Allahpundit links to the above surreal video of the funeral motorcade for Kim Jong Il and asks, “One thing I wonder about Orwellian spectacles like this: Who’s the intended audience?”

The people crying might believe that the outside world is impressed by their tears, but does the leadership, which has a better sense of international opinion, understand how creepy and contemptible this looks to its enemies? It’s the most pitiful, cultish case of Stockholm syndrome on this scale that we’ll ever see (I hope). Or is the spectacle not aimed at foreign audiences at all but exclusively at the inmates of the North Korean gulag? These lines from Michael Totten stick with me: “Especially in full-bore Stalinist systems like North Korea’s, would-be dissidents feel like they’re completely alone, that no one else has any idea the emperor is naked. That’s why these regimes will mobilize massive state resources just to locate and punish a single graffiti artist. It’s critically important that everyone who hates the government feels like they’re the only people who do so.” If you’re a dissent-minded North Korean watching this clip, that’s precisely how you’d feel.

The day after Kim Jong Il’s death was announced, John Derbyshire wrote at the Corner, in a post that was the source of the first half of our headline above, “More often than not, those North Korean tears are real:”

There were similar displays in China when Mao Tse-tung died. In conversations over the years I’ve asked many Chinese friends & relatives who were adults at the time whether they wept, and if so whether sincerely. The answers fall into three groups.

Those three groups, according to Derbyshire, are “Sincere weepers,”  “Swept-alongers,” and “The Awkward Squad.” Regarding that last group, Derbyshire writes:

A few have told me: “I pretended to cry, because I might have got in trouble for not crying, but it was fake: in my heart I hated the s.o.b. and was glad he’d died at last.” Those few all had a certain distinct type of personality: skeptical, contrarian, prickly, stubborn, and antisocial — the Awkward Squad. The first job for anyone serious about being a totalitarian dictator is to identify these people and hustle them off to the camps. They are only a small minority: the rest can easily be manipulated. There were similar displays of collective grief when Stalin died. The movie The Inner Circle gets a good scene out of it.

Speaking of movies, if you ever get chance to view it via DVD, Netflix or one of the cable movie channels, don’t miss Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the 2005 dramatization of Scholl, her brother, and colleague Christoph Probst. The three were guillotined by the Nazis on February 22^nd of 1943 for having dropped anti-government leaflets out of the third floor onto the atrium of a building on the campus of Munich University less than a week earlier, in the wake of the Nazis’ monumental losses at Stalingrad.

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But in any case, to paraphrase this question just slightly is to answer the original headline: “Is the World Really Safer Without Nazi Germany?”

See also: Robert Harris’ brilliant summation of the soft evils of detente.

And if sounds at first glance like too harsh an assessment of the implications of what Gorby is saying, just a reminder — here’s CNN’s workers’ paradise-style video look at North Korea last year:

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As Steve Barton writes at Newsalert, “Go to the 10:05 marker in the video: Rachel Maddow says she’s ‘someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.’”

It’s just a quip from her little red joke book — I think — but add to Maddow’s expression of her worldview, table-pounding Lawrence O’Donnell who said “I am a socialist,” and “I live to the extreme left,” on the air last year at MSNBC.

Back in 2007, the New York Times dubbed MSNBC “a liberal version of Fox News;” a description that network executive Phil Griffin tacitly concurred with, saying that network finding its ideology “happened naturally,” which it would express overtly in its progressive-themed “Lean Forward” campaign last year (which as critics noted, has an echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward slogan as well.)

P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “commies love concrete,” which, if she isn’t kidding, might help to explain Maddow’s otherwise incongruous love of mid-century dam building efforts now eschewed by the rest of today’s environmentally correct far left, including those who staff her employer, General Electric.

But hey, give credit for Maddow and O’Donnell for not biting their Mao Tse-tungs and coming clean on some level about their far left ideology. In its own socialistic way, it makes for a refreshing change from most old media news outfits. At CBS, for years, Walter Cronkite uttered “That’s the way it is” before signing off, his Solomonic vow towards objectivity, before retiring to host fundraisers for an organization devoted to bringing about one-world government. His successor, Dan Rather, clothed his own claims to objectivity inside such goofy Ratherisms as “I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. [Ideologically,] I don’t know what that makes me.” Before being forced out over Ra^therGate and retiring to host programs on HD-Net, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, who produced a spate of anti-Bush movies in the naughts, professed to voting for Obama in 2008, and ran the ‘Truther” “documentary” Loose Change on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not to mention Rather hosting fundraisers in recent years for far left The Nation magazine.

Of course, perhaps the most objective response to MSNBC’s far left collective ideology came from a rather unlikely source:

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

There are no journalists on MSNBC’s nighttime lineup? No kidding, Reverend Bacon, no kidding.

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Killer headline at the Drudge Report; as Michael Totten writes, “This hasn’t yet been confirmed, but it’s not the sort of thing North Korean television would lie about if it’s still in the hands of the government.” Meanwhile at the Tatler, Claudia Rosett writes:

Believing anything that North Korean news reports is a dangerous game, but this one appears to be true: Kim Jong Il, monstrous ruler of North Korea, has died. Maybe yesterday. Maybe on a train.

Big question now, what happens next with the totalitarian regime that Kim inherited from his father, and was apparently trying to pass on to one of his sons? And will U.S. diplomats now rush in, as they did during North Korea’s last succession, in 1994, with aid and deals that help shore up the regime during the vulnerable stage of transition? Or will they do the right thing, and look for ways to finally bring down the horrific system which since the late 1940s has enslaved North Koreans and threatened the Free World?

At last, an opportunity for North Korea to enter the 19th century. But will they take it?

Update: Not surprisingly, lots of action on Twitter just now. Josh Trevino wins the Tweet of the Year award: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.” Meanwhile, Pejman Yousefzadeh links to Pyongyang Rose’s video meltdown and quips, “I feast upon your tears:”

More: What happens next? Allahpundit links to a 2006 Robert Kaplan article in the Atlantic on that very topic and adds:

How loyal will the military be to new supreme honcho Kim Jong-un? On the one hand, the old guard was reportedly fulsomely obsequious towards him when the regime started rolling him out last year as the heir apparent. Could be that they were acting that way simply to avoid being sent to Camp 22 by his pop if they didn’t, but it could also be that his pedigree as a Kim is enough to warrant absolute devotion. Remember, this is a country so deeply, insanely cultish in its worship of the leader that Kim Il-Sung — Kim Jong-Il’s father, and a man who’s been dead for nearly 20 years — is technically still president. (Hitchens famously described this more-Orwellian-than-Orwell arrangement as a “necrocracy.”) On the other hand, is the North Korean military really going to take orders from … this guy? C’mon.

South of the border, “This is S. Korean president Lee Myung-bak’s 70 birthday today. Surprise!” Chico Harlan of the Washington Post notes, in an endlessly retweeted item. “Best. Birthday Ever,” as Trevino adds.

Flashback: Christopher Hitchens on North Korea, a nation he dubbed “Worse than 1984,” back in 2005:

One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell’s 1984was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. (“Hmmm … good book. Let’s see if we can make it work.”)

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell’s dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven’t already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no “free-world” propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

From ABC back in 2007, what it’s like to be “Born and Raised in a North Korean Prison Camp.”

Reminder: In the comments below, a reader praises CNN’s coverage of Kim Jong Il’s death. But I wonder what the network’s founder is thinking right now?

Update: Via Michael van Poppel of Breaking News Online, “North Koreans weeping hysterically over the death of Kim Jong-il.” Exit quote: “I will change sorrow into strength and courage and remain faithful to respected Comrade Kim Jong Un:”

Update: Ed Morrissey links to a 2010 video from CNN on Kim Jong Un; whose breathless tone dovetails rather well with Turner’s views above — and sounds like pro-German or Russian propaganda from the 1930s. Or just about any CNN report involving a totalitarian dictator (or Barack Obama) since the network’s founding:

(If video above doesn’t play, it’s also currently online here.)

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“God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in 1882. “Think of the implications,” Tom Wolfe wrote over a century later, having witnessed them played out throughout the 20th century:

Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a “tremendous event,” the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. “The story I have to tell,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the history of the next two centuries.” He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of “wars such as have never happened on earth,” wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: “If the doctrines…of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly”—he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations—”are hurled into the people for another generation…then nobody should be surprised when…brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non–brothers…will appear in the arena of the future.”

“The death-struggle between Hitler and Stalin exercises a lasting fascination because it represents a moral singularity,” Richard Fernandez wrote this past weekend at the Belmont Club. “It is a narrative of how men and great states act when they are completely unfettered by such considerations as humanity, morals or even sanity:”

The psychohistorical attraction of the Eastern Front is that it provides the only actual recent laboratory in which we can observe men who are like gods. On the Eastern Front  one could order the death of millions; order the burning of entire nations; send however many people one liked into concentration camps. One could order ‘subhumans’ from the Soviet eastern republics to walk over minefields to clear the way for tank armies. The only constraints were resources.

But of morals, there was none. All other historical tableaus restrict the writer’s palette. Only on the Eastern Front, in the battle between Hitler and Stalin, were all colors completely unrestricted. It was where anything goes. Lincoln Steffens was wrong when he said, after visiting Soviet Russia that “I have seen the future and it works”. The real future of Communism, the portrait of its ideals carried to the ultimate limit, were the Eastern Front and the Downfall.

If I were to do the doctoral dissertation today, my premise would be different. It would not be to identify the specific operational decisions which if done differently would have resulted in the “victory” of Nazi Germany. That would be to miss the point. It would be to ambitiously claim that Hitler never knew what victory was.  Could not have ever known what victory was. Although Hitler’s plans were operationally expressed in start and stop lines, I would argue that in a very real sense Hitler was grasping for a metaphysical goal. There would always be something else. My claim would be that deep down inside Hitler — and perhaps Stalin — were making war on God.

They did not want anything so tangible as x more grams of bread, or y more liters of fuel for Ivan or Hans. Those were goals not worth pursuing. Neither wanted to gain something as mundane as a 40 hour work week, or two weeks of vacation for the populations. They cared nothing for meals, clothes — Hitler was a teetotal vegetarian — or works of art. Nobody was interested in increasing the leisure time available for barbecues and bowling. That language had no place in the world of the Titans. Both Hitler and Stalin were after power, power so pure they could never really grasp it in the form they desired it most. And that therefore the tragic events on the Eastern Front, involving though it did the deaths of millions, were really about nothing at all that you could grasp upon this earth.

That is an astounding claim, but today, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I think the claim can be fairly made. Nothing permanent was achieved by that titanic struggle, that Downfall. It was strangely enough, a bad dream, as insubstantial as its goal. It left no permanent imprint upon the land after the barriers were down, when people went back to drinking beer and eating sausages and playing video games. People went back to the real and forgot about the nightmare.

Robert Harris’ brilliant 1992 novel Fatherland is as much an alternative history of the Cold War as it is an alternative history of World War II. The subtext of Harris’s novel is that Western Europe under the Nazis 20 years after the conclusion of World War II was the equivalent of the last two decades of the Soviet Union; Hitler is an old man, dissipation is rapidly setting into Germany, and a sort gray dreariness pervades the continent; bloated middle-aged men in suits and uniforms preside over a people going through the motions in an exhausted industrial economy. Meanwhile in America, most intellectuals have grown tired of the Cold War between the two super powers, and are eager to forget the Evil Empire, declare detente, and ask, “can’t we all just get along?”

Or as Harris himself told the New York Times, in 1987, when he first conceived of his book:

There were a lot of German tourists on the beach [in Sicily, where he was vacationing],” he said, “and if you closed your eyes, you could just imagine you were in the victorious German empire. Suddenly, everything came to me as a novel, the idea of a cover-up, a sequence of deaths, someone investigating them. I went splashing into the water, and by the time I came back onto the beach I had it written in my mind.”

Meanwhile, regarding the other side of the coin in World War II, Oceania has never been at war with the Eurasian Union…or has it?

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Screenwriter Erik Tarloff, whom according to his bio at the Atlantic, “has contributed speeches to Bill Clinton, Al Gore and others on a pro bono basis,” and who is married to former Clinton economic advisor Laura D’Andrea Tyson, looks back on a critical question his late father, a Hollywood screenwriter himself, was once asked about his life choices. Would he feel equal outrage, if Hollywood’s blacklist at the height of the Cold War had targeted Nazis rather than Communists?

It has often been noted that both the Senate and House investigating committees during this period blackened reputations with a reckless disregard for the truth, besmirching many who had never been Communists. This is certainly true. But it strikes me as much too narrow a criticism, implicitly conceding the right of those committees to investigate the private beliefs of American citizens and to penalize them if those beliefs were deemed erroneous. It accepts the basic mission, in other words, but assails the sloppiness of the execution. Harry Truman was more on the mark when he described the Un-American Activities Committee as “the most un-American thing in America.” Nobody, after all, was being accused of treason, or of terrorism. People were being investigated and punished solely for what they thought.

Within a day of his testimony, my father was dropped by his agency, fired from his job (he was a staff writer on the then-popular situation comedy I Married Joan), and declared persona non grata in the only profession he had ever pursued. An account of what followed can wait for another time; for now, it’s enough to say that he managed to scrape by, the situation slowly improved, and the first script to bear his name after his blacklisting, produced some 11 years later, won him an Academy Award.

Now, let’s flash forward to some time in the mid-’90s. Frank was invited to appear on an LA radio show to talk about his experiences of the blacklist. By then, Joseph McCarthy, the movement he led, and the blacklist that resulted were all in total disrepute, and my father agreed to the interview with the reasonable expectation that he would be treated as a victim of a deplorable aberration in American history.

That isn’t quite what happened. The interviewer began the dialogue by asking if my father would feel equal outrage had the blacklist targeted Nazis rather than Communists. Wrong-footed, Frank fumfered some sort of response. After the interview, both my parents emerged from the studio in high dudgeon. “How dare he?” was the gravamen of their scandalized indignation. And when they told me about the interview later that day, I made matters worse by suggesting the interviewer had posed a legitimate question. There was a distinct chill in the parental household for some time thereafter.

But it is a legitimate question. Unless one is prepared to defend Communism on its merits, or, alternatively, is merely defending one’s comrades out of a kind of tribal loyalty, then one is, I think, obliged to consider whether punishing people for their political beliefs is always wrong, or wrong only when it’s one’s own side that is being persecuted.

Now, I concede there’s one important distinction to be made here. Americans of my parents’ generation joined the Communist Party out of genuine idealism, no matter how misplaced. With 25 percent unemployment, Jim Crow laws in operation in the South and de facto segregation common elsewhere, and fascism on the rise in Europe and effectively unopposed by the continent’s democracies, Communism might have looked like a reasonable political recourse. Whereas it’s hard to imagine anyone becoming a Nazi out of anything anyone would recognize as idealism.

Why? As Orrin Judd writes, “Pssssst…the Nazis were idealists, too.”

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Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!

“The US need their own Perestroika – these changes have started now and can be seen in Obama.”

Mikhail Gorbachev on Twitter, November 9th, 2009.

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies. Every vital element of the Democrats’ coalition — unions, government workers, government contractors, “entitlement” consumers — requires constant increases in payments, grants and consulting contracts. Without those payments, they don’t sign checks to re-elect Democrats.

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

– Richard Miniter in Forbes, July 18th, 2011.

(Concept via SDA.)

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And the future is now!

“Bob Woodward: Trump is the new McCarthy.” *

For a group that call themselves “progressives,” the left sure seems to spend every waking hour replaying the 1950s, doesn’t it?  (When they’re not reliving the 1930s, of course.) But hey, just as every television journalist is invariably the next Edward R. Murrow for 15 minutes, I guess it’s only fair that everyone is Murrow’s (rather belated) bete noire for the same time period as well.

Related: “Exclusive research reveals ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ viewers are the most Democratic in primetime TV.”

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Last week at PJM, science-fiction author Sarah Hoyt explored the makings of “Jurassic President,” And yes, I had fun creating the artwork for Sarah’s post, in which she writes, “Remember how in Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton had dinosaurs recreated from dinosaur DNA frozen in amber and coupled with frog DNA? Remember how it all went awry because these time displaced creatures couldn’t safely exist in the modern world?”

I arrived from Portugal as an exchange student in 1980, bringing with me the normal European prejudices. Jimmy Carter had been painted in Europe as a level-headed leader, a compassionate statesman. But all the promotion in the world couldn’t survive watching the man give speeches, or hearing of the infamous killer rabbit incident. And my European view could not survive coming in contact with American history books, which even then glorified FDR, the whole “the government saved us from the Depression” mythology.I didn’t object to the portrayal of FDR. I simply was not economically literate enough.

However, I was savvy enough to know propaganda when I read it.  I was disturbed by the palpable longing these texts revealed for an America in the 30s — an America that probably never existed. Even then it seemed to me what they promoted meant turning the clock back to a simpler — and dirtier, poorer, and more brutal — world. I could see we’d got from the ’30s to the ’80s through technological and social changes. This meant the changes weren’t the results of politics and couldn’t be undone by politics. The Democrats could pine for and promise the close-knit society of the ’30s, but they could not bring it back.Even if the ’30s were desirable (I prefer today), they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle.

Obama doesn’t seem to have ever realized this. He moved in more rarefied circles than the Ohio suburb where I finished high school. You could say he was exquisitely educated not to see the holes in the myths about FDR.

He never got to be a normal person, in a normal environment. His isolation, as the product of a biracial couple, and two broken families, might also have made it harder for him to distance himself from the one security he had — the security of his echo chamber that surrounded him like a an amber bubble encasing dinosaur DNA.

I’ve read somewhere that you simply can’t make large changes in life outlook after 45. I’m not sure that’s true. I could give several examples of people I know who have changed their entire outlook on life after that age.

It is, however, unlikely that someone as thoroughly indoctrinated as Obama was can change his outlook. The narrative he grew up in covers every detail of life and provides a facile explanation for everything. Our arugula shopper knows nothing of the average person’s life and, let’s face it, is unlikely to ever figure it out.

He’s been brought into the present after a fashion, the ’30s DNA spliced into the DNA of a Clinton Democrat, so that he’ll make half-hearted gestures, like proclaiming — in contradiction to his earlier pronouncements — that he’s following in the path of Ronald Reagan; or talking about being a centrist; or disguising tax increases as cuts in spending.

But the end result always breeds true to his dinosaurian world view: He’ll favor unions because somehow, over the years, they’ve become associated with the 1930s (even though FDR did not approve of civil service unions); he’ll sell out allies for a SALT treaty, because it was very important in the 70s; he’ll try to expand train service because he has the odd idea public transport fosters the type of close knit communities we had in the 1930s; he’ll obsess over green energy, because Carter did; he’ll do his best to bring back make-work paid for by the government because he imagines that’s what we want.

In fact, throughout all of it, he thinks he’s doing what everyone — not just the people who brought him up — longs for.

And throughout his flailing around in a world in which he doesn’t fit, examples of this displacement emerge in his speech: Sputnik, Cleveland, cars which use up eight miles a gallon.

Sarah concludes, “If, like the restored velociraptor, he weren’t such a danger to the modern world, one would be tempted to feel sorry for our Jurassic President, wandering around in a landscape he can neither perceive nor understand because all his senses and training show him a world that no longer exists — and perhaps never did.”

Which dovetails rather nicely with the latest video from Bill Whittle. In the world of the dinosaurs, the Jurassic era was preceded by the Triassic period. But what came before our Jurassic president? Found via Steve Green, Bill goes down the rabbit hole to explore Barack Obama’s immediate ancestors and their Triassic-era proto-radical chic worldview:

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Between Maureen Dowd and Pinch Sulzberger, you really get the sense that the last people on Earth who still believe in the myths of the 1960s are hold up in their redoubt at 620 Eighth Avenue. Here’s Dowd shocked that Bob Dylan would cave to Communist China’s censors in order to make a few bucks performing in Beijing:

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.

“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

But Maureen, it’s the other guy’s country.

Related: What would Sebastian Cabot do?

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“The Huffington Post bans Andrew Breitbart from front page over comments about Van Jones,” Steven Nelson writes at the Daily Caller:

The Huffington Post announced Thursday that articles written by conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart will no longer be featured on the site’s front page. The decision was made in reaction to comments made by Breitbart to The Daily Caller.

In an interview with TheDC, Breitbart reacted to a campaign by activist group Color of Change that demanded that he not be featured on The Huffington Post’s front page. The organization called Breitbart “a liar and a race-baiter” and threatened that blacks would not visit the site if his content was prominently featured.

Breitbart told TheDC, “I have the exact opposite view on free speech that these left-wing freaks at Color of Change have: More voices, not less.”

He went on to call Van Jones, a former White House adviser and co-founder of Color of Change “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak. And a commie. And an eco-fraudster.” Jones resigned from his position in the Obama administration following a series of embarrassing revelations, including that he had once signed a 9-11 “truther” petition.

So basically racism, communism and trutherism, not to mention Mumia-ism, really is the new McCarthyism, to coin a paraphrase.

Naturally of course, Slate sorta-kinda blames the victim (emphasis by P.J. Salvatore of Andrew’s Big Journalism site):

Andrew has now gotten exactly what he wanted. He doesn’t need to publish his idiocies at the Huffington Post. But getting banned from the Huffington Post proves his thesis about the repressive, anti-free speech liberal media. And he’ll never shut up about it.

And shutting up is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

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More from Lee Stranahan, who has a foot in both camps — or at least he did before Andrew was blacklisted: “Why I’m Quitting Blogging At The Huffington Post:”

One very loathsome  aspect of this story is something that Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff told me in a long phone call about Andrew Breitbart several months ago. Roy knows and worked with Andrew and when the issue of Andrew Breitbart being a racist came up, Roy told me “No, of course Andrew isn’t a racist.”Roy went on to say that while both he and Arianna Huffington knew that the charges of racism being hurled at Andrew weren’t true based on their years of personal dealings with him that they were in a ‘bad position’ to say anything about it.

Read the whole thing. At the Tatler, Bryan Preston adds:

Banning ad hominems from politics is like banning politics from politics. If what Breitbart said about Van Jones is bad, how about the ad hominems that Arianna Huffington routinely launched at George W. Bush? In the post at the link, Huffington calls Bush “deluded, “cockeyed” (as modifiers for “optimist,” oddly enough) and a “zealot.” In this one, she calls Sarah Palin a “Trojan moose.” In fact, given the date on that one, September 8, 2008, it’s fair to wonder if Huffington herself launched the extreme hate campaign against Palin that still rages.I just want to know if the Post will now ban Arianna Huffington from its front page because of her past ad hominem attacks? Or will you folks invent a statute of limitations to exempt your boss?

The Right Sphere also takes a look ad hominen-spewing HuffPost front pagers, Ed Schultz and Jason Linkins. Difference: They’re liberals. So how about it, HuffPo? Gonna get that ban hammer back out, or will you just admit that Breitbart is being banned for other reasons?

Related: Speaking of McCarthy-esque ad hominems, a new item at Huffington Post, and since removed — because apparently even the HuffPo’s editors questioned the timing — proffered us to “Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker, Breitbart.” The text is still online here; here’s the opening:

Like alot of news junkies, my laptop is about to explode because of all the open windows streaming live. From Wisconsin to Libya, Egypt and Japan, the world has truly crashed through our front door this month. What are we supposed to do with ourselves in all of this mayhem?

First, we need to get more comfortable with uncertainty because this is what the future looks like. Second, we need to believe that the United States has a unique and important role to play as we move forward. Our leadership will be key.

That’s why am I picking on potential Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and propaganda blogger Andrew Breitbart. To me, they represent the tri-fecta of backwardness that we must actively avoid among our political and cultural leadership if we want to stay focused on the future. These individuals thrive on the uncertainty of today’s political environment–presenting simple but false governing solutions along with tabloid fodder distractions— while undermining the society that they claim to seek. These actions actually place them outside of the American political spectrum. They are not so much conservatives as they are Soviets–the ideologically driven, corrupt regime that dominated eastern Europe for most of the last century.

Frank Rich, is that you? And who are the other 54? Or to put it another way, “For Leftists, there is only the near enemy, the people they see everyday.”

Update: “ANNOUNCEMENT: Big Journalism Pledges to Help AOL/HuffPo Enforce No ‘Ad Hominem Attacks’ Rule.”

I’m sure HuffPo would welcome all of the Blogosphere’s help in enforcing this rule…

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At NPR (I know, I know, but stick with this), a harrowing story of two Soviet cosmonauts, one of whom was Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and the other is best friend, who ultimately sacrifices himself to save Gagarin from going up in what both men likely knew was a doomed mission at the height of the Space Race:

So there’s a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he’s on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”

This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it’s true — is beyond shocking.

Don’t miss this one.

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In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger explores Vietnam’s “Motorbike Economy –The Vietnamese are riding into the economic big league, atop millions of motorbikes:”

here are cars and trucks, but they look like whales surrounded by schools of fast fish. Welcome to Vietnam, the motorbike economy—adept, efficient, always in forward gear. The country is run by one of the world’s last Communist parties, which had the sense 20 years ago to open the economy to the world but has a bad habit of degrading the value of Vietnam’s currency. Still, it’s doubtful that even a Bernankian flood of liquidity will crash the motorbike economy for long.

I hadn’t come to Vietnam to see the motorbikes (though one could). It was to visit a symbol of Vietnam’s rise—the new, 500,000-square-foot Intel microchip assembly and test factory on the edge of the city. In five years Intel hopes to hire 5,000 workers. Over a lunch of pho ga (chicken noodle soup) in the cafeteria, I talked with six of them. Naturally, I asked about the motorbikes.

“We now have a motorbike culture,” said Nguyen Thi Bich Lan, who got a masters in industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan. “I can’t wait to get home to ride my bike,” she says.

To where? “We hang out with our friends,” said Do Hoang Tram, a logistics manager. “It’s easy to get around,” she said, “so we ride all over the city, looking for new cafes or the latest good restaurant.”

This is Vietnam’s emerging middle class—in their 20s or 30s, working for a household-name technology company. Two studied outside Vietnam. All spoke English (the country’s literacy rate is over 90%) with such relaxed self-confidence that after about an hour the eerie thought occurred that if these six were sitting in the cafeteria of our building in New York, you’d assume they had been there for years.

And concurrently, as the Vietnamese ride their motorbikes out of the ashes of the nation’s terrifying “Start From Zero” phase during the mid-20th century and attempt to rejoin modernity, Mayor Bloomberg’s bike lane reprimitivization of New York continues apace.

At least for now…

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You know those red diaper baby Communist summer camps that David Horowitz has mentioned in his biographies? Even in the 21st century, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, there are still a few around, Ronald Radosh writes in a new post on his PJM Express blog. And note this detail:

I assumed that in the 21^st century, those days of Red summer camps had come to an end. Alas, that is not the case. Evidently Gabe Zimmerman, the director of community outreach for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) who died standing by her side in the Tucson shootings, was a proud counselor in 2001 at one of these remaining camps, Camp Kinderland in Eastern Massachusetts.

According to an report in the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward, the camp “is an idiosyncratic sort of place, a living relic of American Jewry’s red diaper past.” To say the least!

Forward into the past!, as the Firesign Theater would say.

(And yes, I wrote the above punning headline for Ron’s post for the PJM homepage, for better or worse.)

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“I haven’t found any reviews, so far, that hail this as Hollywood’s first Gulag movie, perhaps because hardly anyone noticed that there weren’t any before. Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They’d never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones.”

– Anne Applebaum in Slate, the author of Gulag, and an advisor to the new film, The Way Back, directed by Peter Weir.

Still waiting to see Total Eclipse on the Big Screen, though.

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Back in 2005, when President Bush appointed John Bolton to shake up the UN, Mark Steyn reminded readers of Reagan-era Secretary of State George Schultz’s test for incoming ambassadors:

Yet the assumption behind much of the criticism of Bolton from the likes of John Kerry is that, regardless of his government’s foreign policy, a UN ambassador has to be at some level a UN booster. Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration’s ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who’d just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. ‘No,’ Schultz would say, ‘this is your country’ — and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan’s embryo world government.

And not China, something that James Hansen, NASA’s most visible global warming zealot has yet to figure out:

November’s election made it quite clear that the people of the United States do not want to radically change our society in the name of global warming. Pretty much every close House race went to the Republicans, while the Democrats won all the Senate squeakers. The difference? The House on June 26, 2009, passed a bill limiting carbon-dioxide emissions and getting into just about every aspect of our lives. The Senate did nothing of the sort.

The nation’s most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the “best hope” to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China‘s will.

NASA laboratory head James Hansen‘s anti-democracy rants were published while he was on a November junket in China, but they didn’t get much attention until recently. On Jan. 12, the hyperprolific blogger Marc Morano put them on his Climate Depot site, and within hours, the post went viral. In a former life, Mr. Morano was chief global-warming researcher for Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.

According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are “the barbarians” with a “fossil-money- ‘democracy’ that now rules the roost,” making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. Here’s what he blogged on Nov. 24:

“I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast to the West with its short election cycles. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient.”

Has this guy ever heard of the Gang of Four? Or the Cultural Revolution, which killed those who were inconvenient? Or the Great Leap Forward, which used the best technical information to determine that a steel mill in every backyard was a good idea?

Clearly though, Thomas Friedman will love Hansen’s anti-American, growth-stifling rhetoric, presumably almost as much as the president does.

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Roger Ebert on Sarah Palin, August 19, 2010:

By implying Dr. Laura was silenced by “Constitutional obstructionists,” [Palin] employs the methodology of the Big Lie, defined in Mein Kampf as an untruth so colossal that “no one would believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Roger Ebert on Sarah Palin, January 8th, 2011:

Sarah Palin rummages online frantically erasing her rabble-rousing Tweets like a Stalinist trimming non-persons out of photos.

Because GOP as Nazi comparisons are so 2010 — particularly when you’ve already made them yourself.

Related: Jim Emerson, the editor of RoberEbert.com gave the 2006 film “Death of the President,” which speculated on the assassination of then-President Bush a big thumbs up:

The scenario is a familiar one: What would happen if a much-hated world leader was killed in office? Since the failed assassination attempts on Adolph Hitler, fictions imagining how things might have changed with the elimination of one powerful figure have fascinated historians and the public. How could they not?

We all know that four U.S. presidents have been assassinated, and that every president faces that threat every day. Gerald Ford, one of our most benign chief executives, survived two murder attempts in the month of September 1975 alone — and he was never as divisive and generally reviled as Bush Jr., whose methods and ideology have been vilified as Hitlerian in real-life speeches and demonstrations that we’ve all seen already. (I’m speaking only about the real-life hatred the man has evoked worldwide, not the aptness of the Nazi comparison or whether such virulence is justified by his words and actions in office.)

Still though, take two Godwins out of petty cash.

Oh, and this:

“There’s no reason to be threatened by this film, any more than there was to be by “United 93” or “World Trade Center.” It’s responsible and observant about the world we live in — and it’s certainly not going to give anybody any ideas they haven’t had already.

But political campaign graphics will?

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No, this is isn’t a post about the president’s strange, sudden praise for Michael Vick — though I wonder if Bo is looking a bit worried these days.

Back in the 1930s, American liberals excused the communists of the Soviet Union as being simply “Liberals in a Hurry.” Doug Ross spots a Timesperson visiting North Korea, retching at the horror before her and quips, “New York Times visits North Korea, unintentionally reveals the endgame of the Democrats’ unchecked authoritarian agenda.”

Responding to the Gray Lady, Doug writes:

The Constitution purposefully and carefully set limits on the powers of the federal government. But if government ignores those limits to control more and more aspects of our lives, what prevents this society — our society — from descending into the same, nightmarish central planning endgame?

Is there a successful model that Democrats can point to? Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea and the Soviet Union are authoritarian societies that represent the failed “progressive” model taken to its inevitable conclusion.

‘But those models are too extreme,’ the progressive might retort, ‘Democrats would never descend into a totalitarian, unchecked political regime of that sort.’

Fine. Then what are the limits on the Progressive Democrat Party? What amount of taxation would be sufficient? How many people should be categorized as “rich”? How many more aspects of our lives — besides health care, energy, automobile design, carbon dioxide emissions, credit card interest rates, education — must be controlled before Democrats say ‘enough’?

Democrats never have — and never will — offer an answer to that question. And their view into the tragic, failed society of North Korea is a simple error: unintentionally revealing their endgame for all to see.

Well, they’ll always have Detroit. Not to mention Greece.

In a 1964 campaign rally in Providence, RI, Lyndon Johnson, standing on the hood of a car and armed with a bullhorn, summed up the Great Society for the assembled masses: “I just want to tell you this — we’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few.”

40 years later, in the Wall Street Journal, later reprinted by the Claremont Institute, William Voegeli attempted to narrow things down a bit, and ask the same questions Doug asks today: what’s the end game? How much control, how much regulation is enough? This of course was back in 2004, when the federal government under then-President Bush was merely gigantic, not yet leviathan:

The Democrats’ problem is not that they, like “Seinfeld,” are a show about nothing. It’s that they are a show about everything, or anything. (At one point, the Kerry-for-president Web site referred to 79 separate federal programs he wanted to create or expand.)

Ruy Teixeira says that after 2004, “the bigger question is: What do the Democrats stand for?” Here’s a better and bigger question still: What do the Democrats stand against? Tell us, if indeed it’s true, that Democrats don’t want to do for America what social democrats have done for France or Sweden. Tell us that the stacking of one government program on top of the other is going to stop, if indeed it will, well short of a public sector that absorbs half the nation’s income and extensively regulates what we do with the other half. Explain how the spirit of live-and-let-live applies, if indeed it does, to everyone equally–to people who take family, piety and patriotism seriously, not merely to people whose lives and outlooks are predicated on regarding them ironically.

Until those questions are answered, until Americans have confidence about the limits liberalism will establish and observe, it’s hard to see when the Democratic narrative will again have a happy ending.

Well, the narrative certainly had its happy moment in November of 2008, but as we’ve seen in the years since, to govern is to choose — though these days, that’s increasingly difficult; given how much they’ve either banned or regulated, the modern left would invert LBJ’s saying from almost 50 years ago quite nicely. They’re in favor of mighty few things and they’re against everything else.

Last year around this time in the American Spectator, Quin Hillyer attempted to square the circle, before hilarity ensued.

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Last month we explored the closed loops of the left via quotes from two very different authors, Arthur Koestler and Ann Coulter. To recap, we’ll start with the former:

A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.

The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself.

– Arthur Koestler, via David Foster of the Chicago Boyz blog.

Much more recently, Ann Coulter wrote:

“If you can somehow force a liberal into a point- counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.”

– Coulter, as quoted in John Hawkins’ article at Townhall, “The 25 Best Quotes About Liberals.”

But how to break that cycle? At PJM today,  ex-Soviet immigrant Oleg Atbashian of the Peoples’ Cube blog employs the Socratic method to cut through the fog via a lengthy and fun series of  interrogatories. Don’t miss “Question Insanity: What to Ask Progressives.”

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“Christmas is now celebrated, however imperfectly, in most lands where the worst tyrants tried to eradicate it and its celebrants,” Mark Tooley writes at the American Spectator. But for much of the 20th century, that wasn’t the case:

Today, unsurprisingly, North Korea and Saudi Arabia actively suppress Christmas. But much of the rest of the world seems to have at least secular versions of the holiday. Although still officially communist, Chinese cities are more and more decorated with holiday trees and lights, partly reflecting the country’s growing economic integration with the West, partly reflecting the growing Christian population. Much of the world’s Christmas ornaments are now manufactured in China.The old Soviet Union tried to displace Christmas by highlighting New Year’s Day as the alternative Winter holiday. (In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Christmas follows New Year’s.) Of course, Christmas outlasted Soviet communism. East European communism collapsed in 1989 in time for Christmas. Romania’s brutal tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his equally brutish wife were tried and executed by the “people” on Christmas Day. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, providentially ending the Soviet Union.

Less than two decades later, how easy to forget that the last century was dominated by totalitarian monster regimes like the Soviet Union. Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and German National Socialism together murdered more millions than all that century’s wars combined. The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins. This Christmas, we can celebrate, among so much else, despite the world’s current travails, that the great totalitarian murder machines are, for the most part, gone.

To get a sense of the Nazis warped Christmas to fit their ideology, check out this heavily-illustrated 2009 article at the London Daily Mail: “How Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas.”

Related: At Roger Kimball’s blog, it’s Christmas, Antonio Gramsci style:  “’Tis the Season to be Politically Correct.”

But then, isn’t that the case 24/7, 364 days a year?

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