John Fund at the WSJ describes the difficulty in finding out anything about Barack Obama, besides what he has carefully released to the public. Obama has been alternately parsimonious and extravagant about providing information about himself. He wrote an autobiography when he was only 34 years old, entitled Dreams of My Father, whose authorship was described by Wikipedia.
“In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published as Dreams from My Father in mid-1995.”
But apart from these controlled releases of information Obama has been very guarded about his life. Fund writes that:
Ben Smith of Politico.com has written about Team Obama’s “pattern of rarely volunteering information or documents, even when relatively innocuous.” … Chasing the rest of Mr. Obama’s paper trail is often an exercise in frustration. Mr. Obama says his state senate records “could have been thrown out” and he didn’t keep a schedule in office. No one appears to have kept a copy of his application for the Illinois Bar. He has released only a single page of medical records, versus 1,000 pages for John McCain. … All presidential candidates resist full examination of their records. But it should be the job of reporters not to accept noncooperation, stonewalling or intimidation when it comes to questions about fitness for the nation’s highest office.
Examination by the press is part of the “quality control” process that a democracy relies on to ensure that no grossly unsuitable candidate gets the nomination of a major party. But when Bill Maher, surely no friend of the Republicans can say that the media coverage of Obama has become so biased that it’s embarssing there is little prospect that Obama will be asked any questions about Rezko, Ayers, Auchi, Mansour or anything else. Maher said
I think there is a problem, though, with the media gushing over him too much. I don’t think he thinks that he’s all that, but the media does. I mean, the coverage after, that I was watching, from MSNBC, I mean these guys were ready to have sex with him….It’s embarrassing.
People would be aghast if nobody was interested in inspecting Air Force One before it flew. But there is less worry about the need to inspect who gets aboard Air Force One before it flies. Does Hope and Change apply to reforming the media too?
Tip Jar.
TMZ.com had a blurb today about the current melt-down at MSNBC. They also have a poll up about which of the 4 people involved is the biggest douche-bag, with Olberman leading by a mile.
When a left-leaning entertainment site like TMZ starts taking pot-shots at “news journalists” like MSNBC, it seems to me that we’ve spun into a new and deeper cycle of “media” flushing themselves down the toilet.
Which is why we have the internet to winkle these little factoids about Obama out since our current crop of “newsmen” are too busy trying to see who can piss the farthest.
It is very odd that Sen. Obama is so willing to talk about his youth and his certain other selected time periods in his life, but not others. He’s been positively scary about trying to shut down any inquiry into the nature and depth of his relationship with William Ayers. Asking the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation a group that ran ads criticizing his friendship with Ayers is not suggestive of respect for the 1st amendment.
When a left-leaning entertainment site like TMZ starts taking pot-shots at “news journalists” like MSNBC, it seems to me that we’ve spun into a new and deeper cycle of “media” flushing themselves down the toilet.
There’s some debate about why this is happening. One line of thought is that the MSM has stopped being “MSM” and is now a niche player like everyone else where a magisterial anchor can’t even pretend to be magisterial any more. Henceforth, in order to survive, journalists will have to join the shrieking game to retain their core audience. If that’s the case then many news programs are going to begin the slow transformation into freakshows.
I think an increasing number of people are getting their information from multiple sources. They may even watch freakshows, but they’ll be looking for collateral. There’s a market opportunity for sites which can create a cinema multiplex of sideshows, a Hyde Park of views. The MSM is dead. All we can hope for is an arcade of niche views.
The ideological bias of the MSM is no longer denied, even by themselves. Their product is trusted and valued by an ever shrinking consumer base, and as businesses their value, reach and impact on the global information battle space will contract significantly.
A segment of the public will still buy their Bravo Sierra, because they know no better or because they are ideologically comfortable with the propaganda they receive. These holdouts will provide the smokescreen of paying customers covering the unattributable financial assistance donated by Hungarian billionaires, North Korean counterfeiters, and other assorted Russian, Red Chinese, Iranian, Cuban and Venezualan recipients of domestically produced anti-American propaganda.
In the universities now, post-modernist views of truth obtain – so no one even bothers with the idea of objective truth. They are all advocates for a political viewpoint – except that they feel it is not incumbent upon them to be truthful with us about their biases. With that kind of depth of deception and intellectual sloth, fragmentation in the media is bound to occur.
Yeah, any vetting is left to the net and 527′s, for better or worse. The MSM is a bought and sold(out) commodity, a long running infomercial spinning like a top for thier masters. The faith of it’s veiwership was all the real equity the MSM ever had and they’ve spent it up like a drunken sailor.
The guy that sells “Orange glow” (Billy Mays) is really no different than most network anchors these days, maybe more trustworthy even.
Stay Classy Daily Kos: Accusations Palin ‘Faked Her Pregnancy’ of Down’s Syndrome baby
The claim is that it was her teenaged daughter’s child, not hers.
Daily Kos is to the DNC what Al Sahab is to Al Qaeda.
after a period of fragmentation there will follow a cycle of consolidation, producing new msm entities. maybe the cycle time will be shorter, but the cycle will obtain.
I’ve become too accustomed to others not remembering the little tidbits from the past that I do. I surely hope I jog the memory of some of you worthy souls so that you can help broadcast the obvious implication.
I remember after it was disclosed how much the media covered up for JFK before and while he was President, considerably after his murder, how the media flogged itself and vowed never to do such a thing again.
Now compare: “I think there is a problem, though, with the media gushing over him too much.”
Were we living in Orwell’s 1984, it is clear that the media’s official name would be The Ministry of Information. Would not we be much wiser there?
The conventional wisdom is we don’t know this guy.
The truth, imo, is we know him better than most candidates.
(thanks to his books, which can be parsed, and his openly anti-American associates, and the reportage of Chicago MSM)
It’s just that the Dems and MSM do not acknowledge most of what we know to be true, given that it is almost all bad.
Pascal mentions JFK –the first ”perception is reality” PoMo man –noteworthy that he too was launched with a book. The book route is great –even an autobiography at 36 –because it’s then easy for alerted fellow travelers to showcase you, not because they like your politics (wink) but because of your artistic literary achievement (winkwink), which so stands out from the other 10,000 books published that year, because “it’s a really good book!”
JFK’s PT-109 story was worth hearing, tho, so i guess i need more examples.
So how does someone burdened, as they have said, with college debt afford to go to Bali for several months? How is it that the woman who raised him did not even show her face at the convention to see her grandchild officially nominated at the convention? Why such an appalling lack of curiosity among the media?
In the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the newspaper man says, “When the legend becomes fact print the legend.” But there is another, less common meaning to the word “legend”. It refers to a cover story under which a real person travels. It doesn’t necessarily connote espionage, but rather to a collection of plausible or alleged biographical facts which conceal another story.
He went to Bali so his book could be written.
As for JFK and his heroism after PT-109s collision with a Jap destroyer…
Has anyone considered how damn dumb and slack the crew of a PT boat has to be to get rammed by a ship 10x their size in the dark? The Japs had bugger all radar. There were islands in the neighborhood.
The PT boat is a small, fast maneuverable beast. In pitch darkness just how would someone high up in a warship see something as low in the water as a PT boat without the PT boat seeing him first?
If the PT boat was moving fast enough to leave a visible wake why wasn’t it going fast enough to dodge something like a destroyer?
Was the crew asleep. Was whoever was on deck smoking with the cigarette or flare of the match visible?
Kennedy was in charge. It was his boat. He probably should have been court-martialled. But then his father the rum-runner was ex-ambassador to England or Ireland or whatever.
Who, What Where……? Muslim Plant/Bush Pic…..?
were in deep dooooo.
Gota vote independent, but who?
Cold day in U.S.or is this hell?
I agree with Doug (as usual) and his explanation of what has happened in this unfolding drama. Those of us who want to know and who have gone in search of the information, have found it. And it is very alarming. It’s just that the journalism profession in its unremitting bias refuses to let go of the myth and the “legend” (as Wretchard reminds us).
We owe a debt to the New Zealand journalist Kincaid who found who “Frank” was in young Barry’s background.
We know the adult Barack writes admiringly of his biological father and his ideas and ideals. And what were those? Well, for the curious… Barack Obama Sr. was NOT a Muslim, but a Kenyan atheist and Communist who had left a paper trail too, including a position paper of what he recommended as an economic program for his boss to implement in Kenya.
We know Barry’s mother was a Marxist anthropologist. She was probably not a Leninist or Stalinist, like Frank Marshall Davis. More likely her thinking reflected the influence of the Frankfurt School revisionist Marxists.
Bill Ayers was a natural fit for Barack Obama. I think they shared a common outlook and vision. Their values intersected, which is the thing that the Obama campaign and its marionette (Soros) desperately want to stifle.
Dear Sirs,
I am as much dismayed at the bias of the MSM as are you all. I have been reading newspapers and watching television since about 1949. There is indeed a new world coming. There is always a new world coming.
What dismays me is the decline of newspapers. Who is going to report city council and zoning board meetings? Who is going to go through the records at the county courthouse ferreting out the corruption? Be careful what you wish for.
Regards,
Roy
“Who is going to report city council and zoning board meetings? Who is going to go through the records at the county courthouse ferreting out the corruption? Be careful what you wish for.”
Surely nobody wished for this. It is what it is though.
PT 109 wiki
@ doug and fred
Obama talks way too much. And it isn’t simply that he’s in love with the sound of his own voice. For some of us, the more people like that talk, the more their listeners take the talk itself as an object of inquiry, wondering aloud, as anyone might who is not a down-and-out liberal in this country, what’s being hidden among so much apparent “self-disclosure.” “Let me tell you about myself,” and then what follows is non-stop “logorrhea” (a nonce term used in academe to describe something akin to diarrhea except that it issues from a different orifice).
There’s a certain amount of paranoid projection involved here: “I’ve got to keep on talking in order to explain myself clearly to everyone in the vicinity, because if I don’t, then they’re liable to think . . . What?” “What” are they liable to think? Mistakes, misunderstandings, fictions, among which may lurk precisely what I don’t want to tell them. What is it they think I don’t want to tell them? I don’t quite know myself, which is why I can’t stop talking. You never know what will be heard (and believed!) if suddenly silence descends on us.”
And there’s that massive audience in Denver’s Mile-High stadium. What do they think they are hearing? I suspect that the sheer intellectual vacuity of the Obamaniacal discourse constitutes nothing more than a massive blank page on which these feckless people are invited to write their own versions of what the man stands for and purposes. “Change? I love change, don’t you, change is better than no change.”
And so on and on . . .
We can forget about the Dem party media filling in the blanks. It’s not an oversight, it’s not due to ‘gushing’, it’s not due to ‘personality cult’.
Those, my friends, are the cover story –the slightly embarrassing future admission to be admitted when the shtf.
Big Dem media is telling itself it’s only serving its niche, serving its fans what they want. Also, it likes what may happen vis-a-vis turning the screws on this free media that’s giving it such fits.
think, what do white collar criminals always say when the jig is up? “Ahh, damn, I’m just a really poor businessman. I listened to bad advice. I’m too trusting, I used a stupid CPA” –and the like. This will be the MSM lament when the White House starts filling up with radicals and the economy nosedives thru Carterite numbers to deeper and better indictments of the unsustainable capitalist system.
Regarding the steady, leftward bias of the MSM, and decreasing actual “news” reporting across the board (i.e. Fox has become an abysmal news source with Greta and Geraldo type reporting):
Questions like “how”, and “why”, and “who benefits” come to mind. How does any entity become 95%+ dominated by like-minded people? Random chance? Natural selection (e.g. as one lefty new pundit once mused, “censervatives are simply not bright enough for the job”)? Diversion of interests based on culture and beliefs?
No way of knowing for certain. However, my own feeling in having dealt with lefties in government is that it’s an issue of bias. Conservatives believe in the classical western notions of absolute truth, justice, and “right” and “wrong”, whereas “progressive” (i.e. liberal-left) folks believe a more eastern philosophical tradition of moral relativism. Most conservative HR or news directors would simply not allow considerations of politics and faith to enter into a hiring decision, i.e. it would simply be “wrong”, while a progressive counterpart could think of about 100 “moral” reasons for denying employment to a conservative applicant.
That the leftist elite now at the control levers of the MSM continue to repeat that behavior even when the credibility (and revenue) loss is been apparent, may testify to the sheer religiosity of their dognma. They are committed to bringing American the “correct” view and interpretation of the news, over actual news. Look at the insular NYT, for example. It’s become nothing more than a political rag, when it once was legitimately the newspaper of record. (CNN brought on Glen Beck, which shocked me, so perhaps the bean counters are pointing out some of the facts of life to the media CEO at CNN. But news selection and reporting is still slanted hard-left.)
The same bias occurs at most non-commercial enterprises, i.e. once a leftist gains control, the culture of the organization moves inexorably left, and then “conservatives need-not-apply”. (Commercial enterprises face the “absolute truth” of profits and loss, so the problem there more self-correcting. But not entirely, as the entertainment industry has demonstrated: the are willing to tolerate a significant amount of financial losses due to political dogma.)
One of the fears my wife and I have had about the U.S. Democrats is that once they achieve their goal of total control of three branches of government plus 60 Senate votes, they will not simply change legislate “left”, but they’ll attack our very democratic foundations. They’ll use levers of law to make dissent and opposition more difficult. Imagine a USSC of nine William Ayers’. Imagine a new “Fairness Doctrine” and a legal blanket on all “hate speech”, or even conservative thought. Again, while using the law and abusing the Constitution for political gains would be unthinkable for many conservatives, the progressive law maker could think of 100 “moral” reasons justifying law to ensure “correct thinking”.
Roy, Zim: Jeff Jarvis at buzzmachine.com has been arguing for years that the media that survive will be the ones that increase their local coverage.
Of course, we are just paranoid, of course, we are only paranoid, of course, we are just acting paranoid, of course there is nothing to be paranoid about, of course, paranoia is the result of too many brownies and such, of course.
Right?
“Has anyone considered how damn dumb and slack the crew of a PT boat has to be to get rammed by a ship 10x their size in the dark? The Japs had bugger all radar. There were islands in the neighborhood.
The PT boat is a small, fast maneuverable beast. In pitch darkness just how would someone high up in a warship see something as low in the water as a PT boat without the PT boat seeing him first?
If the PT boat was moving fast enough to leave a visible wake why wasn’t it going fast enough to dodge something like a destroyer?
Was the crew asleep. Was whoever was on deck smoking with the cigarette or flare of the match visible?
Kennedy was in charge. It was his boat. He probably should have been court-martialled. But then his father the rum-runner was ex-ambassador to England or Ireland or whatever.” – Bob Murphy
I’ve been on the bridge of a US warship in those waters in near pitch black conditions. It’s totally believable. The waters there can be like glass. You can see a drifting object by it’s water displacement, i.e. it’ll still create ripples. The PT109 lookout could not screen 360 degress at once. History (both Japanese and US) reports no lit cigarettes, and no sleeping watch. There is no counter narrative. The Japanese ship just happened to be on a near collision course with PT-109 when their lookout saw the boat, and a slight course adjustment plus their 20 knot momentum carried it though the PT boat. Kennedy by all accounts was a heroic skipper.
We shouldn’t mess with history just because some of the characters were not all we wish they were.
Wrichard writes:
“He wrote an autobiography when he was only 34 years old, entitled Dreams of My Father. . . .”
Wrichard cites the book as “Dreams *of* my Father,” even though the quotation he cites immediately afterwards correctly refers to the book as “Dreams *from* my Father.”
Wrichard, being a sensible analyst, names the book what any sensible person would name a memoir. But Sen. Obama entitles his book dreams “from” my father.
Note that “from” connotes/evokes a certain kind of authenticity, almost a claim of channeling communication from his father, as though the father was trying to communicate with the son, and the clairvoient son is supernaturally capable of receiving the dreams.
Yes, it’s just a little word in a book title. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it’s a strange title. Is there a psychoanalyst in the house?
“That the leftist elite now at the control levers of the MSM continue to repeat that behavior even when the credibility (and revenue) loss is been apparent, may testify to the sheer religiosity of their dognma. ”
A question I keep asking myself as I toddle through life is, “Do stupid people realize they are stupid, or do they just think that everyone else is functioning at the same level they are because they can’t comprehend anything different?”
I don’t think the Dem’s are religious or dogmatic as much as they simply can’t comprehend (or project) that anyone else could have a more inclusive worldview, or be more experienced, or – simply – be smarter than their PhD-endowed selves.
Part of the attraction of Gov. Palin is the counter narrative of her life to Sen. Obama’s legend (in Richard use of the term). Her story is extreme but extremely inside the American tradition and his is extreme but extremely on the margins — as a self exile. He is a man without a “Country” but with a “World” of his own.
What I find troubling about O is he don’t have “normal” friends to add ballast for all his past weird associations. In fact, he don’t even have weird associates who are weird in a different way, to sort of cancel each other out. They are all weird in the same stinking way. Even Dude in The Big Lebowski had associates who were weird in a variety of ways, not the same stinking way. OK, I’m referencing movies. Time to go to bed.
Obama was teaching some of Saula Alinsky’s methods in law school Discover the networks has a detailed description of Alinsky and his methods. “Among the most vital tenets of Alinsky’s method were the following:
“Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.”[75]
“No organization, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their ‘book’ of rules and regulations.”[76]
“Practically all people live in a world of contradictions. They espouse a morality which they do not practice.… This dilemma can and should be fully utilized by the organizer in getting individuals and groups involved in a People’s Organization. It is a very definite Achilles’ heel even in the most materialistic person. Caught in the trap of his own contradictions, that person will find it difficult to show satisfactory cause to both the organizer and himself as to why he should not join and participate in the organization. He will be driven either to participation or else to a public and private admission of his own lack of faith in democracy and man.”[77]
Nothing wrong with referencing the great character studies in the great movies. Duh –tautology –that’s why they’re great movies –but ‘Lebowski’ is as good a film ref to the current topic as can be. The old rich Lebowski, fraud & stranger to himself, and all his family, in all their frivolous moneyed fraudulence, are the Chicago Way, the people who would front an Obama, and the Dude as the American, unornamented and plain, a 90s Los Angeles Palin –fallen on hard times, but a Palin. A “man of his time” as the voice-over said. Every one of the film’s characters stands in for an element in this political drama. I won’t bore with more drift –but thanks for the mental tickle, in mentioning that film.
@Old Salt,
I also have been on a couple of ship’s bridges in the waters between the PI and Oz. My take is that the wiki article skates around what I heard. Kennedy played glamour boy and had an unauthorzed shipalt done to put the stolen 37mm cannon on his craft. They saw the destroyer approaching and the visiting Ensign tried to get off a shot while Kennedy loitered instead of getting out of the way. When he tried to gun the engines they failed to catch the first time and it was to late. It was made very clear to me that Kennedy was an object lesson up to that moment in how not to act as a eager Junior Officer. His conduct afterwards was exemplary but that would not have protected him if he didn’t have political cover.
what drives me up the wall is how people who aren’t of the left don’t take seriously the threat the left poses. they were handed every public institution without a fight. as far as i can tell, many people here can see the individual trees but don’t realize they form a forest. you engage people like benj because you can’t accept he has no mind of his own, no personality. he is a cell in a larger organism. as extreme as it sounds, there needs to be a systematic effort to clean them out of power and relocate them out of the
“He will be driven either to participation or else to a public and private admission of his own lack of faith in democracy and man.”
Cut that sentence down: “He will be driven to an admission of his own lack of faith in democracy and man.”
cut some more: “He will be driven to a lack of faith in man.”
Of course he will be –the driver himself is making a lie of ‘faith in man’.
“Do I not prove your faith a lie?” asks the Revolution, “what is faith for, if not to save you from me?”
It’s the question Putin is asking.
BTW John Forbes Kerry during his brief time in Vietnam (he was there, have you heard?) did something similar, running his boat at the shore to maximize the intimidation factor of raking the jungle with machine gun fire even at the cost of maneuverability. I never did riverine patrol so I may be wrong here but it sounds like he was not doing an authorized tactic.
There is always a temptation for Junior Officer to try and impress his troops by going in closer with guns blazing. I am certainly guilty of having had dreams of such glory myself. Modern combat aircraft do not have this social component. Tactical fighter/bombers are crewed only by one or two officers. The Surface Navy, like the Army, is a place where the enlisted get to observe the officers closely during combat. Training discipline and teamwork should be used to ensure that the tools provided by weapon systems and doctrine are used to maximum effect without unnecessary loss.
Sometimes a bright guy in the field has an idea on how to do things better. We are not like the Russians chained to a rigid control system. But generally speaking these ideas should be approved by Senior Officers first. They were not always gray haired and maybe even earned their rank. Besides courtesy pays and they may help.
re: “There is always a temptation for Junior Officer to try and impress his troops by going in closer with guns blazing. I am certainly guilty of having had dreams of such glory myself.” LOFTM
That’s what good Chiefs are for, to kick a new J.O.’s butt. The system’s not perfect, but by the time a guy becomes a C.O., even if a J.O., and even in wartime, his main focus is usually on the mission and on the safety of his crew. Except for a few megalomaniacs, guys get most of their “Walter Mitty” type dreams of grandeur out of their systems by the time they assume command. The personal responsibility one feels for a crew is sobering. From my reading of JFK, whatever the reasons for getting into the war (e.g. future political viability?), he was all about his crew as a C.O..
re: “Sometimes a bright guy in the field has an idea on how to do things better. We are not like the Russians chained to a rigid control system. But generally speaking these ideas should be approved by Senior Officers first.”
To the contrary: One of the main differences between the Navy and the other services is the tradition of detached command. A Navy C.O. is still granted license to the closest thing to a “God” on earth. He has both a significant amount of authority and accountability to command. The saying goes, that where an Army or Air Force officer reads the regs to find authorized procedures and ROE, a Navy Officer looks at them, and where they don’t prohibit something, he takes it as authorization to proceed. He doesn’t ask permission. This isn’t an parochial viewpoint; again, it’s due to the difference in the traditional mission between the Navy and other services. Even in the current age with light-speed communications, the culture of the Navy breeds leaders as individualists. Admirals think that way today, and so Ensigns still learn that way.
Taking the PT109 ad-hoc 37MM gun as an example, that’s EXACTLY what a good Naval Officer does. He improvises, he decides, and he acts independently to support the mission and his crew. Where I in JFK’s shoes, I sure as heck would have been thinking the same thing given the attack envelope of the PT boats, armament, and limited defense capabilities.
This is so Typical of Obamanation Voters,
Obama Campaign calling the kettle Black,,,
Sarah Palin has Has Just as much experiance as Barack Obama if not more so,, Obama has NO Experiance and riding on the Coat tiles of the black Nomination,, There is no way Thay can put her down,, Say she Not experiance because,,Then Barack Obama will have to say since he have 0 experiance what make him so special,
Attacking Her going to be like attacking him self,,
This is going to be good, We finally have a woman to vote for,, I voted for Hillary and like I said I voting for McCain, now that he picked a woman,, more woman voter are voting for her,,,
Sarah Palin will be a great VP,, anyone who says other wise, will have a lot of explaining to do,, Because,, Barack Has NO experiance and he thinks he could be President!!!!!
And Barack Speech was the same old speech he gives Everyone wants change Why don’t someone tell Barack Time to get an Agenda, Time to change his speech’s he been singing,, getting old,
But then again Only Barack thinks everyone should vote for him
No matter what criminals he had with him,, Ryzko , Who got barack his House,, and Like always,, barack bringing up McCain Houses, how dumb again, calling the kettle black again,, 2 people Rich People,,,1 worth 4 million and the other worth 400 million,, Gee to me and every other middle class in america Rich is rich,, so barack want to get into a pissing match over Houses,, instead of telling the people what he going to do,, He done Nothing every news Media knows he adopted Hillary campaign, Pelosi and Dean And Barack Obama are making Hillary Unite this party ,, Barack Obama won the Primary so why is it up to Hillary to unite this party,, Why are they asking Her,is this all she can do,, it not up to her,, Its up to Barack Obama,, What we have Here is Bush Tactics, they are going to do all they can to fraud and Hi-Jack this Campaign, and rig the election, like they did with Hillary,, they way they gave Obama florida and Michigan even tho Hillary won those fair and Square ,,no Barack wants half after the fact,,,
Well I am glad Hillary is not the vp for barack now she can run in 2012, against McCain ,,,and she can be the first Woman President, But right Now Sarah Palin going to be the First Woman Vice President, who has Just as much experiance as Barack Obama,, McCain Made a great choice,
I guess That greek temple of a joke stage barack made for his speech is the closest he going to get to the white house,,
He Really thinks He is already President, Well at least I did go out and started using barack obama energy Plan I bought a TiRE GUAGE, ,, wow we are saving money Now,
Don’t FOR Get BarackObama Seal,, He Stole from commander & Chief Seal, The Man is an EGO Maniacs,,, I am a Proud Democrat, I will not blindly vote for a Man who will Hurt this Country, I will not do it, If Hitler was a democrat , I have to vote for him,, ,NO way No How NO OBAMA
The truly telling thing about Wretch mangling the title of O’s book is that it underscores the fact that he hasn’t read it. For 6 months he’s been pushing the idea that O is a grand mystery – while cultivating every ugly rumor that might make O look scary. In fact the roots of O’s current liberal – not “radical” – politics are spelled out clearly in his book. His career in politics – straight up through the speech Thursday night – flow directly from the movements of mind evoked in “Dreams From My Father.”
Wade – know YOU’RE not prick either though I did mean that for Buddy…- You registered some skepticism re my plaint re Wretch’s assumption that Sutton was a big Obama supporter. – Here’s my line and yours as per your email…
“What was most striking about that bit of flailing from Wretch was his asumption that the Old Black Man hazily recalling/rewriting his history of influence was necessarily a heavy Obama man.
–I did not catch that angle in the ahem–flailing. Not at all. ”
You must have missed this post where Wretch repeatedly underlined it …
“…the story was introduced in a context that was intended to be flattering to BHO by persons who are his admirers, [WRONG - it was intended to be flattering to Percy Sutton!] as will be evident from the video. So the intent of those who introduced the subject into the public domain was to suggest that the Mansour incident was both true and relevant. It is not as if someone went dumpster diving to steal Obama’s childhood records or spied on him. No. The entire thing was recounted and raised by his admirers. That being the case, it hardly seems fair to object to discussing a subject they themselves have raised on the grounds of irrelevancy or untruth.
Fundamental equity requires that it cuts both ways. If a man’s supporters boast of something, why is it unfair to take their statements at their word..
…- Wretch knew zip about Sutton – didn’t try to find out. OK – cut him some slack, right? He lives in Australia – What the hell he does he know about Harlem politicos – But Jesus! – YOU looked at the video. YOU could tell Mr. S. was something less than a reliable source. So given that Wretch is no dummy either – how could send this swill out there into world? Two possibilities. He can’t read Americans. Or he’s dishonorable. I’m leaning toward the lsst. Here’s why…
As you may recall – Rod Reilly had no probs with Wretch’s approach to the Sutton thingy – “Let the crazy rumors fly!” – Other Clubbers seconded that notion. So I quoted Reilly’s line and asked Wretch – “you want to distance yourself from this or are you signing on!!!?? ”
Wretch – dishonorably – slipped the question – Cutting mine in two – obscuring the fact that I was challenging him to distance himself from Rod Reilly’s defense of the Big Lie…he blew it all off.
“So what’s there to distance myself from? People can watch Sutton’s video for themselves. I’m not saying it. Sutton is. All I want to know is, whether it’s true.”
BTW – The next poster – OLD SALT – spoke directly to the point I’d raised, quoting Reilly and co. and repudiating them. (Though not efforts to look into O’s supposed “Muslim” affiliations). Alexis got the point too – abd spelled out her rejection later in the Thread…Looking back over the emails I was struck by the opening of OLD SALT’s response(though I don’t want to pretend he’s on MY side) …
“This is not a time for us to play fair, so let the crazy rumors fly.” Roderick Reilly
“Roderick Reilly’s right — get all that we can out there — voters have to know there are too many unanswered questions for him to be trusted.” Believer.
Wrong approach. We don’t take the approach of the leftists because we believe (at least many of us do) in absolute truth. Truth matters…
Not to Wretch, apparently. He just wants to be on the side that’s winning…
benj,
Why don’t you ever respond when obvious links to corruption are posted here wrt The Messiah?
…I’ve posted links to reputable folks like and David Fredosso and Stanley Kurtz, but you continue to ignore them.
Is the truth too painful?
Here’s a new link for you to ignore:
Dealing with Dissent, the Chicago Way
Buddy – great to know you’re Lebowski fan — What a fuggin great movie… John Goodman! And the actor who’s there to cackle one line on the phone – “The Biennale” – Amazing. That guy – his name is David Thewlis gave one of the greatest performances ever in a movie called “Naked.”
“He just wants to be on the side that’s winning”
i don’t think that makes sense. Obama’s ahead in the polls, and everything from Intrade to astrology, with poly sci in between, predicts a Dem sweep. Anyone who just wants to be on the side that’s winning will either join up Obama –or express no stand at all.
makes more sense: “he just wants the side he’s on to win.”
all due respect, benj, you want to watch out and not obsess –obsessions drive away potential converts quick quick. Persuade with expansive spirit.
benj –fave minor characters: Jesus (Turturro), the taxi driver who liked “The Eagles”, the sheriff who threw Dude outta town. Great laff, the nihilist’s learning they won’t get any money “But that’s not Fair!” –Goodman, “Some nihilist!”
@Old Salt,
My point was that a PT boat was akin to an aircraft with a jg in charge. That is not the same as a true warship with a Commanding Officer. LTJGs should not have their spirit broken but they should run their bright ideas past the boss. That is what he is there for. A CO normally has 10 years or more in the service, a PT skipper had maybe 10 months. The 37mm was not authorized for a reason and in retrospect it was a bad idea that no other JO would have gotten away with. My take on this is ambivalent because I probably would have wanted that gun myself. As I have heard the story it wasn’t a case of Command by Negation, something I love, because Kennedy knew the answer was already No. The fact is that it had been proposed and specifically rejected because they did not want PT boats going in that close. If a recon pilot tried to add a couple of machine gun pods to his wings so he could go in low and strafe his CO would have a very unpleasant talk with him. That is not a perfect comparison; the PT was a fighting platform. No one was an expert on this type of combat because they were making it up as they went along. No problem with taking a risk to accomplish the mission but to be fair when the result is death and disaster it should make a difference whether or not you played by the book. Change the rules and win equals a hero. Change the rules and get loss of ship and crew equals punishment.
And I love gunnery. Wish the Navy was building the LCS line and the Arsenals. Once we refueled from the New Jersey when I was 1st LT Afloat on a cruiser. Wish I could find a woman who looked that good.
“Cultivating ugly rumors”, eh? While we’re on the subject, let’s debunk the “ugly rumors” about millions of dollars being funneled to unreconstructed Chicago Maoists, among others. Somehow it was supposed to help turn around those failing schools, you see. Don’t you care about the CHILDREN?
And to get back to the topic of the original post, that single page of medical records really is something else. I seem to remember a lot of chatter about W’s administration being the “most secretive” in History. Looking at O. vs. both Rep. & Dem. candidates between 1996 and 2004, I myself can’t remember any campaign that seemed so resistant to providing the most basic biographical information about their nominee. GWB hiding the DUI and Kerry obfuscating his service record are minor league in comparison. Will this somehow get better once the Magic Negro assumes office? It’s comforting to know that such concerns are beneath at least some of the posters here. After all – melanin uber alles!
Buddy – Hear you re Obsessing – But I’m actually having fun as I try to do my part to quash some of the ugliness that’s coming at my guy – ain’t cared about a mainstream pol in 20 years so. And this guy keeps wowing me so…PS You’re right re that last line – It’s a Dylan quote – couldn’t resist even though it didn’t quite work! – Off to bed…Got to get my boy out early!! Best, b.
@Nine=of-Diamonds,
He never did what any normal person would have done. He never gathered his birth certificate, transcripts, tax returns, medical records, etc., put them in binders on a table, put another table past them with lots of donuts and coffee and then called the press in and said “Go at it guys.” That is how you get past an inspection in the service. There is something about his obfuscation and unworldliness that simply fails the smell test.
“Fundamental equity requires that it cuts both ways. If a man’s supporters boast of something, why is it unfair to take their statements at their word..” – Benj
Translated: If an Obama supporter reports information, it is “unfair” (what’s that mean? untrue? dishonorable? wrong?) to be critical of either the source or information. Non Sequitur.
“Wretch – dishonorably – slipped the question …” – Benj
Attributing honor or dishonor to one’s line of logic is an ad-homium attack. Information or lack there of is neither. It’s either true or false, available or hidden, and in the case of BHO, almost everything is hidden. Moreover, when it comes to “honor” versus “dishonor”, anyone who can support the standard bearer of the Democrat left, has no viable position from which to make the comparison.
“BTW – The next poster – OLD SALT – spoke directly to the point I’d raised, quoting Reilly and co. and repudiating them.
‘Wrong approach. We don’t take the approach of the leftists because we believe (at least many of us do) in absolute truth. Truth matters’ (OldSalt).
Not to Wretch, apparently. He just wants to be on the side that’s winning…” – Benj
Again, Non Sequitur. Your main problem with Wretchard is that he gave a forum to the Sutton recollection of Khalid MansourS issue at all. Then you attribute this to “dishonor” on Wretchard’s part. You’re trying to suppress discussion of this information on the BLOGOSPHERE, to Obama’s benefit. In short, it’s very likely that you’re part of a formal or informal “anti-Swiftboating” group for Obama. (Why would I asset that? Classical logic. “Who benefits?”. Who potentially benefits from suppressing the discussion?).
Well, let’s take a step back. Who coined the term “Swiftboating”, and what action did it describe? It was John Kerry and/or his campaign that developed (or adopted) that term. The term was their response to a group of hundreds of HONORABLE men, with dozens of DOCUMENTED stories, about John Kerry and his version of events surrounding his service in Vietnam. Any honest, critical reviewer of the facts would have to consider the veracity of the witnesses, vis-a-vise Kerry’s recollections, documents, and his few veteran supporters. Kerry was “outted” as a fraud or worse by those who knew him and were there. The Swift Boat men and officers testimony and facts where never successfully disputed anywhere except in a Daily-Kos-mind-world-view. Kerry has never authorized released his military records which might support his version of events, though he committed to doing so several times. In short, Kerry was a complete fraud (and still is) and the Democrats trashed hundreds of military veterans who were “the tip of the spear” in Vietnam, who did not fake the three purple hearts, who served much longer in courtry than 4 months, who served with distinction and did not return home to the U.S. to make up stories about atrocities by their fellow sailors and soldiers, to improve their “political viability”.
And you know, Benj, you may be as legitimate as apple pie. And, Obama may be as much of a Patriotic American as everyone of those Swift Boat veterans that his supporters have trashed for four years. But forgive us, in the absence of nearly any disclosure, and in view of a clear organized harassment campaign of any who ask questions about Obama by his supporters, if many of us on this forum consider Obama a fraud, a national risk, and perhaps worse. It’s not our place to put the facts into the public domain; it is Obama’s. We just analyze what is out there, and Wretchard “HONORABLY” relayed what he read to his BLOG, as an open request for more information and analysis.
BHO has a particular legend (e.g. story) with peculiar details, and some serious known inconsistencies, and questionable associations from family, to friends, to business. He could not pass a US Federal “TOP SECRET” level security clearance given the known facts. We would all like to know more.
Just ignore any inconvenient facts, benj.
At least you consistently keep your head firmly implanted in your rectum.
—
Sarah Palin Swimsuit Competition
I have some great pictures of the Sarah Palin swimsuit competition.
New Jersey is one helluva beautiful ship. All three of ‘em –Wisconsin, Missouri. seems like there was a fourth but it escapes sleepy here –
Iowa
re Swiftboat, gotta say, if i was in a jam and needed help, i’d rather have one John O’Neill than ten thousand John Kerrys.
“BHO has a particular legend (e.g. story) with peculiar details, and some serious known inconsistencies, and questionable associations from family, to friends, to business.”
“We would all like to know more.”
I certainly would like to know more, and not the stuff of legend. We get nothing but nuance in what “OH” and you offer, Benj, and no substance. To use an apt but rather tired phrase…, where’s the beef?
I have nearly concluded that the reason we cannot get at the heart of the matter is because “OH” has none, that this great sophomoric prank of running for pres has somehow gone way out of his control. I have read the books Benj, I have watched the video and I can read the words and make sense of their meaning.
You are way off base, my interpretation of the video performance was that it was meant to puff up a fellows failing opinion of himself. My experience is that such stuff is based on some small albeit tenuous link to truth, and the realization that getting even the slightest confirmation of any truth from “OH” would be miraculous.
Hence Kurtz complaint that a whole set of documents that may reveal something of merit, something of substance was about to go missing. It isn’t “swift boating” that we need to fear, it is a lack of documentation, the lack of substantiation, the lack of verification that leads me to claim Missouri citizenship. SHOW ME.
That is what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth asked of Kerry, and what Kerry failed to provide, documentation and proof of what Kerry claimed. Now there may be a reason why he felt he could not remain true to himself if he provided the documents. It is within the realm of possibilities that he was in Cambodia at Christmas, and that he did act with honor on the river that day when his mates were in need. And he may have gotten an honorable discharge despite all the lame brained stunts he pulled with the “winter soldiers” before Congress and in Paris with the NVA while still a commissioned officer.
Tell me what is honorable in those acts, show me what truth about the fog of war was brought to light. Honorable men do not act do not accuse others of dishonor without cause. With out the merest of documentation, we all have to judge for ourselves, if Kerry did or did not act with honor.
So now, where is the honor in stonewalling a reasonable request for information? How is what you interpret…to be the case…, to be measured against black and white verification. How is what I interpret to be verified except through documentation. Where is the beef, Benj? How can we take the measure of the man, when where is nowhere a man to measure? What is there of “OH” is just an empty suit.
Don’t tell me, show me. I do not want words, I demand solid evidence. It is time to put up. Show me.
hear hear –well said, wadeusaf.
Iowa, of course –wot an idiot –brain slippage
HAHA FUCK ALL da bitches wid a knife and then we solve ALL da woman problem in america and da world. We don get no mo problems wid da women afta dat!!
NEVA AGAIN!!
DEATH TO ALL AMERICUNTS!!
OBAMA 08!!
I’ve been on the bridge of a US warship in those waters in near pitch black conditions. It’s totally believable. The waters there can be like glass. You can see a drifting object by it’s water displacement, i.e. it’ll still create ripples. The PT109 lookout could not screen 360 degress at once. History (both Japanese and US) reports no lit cigarettes, and no sleeping watch. There is no counter narrative. The Japanese ship just happened to be on a near collision course with PT-109 when their lookout saw the boat, and a slight course adjustment plus their 20 knot momentum carried it though the PT boat. Kennedy by all accounts was a heroic skipper.
Not messing with history Old Salt. But I simply cannot fathom how a destroyer can sneak up on a PT boat.
Are Destroyers that quiet? Surely one should detect a destroyer farther away than one would detect a PT boat, especially if that destroyer was doing, as you say, 20 knots.
Of course the lookout cannot scan 360 degrees at once but that destroyer did not get to the point of collision by magic. It took awhile to get there.
I did not know that there was a Japanese account of that action. After what we did to their navy, I thought the existence of such a record unlikely.
I just read the Navy report. Interesting that the PT boats were visible enough to be harrassed constantly by Jap float planes at night.
You’re probably right that PT-109 was a target of opportunity that just happened to be close to the path of the destroyer.
“Taking the PT109 ad-hoc 37MM gun as an example, that’s EXACTLY what a good Naval Officer does” – OldSalt
And Kennedy was not alone in making such modifications, which were done for good and pressing reasons and which would eventually be incorporated in PT boats during manufacture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PT_boat
The significance of the Kennedy story in the Obama context is the fact the we are still discussing it.
It was extensively documented and researched while the major players were still alive and could speak for themselves, and there is no “Mystery of PT109″ story to be told, but the “how damn dumb and slack” questions just keep on coming.
In contrast, Obama is happening now, and can speak for himself, if he chooses to do so, but already there is an “Obama, Man of Mystery” story, and nowhere near enough questions being asked.
ps Field mods were also common in the British Army in North Africa, with special units such as the LRDG fitting their
vehicles with aircraft machine guns acquired from the RAF and heavier weapons captured from the Italians. And I believe Lifeofthemind is mistaken about the Russians, who used field mods on IL2s and other aircraft.
As Barry would say, they were “punished” with a child.
He wants to ensure his daughters have access to post natal abortions to avoid such a fate.
The title of the column asks “Who is Barack Obama?”
We know he is the protege of the Machine which, as Wrichard pointed out presciently quite a few weeks ago, “sent him.”
And who is Michele Obama? Why do I distrust her, when she is charming, intelligent, beautiful? Why does she give me the chills?
I just remembered: Hilary was the same kind of candidate’s wife, and she used Bill’s election to become, to some extent, and right away, co-president. The amibitious look in Michele Obama’s eyes suggests to me that she is not intending to be merely presiding, a la Laura Bush, over the Library of Congress annual book fair on the Mall.
The stench around Obama is overwhelming. The willingness of the Democrat party leadership to place power over responsible governance is abhorent, the complicity of the free press is troubling, the apathy (or stupidity) of the electorate is depressing.
I think the Change that Obama seeks is the wrecking of the democratic process and the permanent installation of a one party system. Everyting I know about him tells me so.
Can’t happen? We shall see.
“…what drives me up the wall is how people who aren’t of the left don’t take seriously the threat the left poses. they were handed every public institution without a fight. as far as i can tell, many people here can see the individual trees but don’t realize they form a forest. you engage people like benj because you can’t accept he has no mind of his own, no personality. he is a cell in a larger organism. as extreme as it sounds, there needs to be a systematic effort to clean them out of power and relocate them …”
cjm – that’s the definition of “average”, though. In the Bell curve of life, you have a small tail of dummies at one end (represented here at BC by Benj), a small tail of smarties at the other end (represented here by Wretchard himself), and a big bulge of more-or-less average in the middle.
If you have a forest of trees, then that’s a majority. That’s the big bulge of average. You can NOT eliminate them. You can educate them, you can sway them, sometimes you can intimidate them but you cannot eliminate them.
Happily for our country, historically about 51% of that average bulge in middle is not inclined to be progressive or Democrat. I really don’t see the forest of average Americans tilting over to the liberal side; even if Obama wins I’ll bet it will be the same sort of squeaker as the Bush/Gore election where there really wasn’t enough of a difference to be a mandate.
What *would* be helpful, rather than trying to “eliminate” the huge mass of Average Americans, is if we could somehow come up with a way to dispossess / fire / remove the concept of tenure in colleges and universities, and civil service job security in places like the State Department and CIA. THOSE are the places that “the Left” has been insidiously boring into for decades now, to the point where they have their own Marxist feifdoms set up which effectively operate autonomously over and above the law and whatever the currently elected administration wants to do.
I’d love to see Wendy’s husband the history college professor have to actually work for a living, for example. Or Benj have to move out of his parent’s basement and get on with his life on his own nickel. If we removed government funding and support for these “average leftists”, my guess is that support for entities such as Obama would poof like a rain puddle in a desert.
‘…they will not simply change legislate “left”, but they’ll attack our very democratic foundations. They’ll use levers of law to make dissent and opposition more difficult. Imagine a USSC of nine William Ayers’. Imagine a new “Fairness Doctrine” and a legal blanket on all “hate speech”, or even conservative thought. Again, while using the law and abusing the Constitution for political gains would be unthinkable for many conservatives, the progressive law maker could think of 100 “moral” reasons justifying law to ensure “correct thinking”.‘
3Case’s 2d Amendment corollary to “We are they People we having been waiting for.”:
They are the people the Founders feared and provided for in the 2d Amendment.
Mark,
Rather than consult a psycho-babalist, I suppose one could actually read Oshama’s book to ascertain whether he really meant dreams OF or FROM his father.
But it ain’t gonna be me.
@benj: For 6 months [Wretchard has] been pushing the idea that O is a grand mystery – while cultivating every ugly rumor that might make O look scary. In fact the roots of O’s current liberal – not “radical” – politics are spelled out clearly in his book. His career in politics – straight up through the speech Thursday night – flow directly from the movements of mind evoked in “Dreams From My Father.”
Indeed, zerObama’s roots are well known, and well understood at this blog. What’s not known is zerO’s own take on those roots. Because contra to what Benj writes, those roots are nothing BUT radical. There isn’t a centrist in sight, much less a conservative. BHO seems to have spent his life in a voluntary re-education camp. Yet from him we get nothing but high-falutin blather, plus the occasional (to me at least) terrifying talk about forcing children to participate in “community service” and a civilian — what? force? organization? — with budget and arms equal to the military.
What’s also not known are the details of many of those roots, Exhibit A being the paper trail of his relationship with Ayers that they are going crazy trying to conceal (what, are we to pretend Ayers is also a Liberal and not a radical?). zerO wouldn’t even reveal who “Frank” was in that oh-so-enlightening book — huh, why do you suppose that is? — and it had to be ferreted out by a reporter (shockingly, not a reporter for the NY Times). And what’s old avuncular Frank turn out to be? A squishy hearted Liberal? Gosh no, kids, he’s a card-carrying Communist! An actual party member (back when they still had enough pride or decency to admit what they were).
We know Obama quite well enough Benj to know what he is. As has been said here several times (by Fred?), the books are easy to parse if you’re not reading them with rosy glasses and a woody in your pants. The question is why is Obama hiding what he is? Why is he blocking access to records or all sorts? Cuz he’s just a Liberal? Uh huh.
The term was their response to a group of hundreds of HONORABLE men, with dozens of DOCUMENTED stories, about John Kerry and his version of events surrounding his service in Vietnam. Any honest, critical reviewer of the facts would have to consider the veracity of “…the witnesses, vis-a-vise Kerry’s recollections, documents, and his few veteran supporters. Kerry was “outted” as a fraud or worse by those who knew him and were there. The Swift Boat men and officers testimony and facts where never successfully disputed anywhere except in a Daily-Kos-mind-world-view. Kerry has never authorized released his military records which might support his version of events, though he committed to doing so several times.”
“swiftboating = truth telling. It is very small wonder it upsets Dems/Soros Nation/kos-hacks so.
@Azi – The time will come and we will bring you the relief you need.
that Azi –he sho do wield a deft satirical brush –i think i get it –jihad don’t like uppity wimminz.
Re rescuing words, along with ‘swiftboat’ another word needing rescue is ‘Katrina”. As we know, it’s now being used as shorthand for ‘Bush attacked black folks (or poor folks)’, or at best maybe just ‘Bush’s criminal incompetence’.
The two words share something –their truths are literally intolerable to the left, because, after the wind died down, the first camera that poked into the Ninth Ward of NOLA asked the underlying question:
“What in the world had befallen these people BEFORE the hurricane?”
The answer, of course, is the Democratic party. Or better, since the graft-enabling captives were first ghetto’d there during Civil War Reconstruction (by one Gen. Benjamin Butler), the guilty party is the ‘party of crooked government’, which caucus overlays both parties of record, tho i’d say the 80-20 rule definitely applies in the GOP’s favor.
But we know why those folks have been bypassed by the last 150 years, don’t we?
So, of course, just as with ”swiftboat”, another meme had to come fast and strong and relentless, and come it did, come it did. That train runs on time.
Barak Hussein Obama is not qualified to be President of the United States based on many things. Where is his birth certificate for one thing; anyone running for President should be able to prove that he is a natural born citizen, as the Constitution stipulates. The birth certificate released by BHO/DailyKos appears to be computer-generated fake. The Certificate number has been erased, the typing is digital – not analog typewriter generated, the lines of the document are perfect, i.e.: digitally generated, the name of the hospital is not listed, there are no signatures, and the Race of BHO’s father is listed as African – but in 1961 the terms Negro or Colored were used, not African.
http://wwwwakeupamericans-spree.blogspot.com/2008/06/dailykos-publishes-barack-obamas-birth.html
In addition to this he sat for twenty years and listened to an anti-American so-called Christian pastor spout anti-American propaganda, saying things like “God damn America.” Lastly Obama disqualified himself from being our Commander in Chief when he spoke these words:
“I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems; I will not weaponize space; I will slow our development of future combat systems….I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons; to seek that goal I will not develop new nuclear weapons….and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.”
http://infidelsarecool.com/2008/02/26/results-of-obamas-national-defense-plan/
This defanging of America is at the top of the wish list of our enemies around the world: The Totalitarian Islamo-Fascists, the Totalitarian Soviet Union – excuse me – Russia, and Totalitarian Communist China.
By the way, here is a link to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;cc=lincoln;type=simple;rgn=div2;q1=of%20the%20people,%20by%20the%20people;singlegenre=All;view=text;subview=detail;sort=occur;idno=lincoln7;node=lincoln7:40.1;start=1;size=25;hi=0#bottom
Old Salt – You keep misidentifying other folk’s words as mine. (Hope third time’s the charm on that front.) The lines you attribute to me at the top of your post were actually written by Wretch. Not sure what to make of your criticism and “translation’ of those words – Maybe you want to rethink, given that you’re trashing the man you mean to defend?
Notice you’re big on latin phrases, but if you’re going to come on so classical, probably makes sense to spell the terms right…
Let’s go through this one more time. Rod R. called on Clubbers to “Let the rumors fly” re Obama. Other Clubbers signed on to this call. I asked Wretch to distance himself from their stance. He posted a response and slipped my challenge. Maybe because it was apparent the Clubbers I’d cited were following up on his earlier cues? Or perhaps he was suddenly, freakishly unable to comprehend my simple question? But look – Old Salt – you’re clearly not the tharpest reader in the Club, but you knew exactly what was a stake when guys started to talking up Big (and little) lies. And you said No Go. Wretch couldn’t bring himself to do that so he broke my question in two. His response was dishonorable.
Swiftboating – For what it’s worth – When I first saw Kerry back in the 70s I wondered where has this bourgie preppie come from? He didn’t fit the previous template of the VVAW – an org that had weight in the (class-bound) peace movement in part because its members tended not to come from privilege. After Ron Kovic and his buds, John Kerry seemed irreal…Back in 04/05 I argued the elections that counted were Obama’s senate race and the elections in Iraq. Didn’t get into the details of the Swiftboating thing though I knew folks who did on both sides. My own guess is that Xmas in Cambodia was a shuck and that Kerry probably acted heroically on the river. But I don’t know. What I do know is that I didn’t bring the subject up.
Wade – what’s up with the bluster? – “I demand…” – Uhuh. Enough, as I heard an orator say…
Beef – As in Where is – This is just disingenuous. You got no use for OBama’s domestic program. Cool – but don’t pretend he hasn’t spelled one out. He defined his tax plans and his priorities clearly in his Convention speech. (I would’ve liked to hear more about how he’ll promote union organzing and reform the NLRB but I know exactly where he’s at on those issues.) Wade – are you really in the dark about what sort of Supreme Court justice(s) O is likely to pick? I’m pretty sure he/she will be closer to Brennan than Thomas. (And he/she will be a smart cookie too.) So, as I say, where’s the mystery?
Now – If Obama was JUST about his Conventon laundary list, I wouldn’t be all that excited. But I’m juiced because I believe he’ll use the bully pulpit in ways that promise to transform America’s culture as well as our politics – I’m not going to make another case for the empath-in-chief. But, trust me, that’s the real red meat for me!
Finally – I’ve tried to pay attention to what’s happened in Iraq over the last few years. You know something of the back-story on that score. But you’re too far gone if you expect to choose Iraqis over Black Americans espcially when our allies want us Out. Obama’s rise will have – it’s already had – extraordinarily positive consequences for African American kids. I know that from the inside when I watch my baby boy watch the man speak on the tube. Given Maliki and recent timetabling – we’re talking about 6 months difference between Obama and Johnny Mac… – Don’t even compute compared to 400 years.
“Obama…travelled to Bali where he wrote for several months.” I assume so he could consult with Bloody Mary and Luther Billis.
Now who is being disingenuous? More words Ben, still no answers…, you keep ignoring the questions. Filibuster vs bluster?
Benj said: “If Obama was JUST about his Conventon laundary list, I wouldn’t be all that excited. But I’m juiced because I believe he’ll use the bully pulpit in ways that promise to transform America’s culture as well as our politics”
Barak Obama will use the White House to further transform America into a secular Marxist/Socialist State; but he’ll need help from a Democrat/Leftist-controlled Supreme Court and a Democrat/Leftist-controlled Congress.
Obama’s juice is running down my leg.
“I asked Wretch to distance himself from their stance.”
1. Who died and made you boss?
2. Our host’s status on this board (if we are to call it that) differs from that of everybody else. I have long respected his management of it and see no reason to change my opinion.
3. Our host is too smart to fall for cheesy Stalinist tactics.
“Our host is too smart to fall for cheesy Stalinist tactics.”
But geez, wouldn’t it be wonderful if he’d banish Benj to a Gulag without internet access?
N: i was referring to the hard left when i talked about relocating them out of the country (not the middle 60%). they are a purely parasitical class, and their removal from American society will greatly enhance us as a country. this kind of policy worked very well for Britain.
N: LOL!!
i disagree, strongly. let Benj be Benj. Let him talk, cajole, argue, debate to his heart’s content. It’s good for the rest of us to engage a literate and energetic Marxist. IMHO i hasten to add.
Energetic Marxists like Benj have been encountered in history by greater minds.
“The proposition that a striving for self-destruction is the main impulse in socialism has been extracted from a multi-stage analysis of socialist ideology, and is not taken directly from the writings of socialist thinkers or the slogans of socialist movements. It seems that those in the grip of socialist ideology are as little governed by any conscious understanding of this goal as a singing nightingale is concerned with the future of its species. The ideology’s impact is through the emotions, which render the ideology attractive to man and induce him to be ready for sacrifice on its behalf. Spiritual elation and inspiration are the kinds of emotions experienced by the participants in socialist movements. This accounts, too, for the behavior of the leaders of socialist movements in the thick of the fight, down through the ages–their seemingly inexhaustible reserves of energy as pamphleteers, agitators, and organizers.” Igor Shafarevich
robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
Thanks Buddy. You’re a…mensch! Though I doubt you’ll find any self-proclaimed Marxists who think I measure up but that’s light stuff. It’s true I’m not afraid of the Old Moor. And I’ll take “literate” too, but we both know that what counts is what condition my condition is in!
Did you see the last revelation of Uncle J?… He’s the one who accused me of “plagiarims” thought I’d (twice) attributed the quote is question to my Coy(otle) mistress (Sorry I’m not all clear if C. is girl or boy). C. calls J. on his mistake before I get a chance to respond. But no backing-off from the jerk-off. Waits a bit and then threads his to a NEW revelation. Benj IS Coyotle. Illustrates one strain of ideology at the Club. As per Wade..
“Of course, we are just paranoid, of course, we are only paranoid, of course, we are just acting paranoid, of course there is nothing to be paranoid about, of course, paranoia is the result of too many brownies and such, of course.
Right?”
Wrong?
“I asked Wretch to distance himself from their stance.”
When Buddy’s delightful Marxist posts stuff like this, he’s attempting to put himself at the same level as Wretchard, going mano-a-mano. He is *not* Wretchard’s equal in any way, shape or form, and (IMHO I hasten to add) by standing up for him, the only thing Buddy is doing is allowing himself the on-going delusion that he is.
Therefore, I must conclude that in defending Benj (and his merry little band of sock puppets), what Buddy *really* wants to do is give himself the opportunity to post long profuse wordy responses to Benj’s long profuse wordy responses to Buddy.
Which is fine since the first thing about a post is who wrote it and the second thing is whether or not it appears to be long, profuse and wordy. Which means some of the time you can just FLY through Wretchard’s Belmont Club, being assured that you really haven’t missed anything important.
Benj it appears is our marxist, right? or Wrong?
Seriously though, why won’t “OH” just answer some of the questions, allow for display some of the simple documents that would make so much of this stuff go away. A resume is a one page affair, a Birth Certificate or at least a statement that someone who is authorized to accept in good faith such a doc exists would be a small comfort, but would go far in settling the nonsense. It is only a distraction if it is allowed to grow legs. Why would “OH” want such stuff to grow legs? What is he trying to distract us from.
If I were to attempting to persuade folks I was the right man for the job, I would be all over the experience that makes me a great selection. Sorry the books just don’t do that. The books lay out a number of protests to how a thing was perceived to have been done, with little exploration of why or even how. The solutions proposed are vague and unsupported by real life examples or figures that prove they really would work or are even applicable to the situation.
The push I get from reading your input Benj, is that I am force to read and pursue a line of thinking I otherwise would not consider. I generally find it is far more reliable to read what the original document says other than rely on my own ability to make sense of it. It isn’t always the case.
But the case against “OH” is that the documentation is so thin the list of real world results missing, the references packed with questionable if not down right unsavory characters which cannot be excused with a nod to knowing the enemy nor chalked up to healing of the sick and forgiving the sinner.
The case for “OH” is what? interpretations of what someone wrote about what someone wrote about what someone reflected on the subject of “OH”. My that is thin stuff with which to set about selecting a president. “OH”s political party is the party of Johnson, Lyndon not Andrew, the party of the Great Society, and the party of unlimited moneys spent on plans for those exempted at the expense of those who are not exempt. It is the party of social debt, measured by the most popular injustice of the day, charges founded or not they fly and deny due process, justice or opportunity. It is a party founded on slight of hand and mysticism on charm and wit.
It appears as a con artist with a wink and twitch spreading confusions which mean to bewitch and betray. Those are the feelings I get from “OH” those are the meanings behind the plans I read, those are the bells going off in my head saying this guy is just not right.
If “OH” is your man, you ought to be able to salve my fears diminish my angst, by pointing to something solid, something to hold on to, something to refer back to. But all I get is other peoples stuff. Other peoples words other peoples reflections and other peoples acts but never “OH”.
Smoke and mirrors and no substance, no history, no records, no path, nothing original, and even someone else’s dreams.
How can you support him, do you even really know what it is you are supporting with “OH”?
I don’t understand how you or anyone can make heads or tails of him. And I am a reasonably intelligent person (IMO), with real empathy for “OH”s lack of paternal guidance.
Nahncee – you crack my up – so much of what you write is really funny.
However (there had to be a however) my 2 cents worth agrees with buddy – let Binj be Binj – it is good (for me at least) to engage, if only mostly vicariously – Marxist, staunch socialist or whatever (although his “retch” moment and his targeting wretchard over SOMETHING (“do not forsake me oh my darling”) could be seen a coming a mile away). Wretchard the cat runs a great blog and I too respect his management of this site, and the chance to throw in my 2 cents worth.
“I generally find it is far more reliable to read what the original document says other than rely on my own ability to make sense of it. It isn’t always the case.”
was supposed to say…read what the original document says and rely on my own ability to make sense of it rather than rely on what other people say about it.
Benj, the mystery is how the dem’s could have selected him based on… what? An objection to Hillery or a lack of any serious candidate with serious cred on anything?
What does that say about Dem party goers?
I say (snort)…Right…(exhale,cough) they really did inhale.
I guess in the end it all boils down to this:
“Obama’s rise will have…extraordinarily positive consequences for African American kids.”
and I guess that is what it is all about. Benj isn’t the first one to express this either. My landlord and I discussed Obama the other day and he expressed the same sentiment although in slightly different terms. It seems to be based on a the feeling, or hope, that electing a black president-any black president- is going to cure black culture of it’s ills. There is a tangible feeling of desperation there which is very sad.
For what it is worth I don’t remember my father ever holding someone else up as an example of a man, least of all a politician, or a lawyer, instead he tried to be one himself.
“For what it is worth I don’t remember my father ever holding someone else up as an example of a man, least of all a politician, or a lawyer, instead he tried to be one himself.”
It is different, today, with so many single mothers so many fatherless boys and girls. It is a curse of which takes extraordinary ladies and a handful of gentlemen to help perhaps to overcome. Most schools today compound the difficulties while lessening the stigma. Life goes on.
There’s an election right around the corner –if Obama has some real arguments, it’s good to have somebody to voice them. That’s how the system as a whole is ‘spose to work –so why should a blog be any different? Throw somebody out for disagreeing with the majority? That’s what you do if your argument can’t win on merit. And even then it doesn’t exactly accomplish much.
I think Obama is a closet Red but i also know we ought to defeat him without gratuitously assuring McCain will have the same problems Bush has had controlling the perception that he’s not governing for all the people.
I’d like to win the next four years, not just the next election.
To accomplish that, you gotta communicate –you gotta let benj and his party know you have a politics that’s based on something besides what the worst elements in his party say it’s based on.
For example, maybe in the naxt few weeks we can get Benj to tell us why Obama’s Euro-style tax plan won’t give us double our unemployment rates –as similar plans have, all over Europe, and as a similar plan did here, under Carter.
“It is a curse…”
Calling it a curse implies a supernatural phenomenon. In fact the problem is as simple as too many women are unwisely getting pregnant by unrepentant douchebags.
No JAK, the effect on the kids is a Curse. Describe it as you will…super, supra or supine-natural it is a curse.
The effect on the children is without dispute, the cause not so much. Perpetuating the myth that electing the person to Washington will somehow lift the “curse” is ridiculous in the extreme. I don’t believe it is a curse so much as a deliberate wrong perpetrated by the parents on the children.
Wade – You argue I
“ought to be able to salve [your] fears diminish [your] angst” about O. But Wade – My guy is out revive liberalism .(Which has basically been dead in this country since Bobby Kennedy.) You are pretty close to being a Movement Conservative, right? Aren’t you asking way to much (of me AND O)?
Just so we’re all clear on our different angles on the world. I’m well aware that O can’t make much of writing “Dreams” in a pres campaign. But, look, to ME it’s a big dealio. The cat wrote a pretty good book about matters that matter mucho to me. (And, unlike Johnny Mac, he wrote his book(s) himself.) Same thing with the community organzing thingy. O was no Bob Moses. He didn’t accomplish a helluva lot in his 3 years in those projects. But – for someone with my perspective on democracy in America(i.e. from the bottom up), I think his experience there (as comprehended in “Dreams” ) is more telling than Hillary’s decade as a corporate lawyer or Mac’s years in prison. Mac’s suffering is certainly MORALLY superior (No irony!!). Means Mac is more likely to get into heaven. But it doesn’t make him more qualifed to be president if you believe – as I do! – that one important thing a president can do is license/nuture/cultivate grassroots organizing traditions in America. Now, Wade, you’re not all up in those traditions! So that don’t have much weight for you. But figured I’d try one mo time (?) to get you to see where I’m coming from…I do NOT expect to convert you or ANYONE to O’s cause. As I said in the past, I’m not sure I believe in such “conversions” anyway. It’s probably a lost if you or anyone else sees the world the way I do.
Am I now or have I have ever been? When it comes to political economy, my main man is Lawrence Goodwyn, not Marx. I’ve talked G. up in the past here…- I think Alexis checked “The Populist Moment” out – Didn’t do whole lot for her (though she wasn’t contemptuous of it). But G. turned my politics upside down way back in the mid-70s.
I posted a few days back on what I thought was most valuable in Marx (avec caveats). But I’ll underline it one more time. As long as millions of folks have no choice but to sell their time – whether in factories or Thai whorehouses – Marx’s analysis of their dailiness on-the-cross will matter bigtime…
Stormrider – – “Barak Obama will use the White House to further transform America into a secular [!!!!!] Marxist/Socialist State” – America IS a secular state. thank (ah) God. Maybe you’d prefer to live in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Baathist Iraq (after Saddam added that crescent to their flag)! Your invocation of Solzhenitsyn is a little daunting – wouldn’t want some innocent to conflate the great man’s mind/morality with your stormy sensibility. Here’s a tribute to Solz posted on our site after he died last month…http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2008/08/when_alexander.html – As I recall, OBama cited Solz as one of the 10 or so writers who’d shaped his own head. “Closet Red” Buddy? – Not so…But the meat of your post was right on. The sort of question you asked re Carter/Euro is what the election should be about. And I SHOULD be able to answer it but – Damn man – First Day of School tomorrow – Gots to wake up with Baby boy in 5 hours and I ain’t got the time/energy now to go back to Georgia! Fo’give me!
Lifting the curse, electing the right man might help a little, but lets take your point about self and responsibility and raise it to a cultural level, the sort of dashed hopes and lost efforts of former negro slaves.
I am not in a position to understand what it means to be black in this world today, but I know there is a cultural divide, and some would say there is a cultural bias displayed against folks who are descendants of those slaves. I am not so sure about the bias as being as large a part of our culture as it was in the 1960′s, but I am keenly aware that black still lack self esteem. Aware of their differences but not aware of their opportunity, not sure of how high they can fly.
Obama presents an opportunity for great lift for black youth enabling them to recognize the potential within themselves. I fear he will flame out in the give and take of political drama as it is played today. Too much hope has been pinned on “OH” when he has no history of delivering on much more than a good speech. Guiding a bill through a friendly majority state house is not delivering. Writing those books was not “Finding Forester” either.
I do not claim to understand it, I don’t for the life of me know what causes such stuff to linger in the consciousness of individuals within a group, other than perhaps as a culturally normative mode of self preservation. It is not genetic. It is, unintentionally generational. It is also like a curse, an unwanted gift that keeps on giving. Reparations won’t resolve it.
Benj,
But Wade – My guy is out revive liberalism .(Which has basically been dead in this country since Bobby Kennedy.) You are pretty close to being a Movement Conservative, right? (ouch!)
Folks tell me I am in that field, but I still don’t trust any group numbering more than maybe about five people and then they better be related to me and/or separated by a fence or a tree line or thick gnarly hedge. Just a Quirk. I come by it honestly though.
Aren’t you asking way to much (of me AND O)? Yup.
I don’t think OH is about reviving anything classical, or revving up anything more than pheromones. Believe it or not, Joe had ladies in Delaware swooning for him too, once upon a time.
Yo is fogiven, L’il Abner. But doan fo’git it!
And what did Delaware
(she oh-so-Joe aware)?
For which a baldy scare
sold him that brand new hair?
Oh! No Cabbage Patch despair
in plastic surgery mirror’d lair
where a dollar lets you stare
into the abyss of aware
that you look like an affair
between Chia Pet and bear.
Bum-a-Shave!
Benj said: “I posted a few days back on what I thought was most valuable in Marx (avec caveats). But I’ll underline it one more time. As long as millions of folks have no choice but to sell their time – whether in factories or Thai whorehouses – Marx’s analysis of their dailiness on-the-cross will matter bigtime…”
Karl Marx was a nut; he saw people as “economic molecules” and cogs in the state mechanism. Karl Marx viewed human rights as reversible privileges provided to us little cogs and molecules by an all-powerful Socialist State – which he worshiped. Our founding fathers, on the other hand, viewed people as individuals – each made in the image of God – and each endowed with sacred irreversible human rights. Karl Marx did not believe that just government power derives from the consent of the governed; he believed that government power derives from an elite cabal of “Philosopher Kings” such as himself – no consent required. Karl Marx was the philosopher of the all-powerful Socialist State, the philosopher of tyranny.
As for people selling their time in factories, there is nothing wrong with that. Many peoople in my family worked in factories and/or farms. What is different under Marxism, is that the Socialist State owns those factories and farms, and the Socialist State is the worst possible employer imaginable; you are employed as a slave by the tyrant state. Human life, human liberty, human creativity and human prosperity are crushed by the all-powerful Marxist Socialist State; it can’t be otherwise because at the end of the day those little factory workers are recognized as economic molecules, and molecules do not deserve any God-given human rights.
“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” Karl Marx
“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.” Karl Marx
“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” Karl Marx
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution….Workingmen of all countries, unite!” Karl Marx
“The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.” Karl Marx
“I declared to them point-blank: we have received our mandate as the representatives of the proletarian party from no one but ourselves.” Karl Marx
Benj said: “America IS a secular state. thank (ah) God. Maybe you’d prefer to live in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Baathist Iraq”
Only partially true, Our Constitution is secular law, but its purpose is to secure our God-given human rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Our Declaration of Independence refers to Divine laws which are higher than our Constitution. “All men are created equal” is a Divine law which was violated by the original Constitution, and which was amended first by war and later by the pen.
“The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.” Abraham Lincoln
“That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” is a Divine law which means that these essential human rights are sacred and cannot be justly revoked by any man, any Marxist Politburo, or any other government of man, including our own.
The difference between the United States and Saudi Arabia is that our Divine Laws establish human liberty and justice; Saudi Sharia Law, on the other hand suppresses human liberty and justice. Their god is not the same God found in our Declaration of Independence.
WAde – “I am not in a position to understand what it means to be black in this world today..” – If O wins, I think he’s likely to change your mind – and millions of others’ – about all that. Even if you resist his policies. He’s going to be Empath-in-chief. And he ain’t going to let black people off the hook either! Everybody has an imagination – Obama has repeatedly shown Americans how to use connecgt…
If you can get over your (understandable) fear of the Crowd (Good fences do make good neighbors!) – you’ll be struck by the integrated nature of O’s audiences. God knows I was. And so was O himself. He’s no dummy – he wouldn’t have run this time if he hadn’t seen those hungry crowds of black and whites and kids turning out for him when he went on the book tour for trhe reissue of “Dreams” in 05…Been living in a pretty cosmopolitan city for 30 years – but I’ve never seen the like…
obama will help black kids the same way marion barry, david dinkins, and kwame have. which is to say, he will help them stay down for another generation. if thomas sewel, ward connerly, michael steele, colin powell, etc, etc, etc don’t make you proud of your people, then your people have nothing to be proud about.
i do know that many black Americans are very grateful to benj and his brethren, and appreciate his efforts to better them.
Of course. Obama will get elected, the globe will experience instantaneous collective understanding and empathy. We’ll all declare ourselves black, link arms and banish racism slothm envy, greed, etc etc etc. Then the next election cycle we can elect someone of Latin decent and repeat the process until each and every self identified sub group of the human species feels fully fulfilled and empowered or what ever and it will be just neat.
I don’t understand the desire to identify as a “People” of some kind and try to find self worth in some mythical image a politician presents? How about people just being proud of themselves and their fricking family for fucks sakes?
“Marx was a nut” – Storm-rider – Not big on undue reverence for Master thinkers, but, trust me, Marx’s work will survive your disregard…The historical record confirms his genius (as well as his faults). It’s all there in the corpus of even his minor works – LAst year, Hitchens zeroed in a couple things that might make you rethink your contempt for Marx in a review of a new collection of the M’s journalism (and Francis Wheen’s recent biography). But, of course, that’s only if you’re willing to THINK as opposed to ideologize…You can check Hitchens piece on a recent collection of Marx’s journalism here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/16/classics.history
Since you’re intent on comparing Marx with the Founders, thought you might be interested in a few passages on Marx’s response to the American Civila War…If they pique your interest read on…And you might consider that most of the heroes of Western thought have offered up some STUPID (even ugly)stuff along with the insights that still stick…
Here’s some Hitch on Marx’s journalism…
Much of this journalism was devoted to upholding and defending the ideas not of the coming Russian and Chinese or…Cuban revolutions, but of the earlier American one.
…he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country). I beseeched Wheen to make more of it in his biography, and his failure to heed my sapient advice is the sole reproach to his otherwise superb book. Now James Ledbetter, himself a radical American scribbler, has somewhat redressed the balance by reprinting some of Marx’s most lucid and mordant essays on the great crisis that preoccupied Greeley and Dana: the confrontation over slavery and secession that came near to destroying the United States.
In considering this huge and multi-faceted question, Marx faced two kinds of antagonist. The first was composed of that English faction, grouped around the cotton interest and the Times newspaper, which hoped for the defeat of Abraham Lincoln and the wreckage of the American experiment. The second was made up of those Pharisees who denied that the union, and its leader Lincoln, were “really” fighting a war for the abolition of slavery. Utterly impatient with casuistry, and as always convinced that people’s subjective account of their own interests was often misleading, Marx denounced both tendencies. Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents and at that time a witness of his father’s embattled ambassadorship to London, wrote in his celebrated memoirs that Marx was almost the only friend that Lincoln had, against the cynical Tories and the hypocritical English Gladstonian liberals. Surveying the grim landscape of the English industrial revolution, he wrote, in The Education of Henry Adams, that it “made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill”.
Marx himself, in reviewing a letter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to Lord Shaftesbury (and how splendid to have the author of “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” seconding the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), ridiculed the smarmy arguments of papers such as the Economist, which had written that “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue”. The Lincolnians, it was generally asserted, were fighting only for the preservation of the union, not for the high-sounding cause of emancipation. Not so, said the great dialectician. The confederacy had opened hostilities on the avowed basis of upholding slavery, which meant in turn that the union would be forced to tackle emancipation, whether its leadership wanted to or not. See how he makes the point in so few sentences, and shows that it is the apparently hard-headed and realistic who are in practice the deluded ones: “The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institutional good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the 18th century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr Spratt, cried out: ‘For us, it is a question of founding a great slave republic.’ If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?”
Written in 1861, this cut like a razor through the cant of the pseudo-realists, while not omitting a good passing slap at the luckless Mr Spratt (remember that Marx was teaching himself English as he went along).
As war progressed, Marx and Engels were to predict correctly that the North would be able to exert industrial power as against Dixie feudalism, that ironclad ships would play an important role, that the temporising union generals such as George McClellan would be fired by an impatient Lincoln, and that an emancipation proclamation would be required as a war-winning measure. For good measure, Marx helped organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers, and wrote and signed a letter from the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election and his defeat of the anti-war Democrats. No other figure of the time even approached his combination of acuity and principle on this historic point, which may contain a clue as to why the American revolution has outlasted the more ostensibly “Marxist” ones.
Marx’s appreciation of the laws of unintended consequence, and his disdain for superficial moralism, also allowed him to see that there was more to the British presence in India than met the eye. No doubt the aim of the East India Company had been the subordination of Indian markets and Indian labour for selfish ends, but this did not alter the fact that capitalism was also transforming the subcontinent in what might be called a dynamic way. And he was clear-eyed about the alternatives. India, he pointed out, had always been subjugated by outsiders. “The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” If the conqueror was to be the country that pioneered the industrial revolution, he added, then India would benefit by the introduction of four new factors that would tend towards nation building. These were the electric telegraph for communications, steamships for rapid contact with the outside world, railways for the movement of people and products, and “the free press, introduced for the first time to Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans”. His insight into the Janus-faced nature of the Anglo-Indian relationship, and of the potential this afforded for a future independence, may be one of the reasons why Marxism still remains a stronger force in India than in most other societies.
His belief that British-led “globalisation” could be progressive did not blind him to the cruelties of British rule, which led him to write several impassioned attacks on torture and collective punishment, as well as a couple of bitter screeds on the way in which Indian opium was forced upon the defenceless consumers of foreign-controlled China. As he wrote, reprobating Victorian hypocrisy and religiosity and its vile drug traffic, it was the supposedly uncivilised peoples who were defending decent standards: “While the semi-barbarian stood on the principle of morality, the civilised opposed to him the principle of self.”
And in writing about another irony – the fact that the Indian “mutiny” of 1857 began not among the wretched peasants, but among the sepoy soldiers whom the British had themselves trained and clothed and armed – he hit upon a powerful formulation: “There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself.”
This recalls his more general proposition that, by calling into being a skilled working class concentrated in huge cities and factories, capitalism itself had given birth to its own eventual gravedigger. Of course, it goes without saying that this concept of his was in turn to fall prey to its own unintended consequences….
The genius of the old scribbler was to see how often the sheerly irrational intruded upon the material and utilitarian world of our great-grandfathers. That he knew and loved the classical texts as much as his despised antagonists was no disadvantage to his muscular prose style. Murray Kempton, indeed, puts him second only to Edmund Burke in this and other respects.
And I think it is with Kempton’s compliment that I ought to close. How can it be, he asked, that Marx knew so much about countries he had never visited and politicians he had never interviewed? How was it that we can read his scornful dismissal of the British government that was elected in 1852, and then turn to the memoirs of the statesmen who were directly involved and discover that they privately feared the very same paralysis and inanition that Marx had diagnosed?
Part of the answer involves a compliment to the Victorians, who compiled honest statistics about death rates and poverty and military spending (and even torture in India), and who published them for all to read. Like the late IF Stone, one of Washington’s greatest muckrakers, Marx understood that a serious ruling class will not lie to itself in its own statistics. He preferred delving in the archives to scraping acquaintance with the great and the good. When it came to the ghastly twin trades of slavery and opium, he was “a moralist with every stroke of his pen”, as Perry Anderson once phrased it. But he never lost his anchorage in the material world, and never ceased to understand that a purely moral onslaught on capitalism and empire would be empty sermonising. Isaiah Berlin, contrasting the two Jewish geniuses of 19th-century England, preferred Benjamin Disraeli to Karl Marx because the former was a hero of assimilation and accommodation and the latter was a prickly and irreconcilable subversive. Well, you may take your pick between the Tory dandy who flattered the Queen into becoming the Queen-Empress and the heretical exile who believed that India would one day burst its boundaries and outstrip its masters. But when journalists today are feeling good about themselves, and sitting through the banquets at which they give each other prizes and awards, they sometimes like to flatter one another by describing their hasty dispatches as “the first draft of history”. Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might like to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.
· Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter with a foreword by Francis Wheen, is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99). Christopher Hitchens is the author of Karl Marx and the Paris Commune. His new book, God Is Not Great, is published by Atlantic Books (£16.99). To order Dispatches for £11.99 or God Is Not Great for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call call 0870 836 0875
“nurse! bring a bucket and mop, the patient has vomited again”
Benj, you and Christopher Hitchens can laud Karl Marx all you want, but he was still a nutty irrational philosopher who had a hankering to worship government instead of God; and he was theophobic and pathologically hostile to God and religion – because it was a competitor to his new religion of “World Socialism.” Unfortunately, his ideas were not purely in the philosophical realm; they entered the realm of reality – the realm of human government and human rights. Karl Marx’s new religion led directly to the loss of essential human rights in every society where his ideology was enacted; and the chief human right lost was the right to life its self, not to mention the human rights to liberty and creative pursuit of happiness. What would you expect from the philosophy of Karl Marx: If human rights are derived from all-powerful “World Socialist” government, rather than from God, then those rights are reversible and not unalienable.
Our American Founding Fathers were more than philosophers; they were real men with real ideas that work in the real world. The philosophy of Karl Marx is the philosophy of elitist tyranny which irrationally recognizes an elite class of “Philosopher Kings,” i.e.: all men are not created equal before the law; and it leads irrationally to unjust government power which is not derived through the consent of the governed.
I’ve given you some of the infamous quotations from Karl Marx; now for his sidekick:
“The method of engaging in trifles at public meetings and doing real business on the quiet justified itself brilliantly.” Friedrich Engels
“This is at least the best thing that remains for us to do, while we are compelled to use the pen and cannot bring our ideas into life with the help of our hands or, if necessary, with our fists.” Friedrich Engels
“If, thanks to war, we should come to power prematurely, the technicians will become our special enemies, and will deceive and betray us wherever they can. We will have to resort to terror” Friedrich Engels
According to The Black Book of Communism the total murdered by Atheist-Communist regimes approaches 100 million people killed. According to R.J. Rummel (author of Death By Government), the figure could exceed 250 million. There is some uncertainty over who is the all-time killer: the Soviet Union or China. The Black Book of Communism attributes roughly 20 million deaths to the USSR (Lenin and Stalin) and 65 million to China (Mao). Rummel’s best estimates are 62 million USSR deaths and 35 million Communist China deaths (but could be up to 127 and 103 million, respectively).
theblackbook.wordpress.com/
“World Socialism” is the new opiate and religion for the masses.
“For socialism nowadays emerges not only as a natural area of social policy but usually also as a religion, one based on atheism and the deification of man and man’s labor and on recognition of the elemental forces of Nature and social life, and as the only meaningful principle of history.” Sergi Bulgakov
robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
SR – Don’t need lessons from you on the horrors committed by CPs (See the stuff cited above on Solz that’s up on our site now etc.)
If you ever get off your horse of instruction and actually read Engels on sweated children in “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” I doubt you’ll feel so morally superior to him. Especially if you go back and look at the conventional wisdom about their plight. (i.e. Everything’s Fine!) Life would be easy if original thinkers were right about EVERYTHING. But…
PS Oxford U. just reprinted Engels’ “Condition.” And not simply because it has historical interest. Is is likely, Stormrider, that you will write anything anyone wants to read 180 years from now?
So, only people who can see the future, and know that they’ll be read 180 years from now, are in position to criticize Engels?
freud, marx, and darwin — the three biggest frauds of the 19th century.
Benj,
I’ve read enough of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to understand that their Theophobic European Philosophy is that of the atheist tyrant, i.e.: the philosophy of atheist elitism – as opposed to the pagan tyranny and elitism of Fascism, or the religious tyranny and elitism of Medieval Christianity.
Our founding fathers were the true revolutionaries of history, not Karl Marx and his cabal of injustice, subjugation, slavery and mass-murder.
“The revolutionaries who drew up the “Conspiracy of Equals” understood equality in such a way that they alone formed the government, while others were to obey implicitly–and those who did not were to be exiled to certain islands for forced labor. In the most popular work of Marxism, the Communist Manifesto, one of the first measures of the new socialist system to be proposed is the introduction of compulsory labor.” Igor Shafarevich
Our American founding fathers, as part of the scientific enlightenment, merged both reason and Judeo-Christian religion in relation to human law and government. That is illustrated perfectly in our American Declaration of Independence which incorporates the entirely reasoned and enlightened ideas of the self-evident equality of all men, just government power deriving through the consent of the governed, and the rational acknowledgement of government’s main function as defender of human rights; alongside the religious idea of God as the source of those human rights, and God as creator and great equalizer of all men. Our founders were also careful to separate Church from State, but they did not separate God-given human rights and the idea of God the equalizer of men from the American State.
As for Marx and Engels defending the rights of the oppressed, it just didn’t work out that way did it? Their elitist “World Socialist” philosophy became the far greater enemy of human rights, and became the greatest oppressor, enslaver and mass-murderer of human beings in Earth’s history. Benj, the ideas of your “World Socialist” heroes, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, etc. etc. are as un-American as that of “National Socialist” Adolph Hitler.
It doesn’t matter if what I’ve published is popular 180 years from now, it only matters what the real giants of human liberty and human creativity have written. The real issue is which philosophy lends its self more to reason, human life, human nature, human liberty, human creativity, the pursuit of human happiness and justice: Americanism or “World Socialism.” I choose the former, and you, having chosen the latter, have become anti-American, because Karl Marx and “World Socialism” are anti-American. History as reflected in wars of aggression, mass-murder, human productivity and human happiness is a testament to Americanism over “World Socialism.” As for the Oxford Press, let them publish Marx and Engels all they want; most European philosophers and many European educators are anti-American as well. It’s not so much that I feel morally superior in the affairs of law and government myself as an individual, it is the moral superiority of Thomas Jefferson over Karl Marx in this regard; it is the moral superiority of Americanism over “World Socialism.”
Marxist “World Socialist” Founding Fathers:
“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.” Karl Marx
“I declared to them point-blank: we have received our mandate as the representatives of the proletarian party from no one but ourselves.” Karl Marx
“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” Karl Marx
“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.” Karl Marx
“The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.” Karl Marx
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution….Workingmen of all countries, unite!” Karl Marx
“The method of engaging in trifles at public meetings and doing real business on the quiet justified itself brilliantly.” Friedrich Engels
“This is at least the best thing that remains for us to do, while we are compelled to use the pen and cannot bring our ideas into life with the help of our hands or, if necessary, with our fists.” Friedrich Engels
“If, thanks to war, we should come to power prematurely, the technicians will become our special enemies, and will deceive and betray us wherever they can. We will have to resort to terror” Friedrich Engels
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Vladimir Lenin
“When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the “freedom of the press” goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.” Vladimir Lenin
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.” Vladimir Lenin
“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” Vladimir Lenin
“While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.” Vladimir Lenin
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted….Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.” Vladimir Lenin
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Vladimir Lenin
“Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.” Vladimir Lenin
“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.” Vladimir Lenin
“To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities; that is not to be taken seriously in politics.” Vladimir Lenin
“The goal of socialism is communism.” Vladimir Lenin
“It is true that liberty is precious – so precious that it must be carefully rationed.” Vladimir Lenin
“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.” Vladimir Lenin
American Founding Fathers:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” Thomas Jefferson
“Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.” Thomas Jefferson
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” Thomas Jefferson
“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” Thomas Jefferson
SR is right –the Constitution is truly egalitarian. The Manifesto is master/slave.
Buddy – “So, only people who can see the future, and know that they’ll be read 180 years from now, are in position to criticize Engels?” Course not! Criticize away. (But please – hear me SR!! – tell me something about M&E that hasn’t been said a million times already.) What I objected too was SR’s absolute dismissal – “Marx was a nut.” That’s just dim. Figured I was probably wasting my time but actually went to dug up Hitch on Marx on the Civil War FOR SR just in case he wanted to consider why some intelligent folks thougt the guy was something other than an oaf. BTW – wouldn’t have bothered if he’d just been wailing on Lenin who really does seem to me to be irredeemable. Lenin’s stuff gets reprinted too but something like “State and Revolution” has ONLY historical interest. Unlike Marx’s journalism or Engel’s “Condition,” it doesn’t tell you anything about its Age of conception. Just promotes an appalling anti-democratic authoritarianism…
PS – Constitution is [NOW] truly egalitarian – 3/5′s right.
Benj,
I never said that Karl Marx was dim or unintelligent; I have no doubt he was extremely intelligent. But, Benj, there have been many intelligent fools; and there have been many intelligent tyrants. IQ is only one measure of a man; what about the MQ? When I refer to Karl Marx as a nut, it is in the realm of morality, not intelligence.
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” George Orwell
Benj, I have been busy tonight; I read the Communist Manifesto. Here are some excerpts and some commentary.
1 “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property..” Karl Marx
2 “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.” Karl Marx
No, you will not do away with my private property because that would be theft; and theft violates the eighth commandment.
3 “You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” Karl Marx
No, I will not be swept out of the way because that would entail the destruction of my God-given rights to life, liberty and creative pursuit of happiness; and that would be Marxist state tyranny.
4 “The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination…. let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.” Karl Marx
No, I object to Communism, i.e.: Marxist Socialism, from religious, philosophical and ideological standpoints; and since I have freedom of speech in America – an essential aspect of God-given human liberty – my objection will be heard.
5 “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property” Karl Marx
Yes, this is exactly what happened in the twentieth century; and it continues to this day.
”The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…“ John Locke
“The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.” James Madison
“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” James Madison
“Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.” John Adams
“Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.” — John Adams
“Now what liberty can there be where property is taken without consent??” Samuel Adams
“In the general course of human nature, a power over man’s substance amounts to a power over his will.” Alexander Hamilton
“Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.” Thomas Jefferson
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson
“Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Thomas Jefferson
“The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.” Thomas Jefferson
“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” Abraham Lincoln
6 “If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally…” Karl Marx
No, the proletariat swept aside the “bourgeoisie” in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and many other nations; and as a result the most disgusting explosion of mass-murder, human enslavement and subjugation and suffering occurred. In the process the greatest example of human inequality and class conflict occurred in human history: The elite wealth and production-controlling, and ruling socialist government class, i.e.: The “Philosopher Kings” vs. all others.
7 “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” Karl Marx
No, human liberty will be brought to the front as the leading question by the ongoing American Revolution; and Americans everywhere will support the existing American political order outlined by our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.
8 “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Karl Marx
No, let the Communists, i.e.: Marxist Socialists tremble because the American Revolution is here, and it will defend the God-given rights of Americans to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The American Revolution will if necessary use force to ensure that government of the people, by the people and for the people does not perish from the Earth, that American government power will in every case derive only through the consent of the governed.
9 “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain….The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.” Karl Marx
No, my family is not an economic entity, we are each individuals made in the image of God and we are joined together by love. I would die for my family.
10 “The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production.” Karl Marx
No, I see my wife as an individual made in God’s image, with infinite worth and with an eternal soul. My wife is not explained as an economic entity. I would die for my wife.
The western star is shining bright
in that storm front post tonight
As per Stormwriter – “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” George Orwell
Orwell didn’t think Marx was a nut. He wrote in the 56 preface to “Animal Farm.”
“Every line I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism, and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.²
Try Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” some time – You’ll see that his work is pretty directly in the line of Marx & Engels (for better and worse). And, for real, it aint about Bell Curves. Sure Marx was SMART but I probably led you a bit astray re my own feelings about the guy by directing you to Hitch (just thought that might pique your interest). What really matters is Marx’s heart – You quote him on religion. I could give you much worse quotes (at least from my pov) that reveal his near anti-semitism. But this is also the man who called religion “the heart in a heartless world.” He mocked the family AND defended sweated children at a time when they were invisible to “respectable” Euro-opinion.
Re Your Wife! – Personal is political? Sure but push your historical imagination a bit here…Ever read, say, Edith Wharton novels – Try “House of Mirth” some time – there’s a very good movie version. You’ll get a sense of how marriage was once regarded as an economic proposition within the American Establishment – And we’re not talking Euro Aristos. If you consider the historical context for Marx’s fury at the patriarchs of his time, you might have more sympathy for the descriptive (as opposed to the prescriptive – I bow down WADE!-) aspects of his work…
Benj, there’s no getting around it; Karl Marx was a philosopher of tyranny.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property” Karl Marx
Karl Marx worshiped and cradled the elite and all-powerful socialist state, which engendered a far greater inequality between the socialist master class (an oligarchy) and all others – worse than the inequality between the old bourgeoisie and the old proletariat. Marxism simply created a new socialist bourgeoisie and a new socialist proletariat.
Karl Marx directly called for a totalitarian socialist state whose main purpose was the violation of human rights to property, which is to say our God-given right to the creative pursuit of happiness; and by doing so without their consent; Karl Marx called for the creation of unjust and tyrannical government power. Karl Marx was pathologically and irrationally fixated on the socialist state, which through tyranny, became the owner of an individual’s creative labor and its fruits while ignoring man’s God-given unalienable right to be creative and to be free.
Benj, you’ve hitched your wagon to a European philosopher of totalitarianism, a philosopher of tyranny; a philosopher who counsels the violation of unalienable human rights and government power without the consent of the governed. Marxism is a foreign and un-American philosophy and system of law and government, and by adhering to this you become anti-American.
As for George Orwell, your quotation does not prove any love for Karl Marx; if anything George Orwell was an anti-Marxist because he understood the direct connection between Karl Marx and totalitarianism.
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.” George Orwell
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” George Orwell
As for “Democratic Socialism” I don’t believe there is such a thing; there is only Democracy, human liberty and creative free enterprise vs. Socialism. Even some Europeans are waking up the nightmare of “World Socialism.” Even some Europeans realize that “World Socialism” is simply the nanny state which is morphing into the tyrant state; it is a velvet glove concealing the iron fist of totalitarianism.
“It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similary, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo. I mean it does so exactly, except for the fact that the Commission now has 25 members and the Politburo usually had 13 or 15 members. Apart from that they are exactly the same, unaccountable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all. When you look into all this bizarre activity of the European Union with its 80,000 pages of regulations it looks like Gosplan…. If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union. Of course, it is a milder version of the Soviet Union. Please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that it has a Gulag. It has no KGB .. not yet .. but I am very carefully watching such structures as Europol for example. That really worries me a lot because this organisation will probably have powers bigger than those of the KGB. They will have diplomatic immunity. Can you imagine a KGB with diplomatic immunity? They will have to police us on 32 kinds of crimes .. two of which are particularly worrying, one is called racism, another is called xenophobia. No criminal court on earth defines anything like this as a crime. So it is a new crime, and we have already been warned. Someone from the British government told us that those who object to uncontrolled immigration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes.” Vladimir Bukovksy
brusselsjournal.com/node/865
Quotes of Vaclav Klaus:
“It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution….There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest ‘enforcement of a good’ by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions.” President of the Czeck Republic, Václav Klaus
“These alternative ideologies are successful especially where there is no sufficient resistance to them, where they find a fertile soil for their flourishing, where they find a country (or the whole continent) where freedom (and free markets) have been heavily undermined by long lasting collectivistic dreams and experiences and where intellectuals have succeeded in getting and maintaining a very strong voice and social status. I have in mind, of course, rather Europe, than America. It is Europe where we witness the crowding out of democracy by post democracy, where the EU dominance replaces democratic arrangements in the EU member countries, where [some people] do not see the dangers of empty Europeanism and of a deep (and ever deeper) but only bureaucratic unification of the whole European continent. They applaud the growing formal opening of the continent, but do not see that the elimination of some of the borders without actual liberalization of human activities ‘only’ shifts governments upwards, which means to the level where there is no democratic accountability and where the decisions are made by politicians appointed by politicians, not elected by citizens in free elections.” President of the Czeck Republic, Václav Klaus
brusselsjournal.com/node/206
Yeah but he meant well. Marx that is.
SR – Hold your fire for a moment. You’re not thinking straight -You invoked Orwell to add weight to your assertion Marx was a “nut.” But I pointed out that Orwell didn’t share your opinion of Marx. I’ll underscore that one more time. Here’s Orwell on Marx:
“‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’…. It was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion-which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”
Orwell is right about that. Marx was hated by whatever-is-is rightists long before there was anything resembling an “elite and all-powerful socialist state” anywhere in the world. And, trust me Storm, they didn’t hate em because they loved their wives. Still – I THANK you for YOUR outrage. For Real. When I read over that passage from Orwell praising Marx, it underscored to me what was problematic (right from the jump) with Marx’s fierce critiques. And, believe it not, what’s really dangerous (NOW!) is not the Manifesto’s bluster about the State. Thanks (but no thanks) to Lenin’s ugly legacy, doubt we’re going to have to deal with too many more “totalizing” versions of Socialism. (Hugo no go far.) But the “materialism” behind Marx’s GREAT assault on the hypocrisy of the 19th Century bourgeoisie is (in the End) bad news. It’s VERY hard to get from their to the other, expansive visions of humanism that Marx held in his head at the same time. The Mean Men of Property he was wailing on deserved everything he could give em as he sat reading Blue books in the British museum that detailed the miseries of factory life (and tried to avoid thinking about his carbunkles). But if you focus (like Marx) too much on the smaller impulses that inform people’s acts, you can’t get back to love and our better angels. And, if you have a genius for anger – as Marx certainly did – your work may end up helping create states/ideologies without pity (that you would’ve seen through in a hot second if you’d been around)…
To me, the key to understanding Marxism is not in the elaborate, ornate boilerplate, but in the reality of a secret police. The rhetoric is so grandiose that there’s nothing that can’t be rationalized in its service. If it’s not a pseudo-philosophy designed specifically in order to legitimize a secret police control of a population, then it might as well be.
The very term ‘secret police’ is all wrong –sinister tho it is, it seems to indicate little more than the mere extension of a familiar & socially needful institution.
But that’s not at all how it has always worked. And since every single Marxist state has had a secret police, unchallenged by regular police or national military and thus with power and reach unlimited, one wonders how any self-respecting and honest Marxist can justify restricting himself to socioeconomic theory alone.
Question for benj to consider: what is the difference between police and secret police; why the ‘secret’?
Question for benj to consider: since a cancer cell is wildly healthy (able to propagate and spread with great vigor), is it only a problem insofar as the host is concerned, but otherwise a perfectly ordinary historical inevitability?
Benj,
I like and respect George Orwell based on his literary skill and his moral courage in denouncing Communist Totalitarianism. Whether or not he liked Karl Marx is another issue; if he did, then it is too bad for Mr. Orwell. In any event, George Orwell was not in the same league with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and James Madison – the anti-Socialists – the anti-Marxists. Karl Marx is the epitome of un-American philosophy, and George Orwell may have gravitated the wrong way here. Karl Marx simply did not believe in unalienable God-given human rights because he didn’t believe in God; this is a problem of course for all atheists who come face to face with the American Declaration of Independence. Because of this, Karl Marx viewed human rights as malleable or reversible socialist-state-derived privileges – an anti-American idea – an idea which flies in the face of our Declaration of Independence.
Karl Marx was instantly willing to trample on the sacred human rights of liberty and creatively pursuing happiness, because owning the fruit of your own individual labor does bring a degree of happiness; the remaining ingredients being love, compassion and service to others. Karl Marx embodied the very definition of unjust and tyrannical government power: government power derived without the consent of the governed. It was not a great stretch for Lenin, Stalin and others to then, on a disgustingly massive scale, trample on the sacred human right to life.
“In recent years the book has been used to compare new movements that overthrow heads of a corrupt and undemocratic government or organization, only to eventually become corrupt and oppressive themselves as they succumb to the trappings of power and begin using violent and dictatorial methods to keep it….In addition, the book encourages the reader to ponder whether rebellion will eventually resort to a sort of dictatorship — whether that particular power in society is merely part of human nature. This is shown in the way that the pigs, through their own power, lack of equality, and their domination become indistinguishable from the old regime in creating layers of power and concentrating power at the top.”
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/animal-farm-background-info.htm
Hey Buddy – Well, as you know, the key for me once was what happens when somebody needs to take a piss and line won’t stop. Course it got to be even worse when you couldn’t even complain to yourself cos you were in a Workers’ state! Doubt I’ll convince you, but been pretty conscious re Red Menace (w/o negating menace of McCarthyism) since I was a boy. Liberal Family Values.
But – truth to tell – Doubt I’m approaching the Storm right. Probably should acknowledge Marx hasn’t done anything useful for my own head for decades…Probably makes more sense to leave apologies for Marx to smarties like Hitchens. There are (morally) better ways to go. As per Obama…
Though it won’t be easy even if my guy makes it. Just found out Chuck Schumer’s 10 biggest contributors were banks – Don’t mean to get all materialistic – but if he’s an ally won’t be easy sledding if O tries to reform/re-regulate our financial systems and not simply rely on bailing out haves and have-mores..
Schumer is a notorious reactionary –the revolution is forming on the right, it’s beginning to be clear.
Benj, I’ll never forget, while on a squirrel hunting expedition, taking a piss on an electronic fence – an experience I wouldn’t even visit on Karl Marx.
Or Joan of Arc?
Old Salt: your Aug 30, 2008 – 11:32 pm
So well said. Sea story…On Diego, my crew was on an off day celebrating at the O’Club. I was a navigator assigned in a Tactical Coordinator position, but not yet board certified. CO decision because of his confidence and trust in his officers. Example One of “just do it. Worry if you have to.”
Example two: On that detachment,a call comes in to medivac a badly injured civilian worker to the PI. My Mission Commander immediately gets on the horn to the CO at Cubi Point and says he wants to fly this guy (right now) to Cubi. Skipper asks has anyone been drinking and he responds “yes, all of us.” Skipper rephrases…”Can you fly 10 hours safely?” MC says yes, minimum crew. Skipper says “Go.” 45 minutes later we’re airborne enroute Cubi with a very badly injured (but now hopeful) civilian.
If we would have followed the “rules” and waited for other crews to come off crew rest, the medical types tell us the guy wouldn’t survive.
The CO bet his command on the value of human life and the trust he had in his flight crews.
Ask forgiveness – not permission.
The 37mm? I agree with putting big guns on small ships if you can. Better to kill the enemy.
Benj,
This whole Left vs. Right and Liberal vs. Conservative thing is a very confusing smoke-screen for me. In my mind the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are right there in the middle of the road – the road to human life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The European Right, i.e.: Monarchy, Emperors, Fascist Dictators etc. etc.; and the European Left, i.e.: “World Socialism” and Communism have both fallen into the two opposite ditches of state tyranny. There is no difference between the European Right and the European Left; they are both elitist forms of law and government which suppress sacred human rights and rule without the consent of the governed.
What is called the American Right is, in my own experience and in my own family, simply adherence to the founding ideas of our great Republic; and as such is a mis-labeling. The American Left, however, really does bear striking resemblance to the European Left. If there are American Fascists out there, I hate their tyranny; just as I do American Communists; a pox on both of their houses.
As an American Conservative, I love and adhere to, and wish to conserve our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights – as written – as agreed to by the writers and the people – and as understood by ordinary Americans. As a modern American Conservative I admire and love the great Liberal ideas of our Founding Fathers. Modern American Conservative = Classic Liberal = Me
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” Thomas Jefferson
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” Thomas Jefferson
PS Story – Ever read any alternative history? Haven’t read much myself but I thought of that when you characterized the Founders as anti-Socialists. When I think of someone like Tom Paine, occurs to me you might be getting a little ahead of yourself. (There were a few utopian socialists around in the 18th century, but you may be referencing economic and social realities that weren’t quite of their time.) BTW – there’s a interesting book out now about about the economic origins of the Constitution by a guy named Woody Holton. Just won the National Book Award for history -A quick summary of “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution…”
“upends what we think we know of the Constitution’s origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America’s post–Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans. If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment.”
Holton zeroes in on the way it was the everyday folks NOT the framers who pushed hardest for the Bill of Rights. I think he’s got the goods to back up his assertions there though I’m biased toward populist readings of American history…
Be interested to know what you make of Holton’s history…
”framers? Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment.”
benj, that’s tautology –of course individual initiative and rule of law makes a nation a better investment. Your sentence is a decontructive attempt to follow the basic anti-American meme that the country is nothing but a commercial venture, and a crass one at that.
Benj,
I realize that Thomas Paine was purely secular, and that made him somewhat of an outsider; because the remaining founders, and the American people were religious; and they saw the wisdom of having a Divine source for human right and for human equality before the law.
The Declaration of Independence is most interesting to me because it combines purely rational ideas of the scientific enlightenment alongside Judeo-Christian religious ideas regarding the value of human life. The idea that all men are self-evidently equal is purely rational – you don’t have to be religious to see the self-evident truth of it; but it was combined with the religious notion that we are made equal by an equalizing Creator – hybridization.
The idea of our essential human rights and equality before the law as deriving from the Creator is Judeo-Christian in origin. It dates back to Thomas Aquinas, and probably back even further in the Torah. John Locke was the man who resurrected (pardon the pun) this religious idea during the Enlightenment.
“…by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s….The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…“ John Locke
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
The idea of just government power deriving from the consent of the governed is purely rational – it is not religious as far as I can tell – and I love this secular rational idea of our founders; I bet Thomas Paine had a hand in it; and I thank him for it even though I’m religious. The Constitution too is purely secular, and I am thankful for that too; but even the author of the Constitution saw a Divine hand between the lines. In my mind this hybridization of the best of the secular plus the best of the religious is what makes America great, and it makes us different from Europe, and it makes us Exceptional.
“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” James Madison
I’ll read up on Woody Holton while you read up on Garet Garett.
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them….. In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.” Garet Garett
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html
Benj,
I realize that Thomas Paine was purely secular, and that made him somewhat of an outsider; because the remaining founders, and the American people were religious; and they saw the wisdom of having a Divine source for human right and for human equality before the law.
The Declaration of Independence is most interesting to me because it combines purely rational ideas of the scientific enlightenment alongside Judeo-Christian religious ideas regarding the value of human life. The idea that all men are self-evidently equal is purely rational – you don’t have to be religious to see the self-evident truth of it; but it was combined with the religious notion that we are made equal by an equalizing Creator – hybridization.
The idea of our essential human rights and equality before the law as deriving from the Creator is Judeo-Christian in origin. It dates back to Thomas Aquinas, and probably back even further in the Torah. John Locke was the man who resurrected (pardon the pun) this religious idea during the Enlightenment.
“…by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s….The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…“ John Locke
plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
The idea of just government power deriving from the consent of the governed is purely rational – it is not religious as far as I can tell – and I love this secular rational idea of our founders; I bet Thomas Paine had a hand in it; and I thank him for it even though I’m religious. The Constitution too is purely secular, and I am thankful for that too; but even the author of the Constitution saw a Divine hand between the lines. In my mind this hybridization of the best of the secular plus the best of the religious is what makes America great, and it makes us different from Europe, and it makes us Exceptional.
“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” James Madison
I’ll read up on Woody Holton while you read up on Garet Garett.
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them….. In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.” Garet Garett
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” Thomas Jefferson
I like to think I’m walking w/ Tom Jefferson. The question is – right now – who is the “small elite” that’s grabbed power in America. You’d say it was the “cultural elite”, right? – the not-so-folksy folks from back East who boost Obama. But the strongest part of his base (now) is the one part of the population that pretty much everyone acknowledges is coming from the bottom up. And – whatever happens this year – it would be hard to characterize his “movement” as “small.” On the other hand, O has defined his politics as an attempt to take back America from a powerful group of lobbyists and representatives of narrow special interests whom he argues have too much power over our politics. To me, it seems pretty apparent that’s the “small elite” that Jefferson would reject too. (Isn’t it kinda hard to imagine Tom wailing on a “cultural elite.”) I’m pretty sure (but not certain!) what side he’d be on in this election, unless he was upended by the race stuff. (Noticed that Obama invoked Hamilton not Jeff in his speech in NYC last February – Occurred to me then O might have been put off by “Notes on the State of Virginia”, which is marked by a more than a tinge of “scientific” racism…) If all O had in his back pocket was s bit of Jeffersonian rhetoric, I’d be hom-humming him. But the nature of his fundraising – all those small donors and relatively little from lobbyists – has allowed him to declare his own independence…
Maybe the revo is coming from North from Alaska – but I doubt such things are SPRUNG on us. I think they have to be organized. And I believe I know who’s the gambler and who’s organizer in this race…
No, Benj, the elitist are the Leftist/Socialists in America which model themselves after the European Leftist/Socialists. Elitism is European – it is not American – it is anti-American. American Leftist/Socialist Elitism is on display every time the Supreme Court makes public policy with judicial decision – which empowers government to function without the consent of the governed – rather than through legislation – which empowers the people and makes government function with their consent. Judicial activism is a project of the American Socialist Left.
“At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth,
man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.” Thomas Jefferson
“You seem to consider the judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges … and their power [are] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and are not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves … . When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves….” Thomas Jefferson
“The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our Constitution from a co-ordinate of a general and special government to a general supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet. … I will say, that “against this every man should raise his voice,” and, more, should uplift his arm…” Thomas Jefferson
“But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.” Thomas Jefferson
“… One single object … will entitle you to the endless gratitude of society; that of restraining judges from usurping legislation.” Thomas Jefferson
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.” Abraham Lincoln
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
Let me know what you think of Garet Garett.
Try this one. Obama let it by that while at Columbia that on Sundays he was fasting, even though jogging too. Hello? Who fasts on Sundays? Not Christians; it is the Day of celebrating Christ’s Resurrection. No, the only ones who fast on Sundays are….Muslims. Now, I don’t really care that Obama was a Muslim, but I do not like it that he covers it up. It indicates a certain lack of character.
Quickie Storm – I think GG was definitely right to pick up on the, ah, improvised character of FDR’s New Dealing – But hard for me to ID with his paleo-libertarian angle on history. For me, the Flint sit-down strike was the great event of 30s. I don’t see the tension between the indivdual and the collective in the same way he/you do. Once the nature of production changed in America so did the nature of liberty…Back to that line again – you can’t stop it by yourself if you need to take a leak!
Reading re the New Deal reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me re his pop’s response to FDR. His dad was a career military man. And, as you may imagine, the New Deal was not too popular with his colleagues at the Army War college in the 30s. My bud’s pop went to see how his tax dollars were being spent. Found out New Deal’s public works programs weren’t horrific – But he didn’t try to make a case for the new park down the road when his fellow officers called him to account…He just said – “Look, there are SO many Americans out of work and suffering the Government has do something…even if its wrong!” Interesting to hear Huckabee re-up on FDR in front of the pubs tonight…
RE the Courts – Unlike many people on the left I wasn’t won over by the assumption that the Congress couldn’t challenge the Courts in the Schiavo case. A friend of mine named O’Brien – you can check some of his stuff in the War on TError section of firstofthemonth.org – wrote a brilliant attack on “progressives” who are enamoured of the Supreme Court (in particular). They certainly do have an elitist vision of democracy. Obama – interestingly enough – understands that (writes about it “Audacity”)though he’d appoint liberal judges. He’s argued that liberals need to win decisive mandates on the ground through elections, not slip by 5-4 or relie on having cannier lawyers…
The “progressive” fixation on the Supreme Court is a relatively new thing (as you probably know). Basically flows out of Brown v Board. Given how crucial that decision still seems to me, I’ll admit I can’t say I’m ready to consign my old biases to the dustbin of history quite yet!
“Elitism is European” – If only…But shouldn’t a conservative be a little careful here. I’m a lib and I want you guys to HELP fight those w/o any principles who assume the Market is always the best measure of value…
MY wife is going to kill me if I don’t shut it down now. Good night…
The New Deal was a good deal at the time, but time moves on and Federal control of everything is no longer needed – as we say in the medical profession: The risk/benefit ratio is unfavorable.
It is now time for the states and the people to exercise the law – the tenth amendment – and take back the power that rightfully belongs to them in their states and their communities rather than in Washington, D.C. There is too much power in D.C. and there is naturally a high level of corruption as a corollary.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely – enter our founding fathers and the tenth amendment.
Benj,
I come from a family of New Deal Southern Democrats. My grandfather worked for many years at a U.S. Corps of Engineers dam starting in the thirties. This was a good job for Papa and it gave him a cash income, along with his moonshine still, which his subsistence Appalachian farming could not do. My family benefited from the New Deal, but as I said, time moves on; the New Deal has become a Federal Monster.
Grandpa told me that on every election day the Democratic Party workers would hand out one dollar bills to each voter in line – one vote – one dollar.
I hear you re changing times – no New Deal redux…America and the world are much more wide-open so any top-down approach to political economy is likely to get swamped. But I’m not sure Federalism is the magic bullet. We ARE the world now, no? I don’t expect you Clubbers to agree, but I think that’s why most Americans will believe Obama’s rangey life-experience is more on time than Mac’s (or Palin’s). But we’ll see what happens…
I’ll pass on your story to my friend – Georgia boy himself -Got heavily involved in the 60s Civil Rights Movement – Don’t think his Daddy could go there with him, but my sense is that Southern New Dealers shared something that ran pretty deep.
As did certain New York New Dealers – Reminds me of a very strange and penetrating book called “My Pilgrim’s Progress” by a writer named George Trow that jumps off from his own experience growing up in a New York WASP Aristo FDR-loving family. It surveys what’s happened to American culture (and long-gone patterns of authority) over the past 50 years. Trow fell in love as a boy with Ike (which, given his family background, felt pretty treasonous). Anyway – the book ranges from 50′s political culture to Hitchcock & Howdy Doody to the World’s Fair to Reality tv. Told me more about the felt consequences of changing American times than anything I’ve ever read. Should caution you, though, Trow would certainly disprove your thesis that there are no American elitists. His fam is American to the bone – but definitely belong to OUR metro haute-bourgeosie. He also regarded Reagan as the anti-Ike not as a hero of our time. (Despised Bill Clinton too.) …Trow died last year – a suicide (I think). He’d spent a couple years in a heavy state of depression – And I’m just recalling now that he spent a stretch of time toward the end of his life in Alaska, trying to feel his way into the state’s frontier ways of being. Trow was always capable of surprising you so I can’t pretend to be sure of what he’d make of the latest turn in this campaign. But I’m guessing he’d be deeply shaken by Ms. Palin’s defiant un-worldliness. I’m also pretty sure he’d pick up on (and deplore) the Talk Showy aspects of both campaigns…
Benj,
I think Federalism is the magic bullet, because our founders were smart and wise at the same time; and besides, the tenth amendment is law – a law which will someday be enforced – hopefully in my lifetime.
Why should religious Southerners have to have coercive secularist prigs in Washington D.C. force a secular curricula – particularly in the humanities – on the children of us God/gun clingers. It has worked out that way under the New Deal Federal power-grab. The problem here is that the New Deal Federal power mentality could someday be reversed, and then you’ll have the shoe on the opposite foot with secularists under the heel of religious prigs. Why not let secular/atheist minded people in San Francisco and Manhattan control their schools and religious people in Texas, Alabama, Alaska and Tennessee control their schools and educate their own children as they see fit? That’s the way the founders intended things to work out, and that was the purpose of the tenth amendment.
And why should Medicare be one system for the entire nation – too much opportunity for coercion and corruption – better to have 50 Medicares – same with Social Security – one for each state. If there are complaints and if there is corruption – which of course there will be – the people are much closer to the problem and much closer to their representatives – a diffusion of power to the people – as the founders intended.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a secular side as well as a religious side – I like Thomas Paine just fine. Thomas Jefferson was better though, and he is my all-time hero. Mr. Jefferson had a fine blend of religion and reason, and you see it perfectly in the Declaration of Independence.
I hear you – lived in NYC as it’s been homogenized/gentrified in recent decades and I’ve come to favor almost ANY sort of local flavor that isn’t malled by the Market. But I think the race thingy was probably more crucial than the New Deal – Doubt there was any choice on that front but to go heavy with the Feds…Share your feeling for Paine. Jefferson has become a little harder for me over the years. Here’s a poem by a friend that makes something artful out of my quandaries there…
Leaving Charlottesville
There is so much to keep me here.
My son would grow to love his grandparents
and learn something of their life
before they moved here.
His grandfather would tell his stories
as they walked by the pasture
on the way to the school bus.
He’d learn to trace a fox
Across leaves edged with frost.
The house on a small hill
seen in the travel ads,
focuses all that takes me away.
The simple lines,
the clock at the entrance,
the octagonal room
all show the designer’s pared intellect.
But the man who listed slavery
as a reason for revolt
forced his slaves to live below grade,
not to be seen when he stood at the window,
to work in a tunnel,
not to be noticed when he passed.
The house is a painted lacquer box
that holds a severed head.
The place haunts us still.
Already snow is in the mountains.
Beyond the strip malls now
ancient trees line the fences.
Frost catches the morning light.
I will live fully in the city,
where my child sleeps.
Benj,
Nice poem. I lived in Richmond for a time as a boy, and I’ve hiked in the Blue Ridge Mountains with my wife and kids, and I’ve taken them to Monticello several times; and I always get the feeling of freedom there, not a feeling of slavery. Thomas Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong, and he began to free his slaves; but he died before it was finished. It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote “all men are created equal,” re-stating a Divine moral law which eventually trumped the 3/5 law of the Constitution. I understand why the 3/5 law was in the Constitution – if it weren’t there the Constitution would not have been ratified, the nation would not have been born, and the War of Independence would have been lost – England would have allied herself with the South.
“The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.” Abraham Lincoln
Quite a conversation yooz guyz –really. A keeper –
Esp liked the 10th Amendment & redux federalist revolution phrasings –eloquent and timely, in light of the underlying meaning of today’s reaction to Palin’s speech last night.
Only a few of the delegates to the convention, and only a few of the soldiers who won the fight against George III were slaveholders –but of those that were, many were critical to victory & successful launch of new nation. And some of these were only able to leave home and dedicate themselves to the Continental Army, and later only able to convene far from home and spend months of years in Philadelphia, because the labor was available to run the farms. Peculiar institution tho it was, slavery was instrumental in freeing us from the empire. George Washington, for example, arguably the victory’s sine qua non through his devotion of seven years of extraordinary leadership during the fight, would likely be unknown to us today, having spent an anonymous life running his plantations, had he not had workers apparently loyal and faithful and talented enough –workers who due to the peculiar institution he owned –to do so in his stead.
I’m blushing bud! A few months back I think I talked up Henry Wiencek’s book “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). It got some play when it came out but not close to what it deserved. Pretty amazing story with a lots an unobvious turns. Doesn’t make any Founder look awful – not about gotcha, but the truth does hurt sometimes – BTW – I remember being suprised when I found out how many black soldiers were in the Continental army round the time of Yorktown. AFro-Ams made some important direct contributions to the struggle (outside of Crispus A. at the Boston Massacre). And then there were AA’s who fought for the Brits too (with manumission as a goal?) If anyone has dope on all that, please pass it on…
Brits had an entire formal program of trying to get AAs to turn on the rebels. Never read anywhere that it had an particular success.
Wonderful stuff, guys.
I wouldn’t select the existence of secret police as a concomitant of communism. Even we have secret police, as did the Nazis etc etc.
I think more specific to communism were closed borders where you could be shot for trying to escape the workers’ paradise.
I spent almost three years in West Germany in the US Army in the mid-60s. The inner German border to the DDR was an obscenity.
In my time it had a double-apron barbed wire fence with an inverted triangular sign with a skull and crossbones in the middle and at each side; Achtung! Minen! DDR.
On the other side of the fence was a minefield and 10m of frequently raked sand which would show deep footprints if anyone ventured towards the fence.
Farther over was a weird road made of Besser blocks on their sides and about every 20 minutes a pissy-sounding commie 2 stroke motorcycle with a sidecar and two armed soldiers would go by.
I think that kind of border is the perfect illustration of the big lie of communism and the workers paradise.
We have to put up a border fence to keep people out. The commies have to put up a border fence (or wall) to keep their own citizens in under pain of death.