The Weekly Standard Sheep Issue

The issue most likely currently on the stands now, though there’s a new issue that has supplanted it on the website.

We’re in that moment with this political ideology / tendency — such as the Weekly Standard’s brand of Neo-Conservatism and Republicanism — where they look over the political landscape, see a public not attuned with them, and declare them sheep.  It’s not entirely out of focus and damnable:  any thinking or semi-thinking person, I believe, is going to have an unholy and not entirely compatible combination of Elitism and Populism such that you can jump back and forth between haughtily from on high lumping the public as “Sheep” and then muck-ruck right on down in the mud and pull forth on behalf of “The People”.  What is interesting on that score in this magazine is this issue features an article on “Tito the Builder”, the ethnic adjunct to “Joe the Plumber”.  A search of this blog shows that “Tito the Builder” broached my consciousness just enough to have a single blog entry.  This, I suppose, is the Weekly Standard’s concept of herding the sheep (the masses) with a sheep — in Marxist terminolgy Tito the Builder would be a (God, the terminology is escaping me… look over this page and I’ll find it, perhaps get back to edit it in.)

The real kicker for this “Sheep” issue of Weekly Standard is the opening editorial.  It is an editorial entitled “Barack Obama’s America”.  It is written by none other than Alexis de Torqueville.  This is a clever little ploy, though not terribly original, where you find a historical text and pound your chest that it refers to the situation we have today, damned it.  Again, I can’t really fault them too much — I would do the exact same thing, certainly during the Bush Administration.  But it is worth noting that Alexis de Torqueville never wrote an essay entitled “Barack Obama’s America”, and thus the editorial is an editorial by the Weekly Standard on an Alexis de Torqueville essay — a bit post-modernist for a magazine that decries post-modernism.

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