Saturday, October 14, 2017

Bannon’s Disruption

Given the drop off in horrendous leaks which make ANY admin look like utter chaos, it’s hard for me NOT to conclude that Steve Bannon was not the source of a lot of them.
The difficulty with Bannon is that I agree with so much of his main basic thrust, but I have severe doubts about his methods resulting in success in dislodging a class of ‘experts’, legislators, executive dept fiat producers, and ‘businessmen’ whose failures are devoid of accountability to the people.
Let’s take a look at his ‘primary all the sons of bitches’ plan.
There are 2 requirements for his support.
  1. You will vote AGAINST Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority leader
  2. You will end the senate rule which requires 60 votes to end debate (Cloture) 
My unpleasant observation is, in fact, there is a single large (inchoate) party consisting of the GOPe and Wall Street Dems, and that their support is a political class which consisting of a parade thru revolving doors of some academia-govt-large industry, and the MSM is part of the industry. Mr. McConnell is a major representative of that party. To a large extent the military UPPER LEVELS have been co-opted, and has now institutionally codified many of these values (Nidal Hasan – workplace violence, and Steven Coughlin).
The US legislature can achieve nothing since any actual change DIES in the Senate.
But then reading the interviews of Bannon with Robert Kuttner, August HERE, and October HERE, one has to question whether the disruption can achieve the goals of diminishing the influence of the entrenched, powerful, arrogant and supremely confident political class, whose manifest FAILURES in designing, implementing, and finishing national and foreign policy are success if you look at the results for THEM, and their class.
Recently the NYT published THIS analysis, Democrats Are Playing Checkers While Trump Is Playing Chess , of course, the basis of this ‘chess’ is Bannon’s. The Times (being who they are) paints the D party as using identity politics as some tactical mistake resulting strategic destruction. Then in the mirror Bannon/Trump is seen as a cynical bettor on the opposite ‘race’, in that whites will band together, and we have both sides stoking a very polarized electorate into tribal race camps. The papers they quote as fundamental CONCENTRATE on voting differences by color, and are very weak in methodology (how many news stories say this or that ..and WHAT is the makeup of editors and journalists who create the number of stories?)
Buzzfeed has claimed to have emails showing Bannon worked with racists to bring out the ‘whites’ but not only has this not been picked up by major MSM outlets (who would salivate at proving this) but even they have produced only quotes from the email redacted and have not to my knowledge put forth anything like the wikileaks level of dumping leading to the ability to confirm these claims.
While the goals of ending ILLEGAL immigration (not immigration), border security (promised in 1986, OBVIOUSLY as a lie to euchre the American public as part of the huge immigration reform act), ending Islamic terrorism, and ending the KIND of free trade which has gutted US manufacturing, and then service, and then seen BOTH engineering and R&D begin to flee, are CORRECT GOALS, I think Bannon is not the tool to achieve these ends.
He may be a good identifier of these goals, but he’s not the right man to come up with the plans the people can support to ACHIEVE these goals.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, the D party IS playing identity politics. They don't have to be "painted" as doing so.

And if the goal of said identity politics is the marginalization of whites there is no need for a Bannon to arise to lead the reaction. The reaction will be organic. And it is.

thelastenglishprince said...

For me Bannon is this' generation version of Karl Rove - a powerful political operative who is a strategist who understand electoral emotional pulse, but whose weakness lies in the arena of believing strategy can co-opt policy.

Both endeavors require distinct talents which may not necessarily be married to each other.

Regarding Trump, he is playing three-tier chess and in a league of his own. I think he able to maneuver successfully on both platforms and were I to give an educated guess, the third platform for Trump concerns sustainability of his policies. What starts as Executive Order must transition to policies which can withstand the test of Constitutional challenge.