26 March 2012

Walsh For All and Three Against Walsh


Dear Dr. Bones,

It is a horrid thing, sir, to be without that intellectual bottom that the little lady from the Faculty Lounge was drooling about the other day. Worse still, to disapprove of, or maybe just instinctively abhor, the I. B. product, as this person appears--¡to her own organ’s peanut-gallery peanuts!--to disapprove or abhor:

SUNDAY, MAR 25, 2012 12:00 PM EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
All for none and none for all
Forty years of culture wars and racial battles wrecked the country and the GOP – but it’s not too late to change

BY JOAN WALSH

(...)

ELYDOG | Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 12:48 am

"Democrats love capitalism - after all, we saved it from itself twice, under Roosevelt and Obama." - Paraphrase of Walsh’s statement.

So folks, the next time you wonder why the Democratic Party supports capitalism - and the capitalists - and Obama bails them out, and politically supports the 1-10%, you’ll know why. After all, the Democratic Party is also OWNED by a wing of the capitalist class. And Ms. Walsh is a proud mouthpiece of theirs.

As to Joan commenting that indirectly Thomas Frank is some kind of "Marxist’ and that it is ’condescending’ to think white workers might vote against their own material interests sometimes (a Marxist idea...) - I’d have to say if you’re unemployed, and you are also against abortion, and you think that abortion is the key issue in society, then you ARE voting against your own material interests. That is the purpose of the ’culture wars’ - to direct people away from their material interests and towards moralistic issues that the capitalists can manipulate. And Joan, the good Catholic liberal, plays into that.

And this is the face of progressivism?

Mike V | Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 12:59 am

Yup, Walsh said what we should be patently obvious--Democrats are in bed with the corporate ruling class just as much as Republicans are. That is why Obama has surrounded himself with corporate executives like Bill Daly and Wall Street lobbyists like Broderick Johnson.

Walsh’s "progressivism" has always been rooted in attacks against true left wing insurgencies against the corporate-backed duopoly of Democrats and Republicans. She has always been a shill for corporate capitalism and the Democrats who have been tools of corporate capitalists. She epitomizes so much of what is wrong about modern liberalism. She is nothing but an apologist for corporate liberal politicians like Obama. The idea that there are elements in society that have a vested interest in acquiring more wealth and economic power for themselves, or that those who are excluded from the plutocracy might actually have interests of their own in conflict with those who exploit, is clearly not consistent with Walsh’s fairy tale vision of the world.

I’d say the second anaylsis is basically correct, as well as in agreement with the fundamental correctness of the previous poster, BUT . . .

... well, ’tis only *basically* correct. The superstructure needs a lot of work if the whole iceberg is ever to progress anywhere.

Both comrades make the mistake of picking on Citizenness Walsh personally. Of course she is no more than a sign of her unhappy times, only another feeble straw swept up in the hurricane of Decline. Walsh did not turn the wind tunnel on, she isn’t even blowing particularly hard, though it does go without saying that she should leave intellectually/ethically grown-up stuff like ‘Marxist’ and ‘condescending’ to somebody competent like Comrade Frank of KA.

To look on the bright side, here is what promises to be a textbook case: six, or twelve, or twenty years from now when Citizenness Walsh explicitly renounces all leftist infantilism, sinking into the arms of the TopPercenters with a sigh as she realizes that reaction ain’t *really* half so nasty [*] as it used to be painted by herself, among others, ‘ELYDOG’ and "Mike V" and Paddy McTammany will be able to holler "¡We saw it coming!" That won’t do a thing about the Hurricane, of course, but by then I daresay we’ll be happy just to think about something other than clouds and wind speed for a moment or two.

Happy days.
--Paddy

___
[*] A lot will depend, nastinesswise, on exactly where one happens to be sitting on the deck of the ‘Neotitanic’


_E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare_
(( E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare ))

when the big crunch comes. An "editor at large" of _Salon_ ought to be OK, yet one cannot altogether count on credentials, not cum vix justa sit secura.

In the case of Citizenness Walsh, one must hope so, for a deep-rooted aversion to all nastiness is 99% of why she cannot analyze straight. Becomingly ladylike and uninformed notions of ‘Marxism’ make it out a very icky business, no doubt, in her eyes. And everybooby knows that it is not NICE to ‘condescend’.


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