Which means that we've stilll got a long way to go. :(

I think I really am trying to answer, why do politicians make moral statements that seem partially askew to their 'actual' goals? I would say because politics begins with morality -- people are goaded into action because of morality (regardless of secondary outcomes that benefit the perpetrator of the argument). While it does mask their true intentions, they are handicapped otherwise.

(This may eventually turn into Marxist structural analysis in the sense that all moral arguments need to be deconstructed to demonstrate which class they benefit the most.)

I'd also like to ask you if you have a working definition of morality, at least for this article?

On a side note, I'm generally averse to making distinctions with capital letters (a tendency found with philosophers) because once you start using them more often, they confuse the heck out of people (even though its useful to make a conceptual distinction).

Another side note: I'm sure that you understand that empirical observations are what theories are made from! We shouldn't shy away from bottling our arguments to stay simply empirical or purely theoretical.

Okay, that's much clearer. Sorry, I didn't pick up too much on the point that you basically can't trust politicians moral arguments. I'm trying to say that any politically moral argument fails (to gain support) because its not tempered by a sense of knowing how people react to it. An organic intellectual is able to provide the intellectual legitimacy to an argument because (1) the intellectual knows how people would react to it and (2) the intellectual gains knowledge of stuff going-on on the ground and (3) the intellectual himself has political support. This is my response to where moralizing sits with "politics".

This is of course, has little to bear on the whether or the argument masks a shift in the political landscape i.e. if an argument can be successfully turned into policy, there is a secondary effect to the perpetrator's advantage. Sometimes that is acceptable. (Especially in Malaysia. I think many urban people are very skeptical of Anwar and understand to a certain degree that he is an opportunist, but would support the opposition anyway because of other larger political goals -- i.e. putting transparency and SERIOUS anti-corruption back on the table, and perhaps ending policies that are hurting other ethnic communities than it is benefiting a small portion of Malays).

Moving towards Gramsci, the disconnect between knowledge and morality within the opposition is probably due to the lack of organicism within party intellectuals. To Gramsci, there are intellectuals within academia, popular journalism, writers, artists, businessmen, NGOs, political parties and so forth, but the only ones who are significant are organic intellectuals. Organic, in the sense that they are embedded within the social ecology, closely connected to a groundswell of support and are able to feed from them, ostensibly to produce better counterhegemony. To use the Tea Party example again, if Palin wants to run for president, she needs to craft her policies, words and ideas to suit the tea party (so as not to lose internal support) AND America as a whole (so as not to lose external support). Both will require immense amount of dialogue with people inside and outside the party, and a lot of creative brainpower to make sense and produce something acceptable for best results.
Which means, back in Singapore, the problem isn't really with morality, but with how the opposition aren't able to create a counterhegemonic knowledge structure which supports that morality and supplants the current hegemony.

My thinking currently goes that politics BEGINS with morality, in the sense that an individual encounters a socio-economic world that operates against that morality. As a comtemporary example, the US Tea Party is basically run on principles that want to see 17th century liberalism restored (against Obama's greater state-interventionist America). [My conception of morality simply involves the invocation of the word 'should'. I would even argue that PAP had a sense of morality in the sense that they thought that 'Singapore should be economically advanced and everthing must be done to preserve its advance', 'Singapore should be able to defend itself from threats internally and externally', against 'Singaporean citizens should have x amount of equality', or 'Singaporean citizens should have x rights'. I think I've even heard Teo Chee Hean call Singapore a utilitarian state -- see http://thoughtstreak.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/sin... ]

This is a topic I've been developing myself through Machiavelli, Gramsci and a bit of Althusser. The sort of 'politics as practice' and 'politics as a separate morality' were first directly expressed in Western writing through Machiavelli. Gramsci is also notable because he gives us a framework to talk about situating a counter-hegemonic movement within a larger political environment while bracketing socio-economic objectives and the role of the intellectual in producing counter-hegemonic knowledge structures (which point towards the usefulness of academic deconstructionism as a first step).

Yes we can moralize and politicize at the same time! That is, we can hold certain moral objectives and be true to them -- for instance, believing in state supported welfare, believing in a small state, believing in moral policing according to religious principles -- but we don't have to adhere to *personal* moral standards to achieve those objectives. What moral standards we think applies to the state and society at large does not necessarily have to apply to individuals and vice-versa. [This is more towards Machiavelli]

My conversations with friends here in Singapore show that there are large differentials between people. Mediacorp employees tend to be quite optimistic about the YOG, possibly because it's something for them to cover. On the other hand, alternative news sites like TOC and Temasek Review are somewhat fanatical about pointing out the gaffes of the YOG, such as the meagre food offered to volunteers, the obvious usage of non-expert commentators and the apparent failing of the YOG celebration to draw a crowd. I just say that it doesn't seem worthwhile spending S$400 million.

Melvin, I feel like there are real gems somewhere in there, but it's too much for ordinary internet reading. Your paragraphs are really, really long.

NOOO, Nostromo, not you too! Sigh, I just can't watch American Idol's first few shows because of this: I can't take the intentionally highlighting on people being unintentionally stupid.