame that, for one thing, prevents the legitimacy of the Iraq war to be raised within it. Too "extremists". Further, the same structuring* ramifies the same Right-Left opposition, coupled with Male-Female opposites, within the Democrat party; in the tension between male-female, coinciding with black-white race tension in the choice between Hillary and Obama. These Archetypal opposites play an enormous role in the America psyche. "Is the Democratic part tearing itself apart?" Chris Matthews line led with. "Race and sex". Can "the Democrat party" contain these powerful psychological opposites.under a political umbrella?
3.
THE VILLIANS EMERGEA. LET PODHORETZ BE PODHORETZ !
appetites and old men
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03132008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/no_gov_for_old_men_101668.htm
NO GOV FOR OLD MEN
SPITZER'S APPALLING APPETITES
March 13, 2008 -- ELIOT Spitzer's unwillingness or inability to quiet his extracurricular hunger for sex-for-pay upon assuming high office is not only the proximate cause of his downfall, but the key to understanding the profoundly grave weakness of character that runs through his entire public life.
To know why Spitzer fell and fell so hard, you need only consider his appetites.
I'm not referring to his food intake - though the rangy Spitzer has always had about him "a lean and hungry look," to use Shakespeare's description of one of his villains. Rather, I'm referring to his incapacity to refuse himself anything he wanted - to exercise even the most minimal self-control when it came to satisfying his appetites
*********
DID HE SAY APPETITES? We've got to have a Jack Nicholson cameo to cover this.
Here we have Podhoretz at this best. Or worst. His best IS THE worst. He prays in his Jewish heart, sic, that Bush bombs Iran before leaving office. During March 10-13 Americans who follow just things learned that head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the entire Middle East - Iraq theater, Admiral Fallon, has resigned. He was reported in a now instantly famous article in Esquire magazine to have not been in favor of the surge strategy, and to be willing to engage Iran diplomatically. He is credited as being the most comprehensive strategic thinker. Meanwhile, a war ship is announced headed to the Persian Gulf.
Podhoretz' goes on to concoct a link between Spitzer's insatiable yuppie appetites and Tommy Lee Jones' dead dad moment in "No Country For Old Men." Go ahead and croak, you old fuggers, he has Heartless Death Mask intone.
"And Gov. Spitzer's aides (yeah, sure) sought to destroy the 77-year-old Joe Bruno, the senior Republican in Albany, by any means necessary.
"A Freudian psychoanalyst might wonder what appetite, exactly, Spitzer was seeking to satisfy when he decided to try and take down these elderly men."
Death wish toward the Father, J.P. That's what you are alluding to here. That self-centered, immoral, sex-obsessed yuppie sinner man wants to off lumps like Hank Greenberg, John Whitehead and, indeed, Fatherhood itself.
That's Podwhoretz fer ya. He's good with depth psychology like that.
.....Dumping his OWN 'appetites' and death wishes toward Old Men who won't/.can't wake up from their Father-God dream (and don't intend to let others do so either) into bad boy Eliot Spitzer. Then smacking him HARD are these moralizing neocons. He is an errant one-of-them, who has betrayed his tribe. Father - Son pictures of the Spitzers are shown on Podhoret's column above pictures of oldster's Greenberg, Whitehead, Bruno. This signals a father-son war within the downstate NY Jewish community, Zionists vs Diasporas. One branch of 'the family' brought shame and disgrace to 'the family' (re-iterated in the content of his public penitence speech -- the Pentitent Jew archetype).
The viciousness of the lynching/crudifixion/sacrifice goes with the devastating shock of the consequences, and seems proportionate to the neocon's actual guilt for the Iraq war, what is happening in Pakistan, and Israeli-Palestine -- all foreign policy debacles coming apart. Hanging in America's atmosphere heavier than West Texas storm clouds is: news of Admiral Fallon's resignation; the desparate Gaza- West Back situation following Israel's announcement of further settlements and hi-tech shooting of Palestinians; the pending trial of an AIPAC' ex-official, Stephen Rosen, for passing classified U.S. security information to Israel; and America's rapidly disintegrating financial/economic situation. (according to Paul Krugman: the prospective jolts of interest rate cuts and tax rebates won't slow the recession.).
WE'VE GOT THE DAILY NEWS' EXPERT'S ANALYSIS, TOO
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/03/12/2008-03-12_same_impulses_that_drove_spitzers_moral_.html
The very drives (those appetites, again) that fueled his success as aggressive NY State AG are precisely what brought him down, the Daily News experts say. This adds Freudian instinct dynamics to Podhoretz' lucky guess, and agrees with much else (including L. deMause's psychohistory).
How this karmic takedown works, however, is not a simple as it sounds. What is key is the symbolic content of his 'clean up prostitution' agenda. According to the experts, he is acting out ego defenses against his own ravenous Id-impulses (they all agree on this lip-smacking detail; so Clintonesque) externalized in the sex-slave prostitution trade. Put simply: He is trying to control himself by controlling them. That explains why he could be so hard, cold, cruelly calculating and zealous. His own dalliance could be rationalized as the human side he, and all us sinners, are obliged to forgive ourselves for, raised to the higher human level it deserves. In cracking down on sleazy sex slave profiteers, he is keeping smut out of the range of children and making things better. So the thinking would go. When he gets busted for doing what he fought, the hypocrisy built into the scheme deconstructs as Instant Karma.
B. Segue: Spitzer =>o Obama
Chris Matthews on MSNBC - (in the am?) --
(Context: Geraldine Ferraro's comment that Obasma wouldn't be where he is, enjoying the popularity he enjoys, if he weren't black: a reverse white racist thing to say, even if true. She seems to have wafted the curare dart for Hillary Clinton, only to reabsorb herself into the background.)
Repredicating Pastor Wright's Anti-Semitism
A tlling vignette* flashed on MSNBC channel news TV this am. Chris Matthews, their senior political analyst and correspondent, usually the evening HARDBALL hitter, appears to put the spin-predicates on a sermon delivered by Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of a (protestant) United Church of Christ sometimes attended by Barak Obama. The flap* de jure, big enough to get the big guy out of bed, is stuff sounding for all the world like black racist, anti-American, anti-semitic Bible thumping fanaticism. Not good for the Jews. Only sound bite snippets of his actual 'delivery' of the sermon are played, enough to intimate Bizzaro Zone presence, without getting pulled in too deeply. They have to buffer the text by manipulating the token.
The text, taken went like this (Quoted from the Wall Street Journal):
:http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120545277093135111.html
"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began. "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. .. no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."
*****
"Man - o - man - o -- thats some Manochevetz," as the saying goes in Chicago. You just don't get preaching like that up here along the Susquahannah. I understand it. It's in my soul resonating through eax=scg strand of DNA.
Speaking of which.... (continuing where the WSJ quote broke off)
Concluding, Mr. Wright said: "We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty."
Lets take the points qualifying him as Most Hated Man, today. :
1. Economic guilt complex; latent socialist 'liberation theologian here. dangerous.
2. Anti-America, as poisoner.
3. Anti-Zionist
4. Anti-Reagn's Contra War
5. Anti-Vietnam war
6. Anti-America, as drug runner
7. Anti-white racists
There's somethingabout this guy you've really gotta like.
*****
The lusion has to be that the fix is in. The black guy has to be taken out, taken down, like Spitzer. It became evident that the fix was in after Lieberman got Giuliani brushed aside in Florida in favor of McCain. In the Archetypal set up, this positioned Republicans behind the Vietnam war hero, divinely (it is hinted; Reagan's spirit pulled him through) rescued, like Moses getting pulled out of the river Nile.
The WALL STREET JOUNAL: Anti-Zionist Extremist, iz Wright
The psychosemiotic agenda would be to seed group discourse with subjects and predicates whose links and application can provided as needed for the propaganda spin de jure. Most of the news stories obsessing over Paster White's comments skimmed over the part that sounded anti-Semitic (but aren't really: it's just how things are in S. Chicagoland). Chris Matthews
