Jesus. The only explanations I can come up with for Conrad Black’s latest at Notional Review are that he has been smoking something really strong, or is having a massive stroke.
Since Newt Gingrich is a completely unfeasible president, the question pops up, like a cobra’s head, of why he is now the leading contender for the Republican nomination. In the desperation created by this glazed pall of implausibility that has anesthetized the Republicans, I offer an alternative explanation. We are witnessing the Hegelian dialectic in action, a rare and unfashionable occurrence, yet appropriate to such an epochal farce as this. (If Newt can be Lazarus for a month, the roots of Marxism can be briefly verdant again.) …
Inconceivable though Newt is as president, he is an articulate and forceful critic of the administration and not just an O’Reilly-Hannity impersonator. Newt sees it plain, calls it straight, and gets the sleep-deprived Republicans halfway home by tearing the incumbents limb from limb. But there’s more: He is such a cyclonic change of pace, he is a non-Mitt who can actually stay the course and stop Mittification from happening. Never mind that he won’t fly himself, he can keep the nomination open for someone who can, who couldn’t face having to campaign for a year and spend $100 million to be nominated. …
Either Newt, too weighed down by darts, buckshot, and self-detonated combustion, will start to fade before the caucuses and primaries are too advanced, and one more declared non-Mitt, possibly Jon Huntsman, will arise; or the absence of a contender with a commanding lead will prevail until it is so close to the convention, or even at the convention, that there will be a draft of one of the non-runners, probably Jeb Bush. …
A large enough number of Americans is uneasy with four more years of Obama that the system has magically, intuitively, dragooned the amiably preposterous ex-speaker to produce a deadlock. Out of this astonishing showdown of able non-presidents, either a mid-primary inspiration or a convention-eve groundswell will identify the right candidate. The office is seeking the man, or woman, but so far without success; so the search will continue.
Hegel should be generally known for something more substantial than the truism (often mistakenly attributed to Goethe) that “no man is a hero to his valet,” especially as the generally unremembered next line was: “not because the man is not a hero, but because the valet is only a valet.” I’m sure there is an application of this to the current Republican race, but can’t immediately think of it.
And those were the more coherent bits.
Mnemosyne
Sort of OT, but Obama’s not backing down:
Obama Assails ‘Ridiculous Washington Standoff’
My favorite quote:
There’s nothing I love more than the spectacle of Republicans ripping each other up in public.
D. Mason
Lol, all hail the rise of the last non-Mitt?
Hunter Gathers
Looks like we have a very late entry for ‘Upper Class Twit Of The Year.’
Donut
I need to smoke about 9 bong hits and shotgun three beers for any of that to make sense.
Egg Berry
How does anyone publish this guy? He’s in prison!
jibeaux
I’d love to read this. Please let me know when it’s been translated and I’ll get right on it!
Catsy
What the shit? Is that even English?
Comrade Mary
I say you are Rick Tyler and I claim my 5 loonies.
Calouste
Jon Huntsman is not a non-Romney. He is the second Romney.
eyelessgame
He’s asserting, I think – it’s hard to tell – that they’re going to have a brokered convention, and that this is a good thing for them.
anthrosciguy
Conrad Black always tries to puff himself up whether with them big words and phrases or a ridiculous robe. You’ve seen the robe, haven’t you?
ant
Jeb Bush?
lol
Anoniminous
— Robert Anton Wilson
Yet, I suppose, if you’re a Conservative and want to allude to a famous philosopher you haven’t read, and know your target audience hasn’t read either, Hegel is a Go-To guy.
SRW1
So what he is saying is that way before Mittens physical incarnation Hegel already hated Mitt, amirite?
Schlemizel
Gawd how I wish I were a teatard sometimes. It would be great fun to live in this fantasy world they inhabit, free from reality.
It would be hugely entertaining to share a hooka with a caterpillar, maybe have tea with a rabbit, pet a cat that isn’t there.
I talk to the janitor in my building. He is a great guy but extremely low IQ, he thinks and talks like he is about 10. But the thing is he is always happy & cheerful. He is a delight to talk to. Some days, when I am really down, I think how great it must be & wish I was unencumbered with thought. It has to be similar to this.
j low
I really prefer Lewis Black.
Raven
@Donut: I remember when a bong was a shotgun!
Cat Lady
Old stand-bys like “stormy petrel”? What fucking century is he writing from?
Dave Ruddell
Oh, Lord Tubby. I hope he gets out soon.
Zifnab
What the hell is the “Mitt-if-icatoin” of the Republican Party? Is that where rich white people with goofy religions start running things in the GOP?
RD
Conrad Black is the Jeff Goldstein of NRO.
stevestory
Please someone help me out–how late is too late for someone new to get in? I don’t mean to win primaries (binding? nonbinding?) How late to get on ballots?
Culture of Truth
So what is this, exactly? Heroin, meth, some alcohol-painkiller combo? Or some Eurochic cocktail cooked up in a lab in Coopenhagen by a former 1968 Parisian rebel, an aging Tim Leary disciple dismissed from Glaxo for mixing a sleep aid being tested on baboons with the latest energy fuel derived from a plant from the Amazon and given to Chinese astronauts on their way to Mars?
Or is it some prison toilet kool-aid made from sterno, paint thinner and envelope glue Conrad got used to in the slammer and amped up new levels as 2012 rolls around? One can only speculate.
Satanicpanic
@Schlemizel: Beer makes that wish come true for me for about 2-3 hours 2-3 times a week.
Raven
@Culture of Truth: Frisco speedball.
jl
@stevestory: You thinking of giving it go? Tell us about yourself. I might sign a petition to get you on something out here on the left coast.
I mean, why not? Good chance you are better than the current whole sick crew, being a random person showing in BJ blog comments.
middlewest
This is pretty much what all my college essays sounded like when I wrote them after two days without sleep.
Punchy
I did not know that “dragoon” was a word.
Roger Moore
@Egg Berry:
Hey, if you can’t trust somebody who was convicted of mail fraud, who can you trust? And if you can trust somebody who was convicted of mail fraud, the Republican Party is eager to get your vote and your vital monetary contributions!
rlrr
A large, awkward, random assemblage of sentences…
Roger Moore
@Punchy:
You need to work on your vocabulary, then. “Dragoon” can be used either as a noun (a kind of hybrid soldier who rode horses for mobility but fought on foot like infantry) or a verb (to bully somebody into doing your bidding).
Ken
I like that he wrote this today:
Does he not read the news? Newt has started to fade, and the next non-Mitt (who may turn out to have less of a shelf life than Newt) is Ron Paul.
The valuable lesson is that if you are going to play prophet by making your predictions after the fact, be sure to predict what has already happened.
Draft Conrad!
Now wouldn’t Conrad Black make one hell of a GOP candidate for president!
He’s a one percenter with disdain for the common people!
He’s a criminal, though he denies it!
And when he talks, he makes absolutely no fuckin’ sense!
Alas, he wasn’t born in the United States!
burnspbesq
@Egg Berry:
To wingnuts, mail fraud and obstruction of justice aren’t real crimes. They’re what pledges have to do in order to be accepted into the fraternity. Like breaking into a sorority and stealing tampons.
jibeaux
@Egg Berry: That explains a lot, actually. Maybe there were some crayon-to-computer typos? Like, a shitload of them?
Schlemizel
@Satanicpanic:
“AH Beer! The source of, and solution to, all of lifes problems!”
– H. J. Simpson, Philosopher
Xecky Gilchrist
those were the more coherent bits.
Good grief, that’s some world class wankery.
The prophet Nostradumbass
When Black gets out of prison, will he have a special seat in the Lords, next to Jeffrey Archer?
RobNYNY1957
Do Canadians really write like that?
Sarah Proud and Tall
I love that this is how the article actually ends.
“i am desperate to get in another Hegel reference, but have no idea how to make it fit, so fuck it.”
WereBear (itouch)
They are so close!
burnspbesq
@RobNYNY1957:
You mean, gramatically correct? Yes, they do.
The subject of that sentence is “number,” which is singular, so “is” is correct.
Anoniminous
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
If he had read Hegel he could have used:
As a proof-text for how Gingrich is merely a tool of Spirit to “stop Mittification from happening.”
Hegel’s “Spirit,” like Smith’s “Invisible Hand of the Market,” is a powerful unobservable over-arching, controlling, thing-gummy whose intervention in Human History will create a unification of the diverse and various German States under Prussia.
The relevance of which is immediately obvious.
Calouste
@burnspbesq:
Although curiously, in British English, sports teams are always treated as plural.
Sarah Proud and Tall
@Anoniminous:
Obviously.
(I admit that don’t know my Hegel from my Heine, or indeed from a hole in the ground, but then again I ain’t stupid enough to publish a 2000 word article on wingnut central to demonstrate my ignorance beyond any doubt.)
G-G Coriolis
@burnspbesq:
Fowler (1926) said “When the word number is itself the subject it is a safe rule to treat it as a singular when it has a definite article and as a plural when it has an indefinite.”
In this case the sense of “a number of” is clearly plural as it could be replaced by “many”.
MikeJ
@Calouste: Not just sports teams, businesses of all sorts. “Apple are announcing a new widget” etc.
wrb
lose the “and”
Scans better this way:
“Gather ’round Hegel
wherever you roam
and admit that…”
DanielX
Has this guy been understudying Bobo? Jeebus, this gibberish makes “Hayekian modesty” look as clear as Waterford crystal.
Shalimar
I am surprised that the fellow inmate Conrad Black dictates his columns to can spell Hegelian.
Frankensteinbeck
This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen written. He just came out and said ‘You poor people are too stupid to understand how awesome we rich folk are’.
Anoniminous
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
We all have to suffer from limits of knowledge.
I don’t know the difference between a fish knife and a cheese knife … which is why I never get invited to the A-List dinners.
:-)
(another) Josh
Yeah, oddly enough “a large number is” is grammatical in the U.S. but not in the Commonwealth. “Miss, you don’t know me, but can’t we pretend/We care for each other ’till the band reach the end,” and all that.
KS in MA
@Frankensteinbeck: FTW.
intelligentdasein
@Frankensteinbeck
And I get the feeling that he probably took to the quote out of context, as Hegel argued the exact opposite in his Master-Slave dialectic. Pretty much, because the slave doesn’t immediately consume his work because its for the master, he can appreciate the form he has molded it into and approve his abilities. The Master has no such experience, and therefore is eventually rendered impotent because he becomes dependent on the Slave to get anything done. This is why the Master is never mentioned again in the Phenomenology of Spirit, because the essence of self-consciousness can only arise in the Slave.