Let's take a look at the score sheet: Marxist East Germany (1974) gives us Nina Hagen und Automobil. Capitalist America (2008) gives us a pale imitation, Lady Gaga und blecch.
Advantage, communism.
OF COURSE, the totalitarian state had its limits. Thus, the First Fraulein of Punk(der punken?) was not perfected until she fled the dictatorship of the proletariat for West Germany, and then spent time in pre-Thatcherite England amid the emergence of The Clash and the Sex Pistols.
Advantage, democratic socialism.
Above, we see Hagen during a 1979 TV appearance.
CALL ME when Lady Gaga has the guts to do this one.
Of course, back when I worked in Catholic radio, the sight of Nina Hagen singing a punk version of "Ave Maria" would have been cause for an epidemic of the vapors. Trust me, the good God-fearin' folk would be going all Rick Perry on the sacrilegious Kraut faster than Mother Angelica could say “Remember to keep us between your gas and electric bill.”
This is why I'm glad the good Lord got me out of there before I lost the rest of my faith. Trust me, it was close. (As always, your mileage may vary.)
But then you take a look at the translation of the German lyrics Hagen put to Franz Schubert's famous melody:
Ave Maria, Maria of whom I sing We are asking you for mercy For people who have already been waiting so long Totally without hope Totally without hope
See there, their unhappy lives It hungers deep, from fear of death Millions live here on the earth Still yet, in greatest need
Ave Maria Ave Maria, Saint Maria Hear my prayers Maria Where much suffering has already occurred Why always does more hurt follow more hurt Let the people have faith again Let them understand and forgive Then all peoples could become friends And all the races could be brothers Ave Maria
LIKE I SAID, let's see Gaga have the gu-guts to go onstage and belt out that one.
Over the past couple of years, writers at The American Thinker have had trouble keeping their demagoguery straight. Basically, they can't decide whether President Obama is a mortal threat to the republic because he's too Nazilike or because he's not Hitlerian enough. If you ask me, it'd be a trip to sit in on their editorial meetings.
For his part, Washington "investigative journalist" Matthew Vadum comes down squarely on the side of "more Hitler, dammit!" The least the government could be doing, he writes this week, is to keep the parasites away from the voting booth.
You don't say.
ACTUALLY, I took liberties in describing his position. Vadum didn't actually call the poor "parasites." He just referred to "nonproductive segments" and how the poor "burden society."
And said that "empowering" them is "antisocial" and "un-American."
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
(snip) Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor. It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money. It's about raw so-called social justice. It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.
Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
In an infamous 1966 Nation magazine article, the radical university professors urged that the welfare apparatus be used to destroy the American system. Borrowing a phrase the ultra-leftist Leon Trotsky used in one of his many anti-Stalin tracts, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), they titled their blueprint for radical change "The Weight of the Poor."
By "weight," Cloward, Piven, and Trotsky meant power or influence. All three wanted to use the poor as a battering ram against the systems they sought to overthrow.
Trotsky thought too many bureaucrats and middle-class people were involved in the Soviet Communist Party and that it was moving too slowly in its efforts to change that society. He wanted more poor people in the party in order to overthrow Stalin's obstructionist bureaucracy and clear the way for "true" communism.
Stateside, Cloward and Piven wanted to use the "weight" of the poor to bring down American capitalism and democracy.
IT IS but a small leap one makes from lebensunwerten das Wahlrecht to lebensunwerten Lebens -- "life unworthy of the right to vote" to "life unworthy of life." This is especially true when one uses rhetorical trampolines such as "antisocial," "un-American," "nonproductive segments" and "burden to society."
Vadum's paranoid vision is that of a Marxist Obama destroying society with all manner of collectivist insanity made possible by registering parasitic hordes of poor Americans and making sure they vote early . . . and often.
A couple of years earlier, though, Cliff Thier fretted over the president's nascent "Obamacare" plan for polar-opposite reasons -- that a Naziesque Obama would deny medical care to old folks because they no longer were productive. From The American Thinker of Aug. 24, 2009:
Under ObamaCare, the older you get, the more likely it will be that you will not be permitted to have an operation, or to receive the optimal medicines. The reason is that you likely will be taking more out of society than you will be contributing in taxes. Which leaves us with a simple question: Who in his right mind would dare to retire?
[An aside. In Nazi Germany, the mentally ill and physically disabled were labeled as "unproductive members" of society. As were, of course, the Jews. Euthanasia was the inevitable and logical result of such thinking then. It is also the inevitable and logical result of such thinking today.
The prophet Ezekiel was supposed to have resurrected the dead. That it is an Ezekiel authoring the Obama Administration's "Robert's Rules of Death" must be God's little joke.
That it's an Israeli doctor who is advocating this system of rating the values of different human lives must be Dr. Mengele's little joke. ]
You and I will have no choice but to continue to work into our 80s (God willing) and beyond. We will have to do everything we can to convince the government that we put more into society than we take out.
If, however, you are younger than 15, older than 40, you've got a problem. If you're younger than 2, or over 65, or mentally ill, or physically disabled, you've got an even bigger problem.
If you love someone who is over 65 or physically disabled and they contribute something important to your life, that won't count. Only if they pay taxes will their lives be rated as worthy.
Good luck to you.
AND GOOD LUCK to The American Thinker and its contributors as they wrestle over whether they want to fight phantom Nazis or, instead, become real ones.
It's a windy, snowy and frosty night in Omaha, where the Midwest fades out and the wild and woolly Plains take hold.
A night like this, here in the rolling hills of eastern Nebraska, reminds one of being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox. A day like the one preceding this February prairie night reminds one of . . . being a Who, safely stowed away in Horton's icebox.
With the light left on.
Horton, by the way, never defrosts his icebox. He probably should take care of that.
He probably will . . . this spring.
WHENEVER I MENTION life in the Gret White Nawth to family and friends back in Louisiana -- particularly the unrelenting rituals of the dead of a Nebraska winter, like braving the blowing snow . . . dressing in many layers . . . shoveling the snow . . . reshoveling what's drifted -- the reaction is nearly universal. Horror is what it is.
People think I'm nuts. People think the North Pole must be pretty close to Omaha, and that nobody in his right mind is gonna live at the damn North Pole.
And regular snowfall is a sure sign of God's wrath upon the terminally stupid.
Of course, this reaction comes from a state where the last white Democrat will change his party registration to "R" by 2013. That is, if the world doesn't come to an end in December 2012, all life extinguished by a rogue glacier sliding southward from somewhere near . . . Omaha.
Maybe St. Paul. All dem places up Nawth is all de same, cher -- cold, cold.
Frankly, I think the Republicanization of my home state somehow may the be source and the sustenance of the Southern horror at all things cold and snowy. Snow, after all, is socialist.
Think about it: It matters not a whit whether one has the finest, most meticulously manicured lawn in the entire upper Midwest or whether yours is a yard ravaged by crabgrass and unsightly patches of dirt the same shade of dingy brown as a 1950s Soviet apartment block. When the snow comes, it's all the same.
IT'S A PATENTLY leftist redistribution of beauty -- No Yard Left Behind. Every yard is covered by a uniform, regimented blanket of socialist snow.
The finest yard is brought down to the proletarian level of the most humble, and the most meager of lawns is -- via some sort of meteorological affirmative action -- lifted up to the same level as that of a McMansion.
Snow ain't white; it's pink. As in "pinko."
Not only that, ice is a communist plot, too, socializing the placement of asses over heads without regard to socioeconomic status, skill, income, educational achievement or race or national origin. A broken bourgeois foot is pretty much the same as a pretzeled proletarian one.
Likewise, the Northern embrace of socialist ice -- like that of pinko snow -- renders useless the advantages of a solid, upper middle-class Cadillac Escalade over that of a poor-white-trash '82 Chevy Caprice.
While the Escalade may get started quicker on an icy surface, neither it nor the Caprice will fare any differently trying to stop at the traffic light at the bottom of a long hill. Arguably, the advantage here goes to the cash-strapped mope driving the Caprice -- if he T-bones, say, an Escalade . . . so what?
ASSUMING liability coverage, the Caprice driver is out nothing but a crappy old car. The bourgeois pig in the Caddy is out . . . well, he's out the monetary difference between a heavily depreciated, really expensive Caddy and what it costs to replace it with a brand-new one. You could buy, like, six '82 Caprices with that.
Remember, it ain't "black ice" that's your problem, Buster, it's "Red" ice.
And the dictatorship of the Gret White Nawthun proletariat laughs at your pretentious capitalist illusions of superiority, Bubba.
Sorry, Glenn. In this case, "puppetmaster" George Soros was right. "A 1957 movie -- made by a communist, appropriately" -- Soros' alleged "gift" for Glenn Beck. That is, according to Beck. You see, Soros thinks the Fox News Channel's resident paranoiac is the real-life "Lonesome" Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd, Elia Kazan's 1957 "communist" classic.
OK,DOES Andy Griffith's character remind you of anyone here? Anyone at all?
Substitute Goldline for Vitajex, Lonesome's sponsor in the film. Anything come to mind now?
THANK GOD that the ultimate faith of "Lonesome" Beck's followers rests in the United States Constitution -- not a TV host. At least if Beck starts to steer them astray, the foundational document of our democratic republic -- and Tea Party America's exhaustive knowledge of it -- will be there to steer them (and us) away from the brink of something really nasty.
I was born into a world in the process of losing its . . . stuff.
We refer to this period of American history as the Red Scare. We were scared of Stalin -- and then Khrushchev -- over in the Soviet Union. We were scared of Castro in Cuba. We were scared of "infiltrator" Alger Hiss in the State Department.
The beatniks? Commies. Civil-rights "agitators?" Commies. Martin Luther King Jr.? Dangerous commie troublemaker. Race riots? Instigated by . . . commies.
The media were commies, college professors were commies, folk singers were commies, and the labor unions were commie through and through.
We were obsessed by The Bomb -- which we invented and first used -- because the commies had obtained it, too. In their nefarious, murderous Red hands, it was a weapon of mass terror.
In our hands, it was how God kept the world in line . . . and capitalism safe.
In the world of the Red Scare, rock 'n' roll was a communist plot -- the pinko sons of bitches invented the teenager, after all -- and Mick Jagger was the devil. (No, look at the man!)
HERE'S where we stood somewhere around 1963:
TODAY, the Soviet Union is no more. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and capitalism has seized the day. Even in "Red China." Markets are global, and the bankers really do have more money than God.
And the Red Scare is back.
Who is the Red Menace today? Well, I can tell you we seem to be quite concerned -- to put it mildly -- about the president of the United States. Who is a Kenyan Muslim communist tribesman (or something like that).
We likewise worry about the secretary of state, who's a fellow traveler. And the Justice Department. And, of course, we still get lower GI disturbances at the mention of those venerable pinko warhorses of modern history -- Castro, the media and the labor unions.
The Red Menace has been enshrined. It has ascended.
THEY TRIED to tell us in 1947. And 1957. And even 1967.
I guess we didn't listen.
Now it's up to tea-party members and other apoplexy victims like Glenn Beck -- he of the only non-commie TV channel out there, the Fox News Channel -- to lead the resistance. Lead the resistance against the government the commies and their fellow travelers TRICKED us into ELECTING in 2008.
Glenn Beck is to the Red Scare what the new Hawaii Five-O is to the old Hawaii Five-O, only with angry conspiracy theorists.
I withdraw that statement. The new Hawaii Five-O, I am told, has new scripts. The producers of the show aren't planning on a word-for-word rehash.
And nobody's trying to elect Dano to the U.S. Senate.
The frightening thing about this new Red Scare is the same frightening thing about the last one. The panicked, angry masses and their cynical zealots-in-chief are ready, willing and able to burn down this entire village in order to "save" it.
In their minds -- or at least in their tea-party rhetoric -- "socialism" is so God-awful that we ought to be willing to burn down the framework of constitutional rule and the civilizing influences of commonweal in order to protect a notion of "God-given" liberty that, in the fever swamp of the angry-mob mindset, comes out more like "Do what thou wilt . . . except what we don't like." And your mileage may vary.
"Communism" is so godless and evil that any extreme action to oppose it is not only justified, but perhaps mandatory. Ask J. Edgar Hoover.
LIKE THE paranoid times of my entry into this mortal coil, this present Red-baiting moment finds angry people making idols of what they see as the opposite of their devil. The "commie" devil.
If "socialism" is bad, doing away with all "government-run" programs and social safety nets must be good. If "welfarism" is bad, a laissez-faire dose of social Darwinism must be virtuous and right -- especially as we languish amid the worst economy since the Great Depression.
Not only that, but the Red Scare becomes cover for all our demons and prejudices. Civil-rights "agitators" were, back in the day, a bunch of America-hating Reds, after all. And kicking a man while he's down can be seen as some sort of virtuous act, because we all know that "social justice" and "social religion" are just snooty names for . . . communism!
Thus, condoning racism can be just another manner of expressing one's innate "Americanism." Ees thees gret country or vhat?
Commies bad. Saying the N-word 11 times straight on nationwide radio good, because you're just combating "political correctness."
Face it, when you're up against the Other, and the Other is a freedom-hating, pinko, commie godless Muslim, and you're fighting for your life -- literally, you've been told by that man on the television -- it's war.
And we all know what they say about love and war.
But that's OK. There are no atheists in foxholes -- especially not in this foxhole -- and the patriot surveys the carnage he has wrought upon civil society and the body politic, and he is at peace in the knowledge that God is on his side.
You know what Bob Inglis is? A socialist. A Republican socialist.
The veteran South Carolina congressman is a conservative-hating, Bilderburger-coddling, quisling traitor who's trying to kiss that crook Bill Clinton's ass while he runs interference for the communist "organizer" Barack Hussein Obama -- the Kenyan witch doctor now occupying (in the Nazi sense of the word) the White House.
Inglis is a hoity-toity little snot who thinks he's better than the people he's selling out up there in Washington, D.C., and now he's bitter because patriots saw through his "conservative" act and handed him his pinko-commie ass in the Republican runoff.
AND NOW the little traitor is showing his true colors, what with all his sour-grapes trash talking about God-fearing tea-party patriots to that godless commie rag Mother Jones:
During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn't—or wouldn't—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
Later, Inglis mentioned this meeting to another House member: "He said, 'You mean you sat there for more than 10 minutes?' I said, 'Well, I had to. We were between primary and runoff.' I had a two-week runoff. Oh my goodness. How do you..." Inglis trails off, shaking his head.
(snip) Why not give these voters what they wanted? Inglis says he wasn't willing to lie:
I refused to use the word because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I've ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, "The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'" I thought, "He's right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington." For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I'm conservative. We disagree...But I don't need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.
Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.
Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."
OOOOOOH. Tea-party patriots are scawy, scawy people. Ooooooh, the mean tea-pawty peoples aw gowing to huwt powah, powah Biwul Ingwiss!
The RINO sounds like Barney . . . Barney Frank! HAAAAAA!
And I'll bet some Jew put him up to saying tea-party people are anti-Semitic.
OH . . . get this! He says the Republicans will regret following the common-sense, freedom-loving patriots instead of the commie-libs and Bilderburgers!
Inglis is a casualty of the tea party-ization of the Republican Party. Given the decisive vote against him in June, it's clear he was wiped out by a political wave that he could do little to thwart. "Emotionally, I should be all right with this," he says. And when he thinks about what lies ahead for his party and GOP House leaders, he can't help but chuckle. With Boehner and others chasing after the tea party, he says, "that's going to be the dog that catches the car." He quickly adds: "And the Democrats, if they go into the minority, are going to have an enjoyable couple of years watching that dog deal with the car it's caught."
AND WE'RE GONNA enjoy watching you burn in hell with your communiss friends, you America-hating pansy!
You just don't get that sometimes you have to destroy the village to save it. Destroy it all!Destroy it so that the green shoots of freedom will emerge from the rubble of the socialist state, fertilized by the corpses of all the pinkos and the parasites.
I wonder whether all the tea-party "patriots" worried about "ObamaCare" are much worried about this "death panel"? Probably not, because WellPoint's death panel is a respectable capitalist death panel, not one of Barack Obama's communistic ones.
I guess Reuters reported the following story because it's based in Great Britain, and the Limeys are "socialists" just drooling all over themselves in anticipation of turning the United States into the simply-red USSA.
And MSNBC picked it up because, well . . . it's MSNBC, which rhymes with "Red TV." YEAH, THAT'S the ticket:
One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. First there was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. Later, Robin Beaton, a registered nurse from Texas. And then, most recently, there was Patricia Relling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.
None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders — more than any other health insurance company in the United States.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.
They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women's specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.
That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as "rescission," for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.
But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters. The revelation is especially striking for a company whose CEO and president, Angela Braly, has earned plaudits for how her company improved the medical care and treatment of other policyholders with breast cancer.
The disclosures come to light after a recent investigation by Reuters showed that another health insurance company, Assurant Health, similarly targeted HIV-positive policyholders for rescission. That company was ordered by courts to pay millions of dollars in settlements.
In his push for the health care bill, President Barack Obama said the legislation would end such industry practices. Making the case for reform in a September address to Congress, Obama specifically cited the cancellation of Robin Beaton's health insurance. Aides to the president, who requested they not be identified, told Reuters that no one in the White House knew WellPoint was systematically singling out breast cancer patients like Beaton.
Many critics worry the new law will not lead to an end of these practices. Some state and federal regulators —- as well as investigators, congressional staffers and academic experts — say the health care legislation lacks teeth, at least in terms of enforcement or regulatory powers to either stop or even substantially reduce rescission.
"People have this idea that someone is going to flip a switch and rescission and other bad insurance practices are going to end," says Peter Harbage, a former health care adviser to the Clinton administration. "Insurers will find ways to undermine the protections in the new law, just as they did with the old law. Enforcement is the key."
(snip)
The cancellation of her health insurance in June 2008 forced Robin Beaton to delay cancer surgery by five months. In that time, the tumor in her breast grew from 2 centimeters to 7 centimeters.
Two months before Beaton's policy was dropped, Patricia Relling also was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anthem Blue Cross of Kentucky, a WellPoint subsidiary, paid the bills for a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
But the following January, after Relling suffered a life-threatening staph infection requiring two emergency surgeries in three days, Anthem balked and refused to pay more. They soon canceled her insurance entirely.
Unable to afford additional necessary surgeries for nearly 16 months, Relling ended up severely disabled and largely confined to her home. As a result of her crushing medical bills, the once well-to-do businesswoman is now dependent on food stamps.
"It's not like these companies don't like women because they are women," says Jeff Isaacs, the chief assistant Los Angeles City Attorney who runs the office's 300-lawyer criminal division. "But there are two things that really scare them and they are breast cancer and pregnancy. Breast cancer can really be a costly thing for them. Pregnancy is right up there too. Their worst-case scenario is that a child will be born with some disability and they will have to pay for that child's treatment over the course of a lifetime."
I AM SURE these women, in some manner intentionally not reported by the Brit commies -- you have heard that even the Tories on that benighted isle are "Red" Tories, right? -- really had this coming, and that raw, unrestrained capitalism once again has acted in a manner morally superior to any statist policy paradigm.
"Enlightened self-interest," "greed is good" and all that rot, wot?
First, Barack Hussein Obama tries to indoctrinate American schoolchildren into collectivism and "civic responsibility" with a socialistic campaign of propagandistic White House "Holiday balls."
Next, he will ban Christmas altogether and replace it with New Year's music programs, where singing socialists take to the Red Channels to give praise to the Almighty Obama. In Russian.
This is the kind of thing "traitor" Ben Nelson voted for the other day -- abortion, statism and atheism. You just watch . . . comrade.
As I write, Glenn Beck probably is giving a Fox News Channel camera the crazy look as he misspells things on his chalkboard and says something like this:
"You need to look at who Barack HUSSEIN Obama surrounds himself with and realize that he, as we speak, is imposing a radical COMMUNIST agenda on this nation. . . .
"That's right, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is imposing a radical communist agenda on the United States. . . .
"I said IMPOSING a radical COMMUNIST AGENDA. As I speak. . . .
"The president, if he is indeed the president, is RIGHT NOW effecting a COMMUNIST TAKEOVER . . . RIGHT NOW . . . as I speak. . . ."
No, above, we have the darling of the unhinged right's conspiracy-theorist section singing the praises of perennial presidential candidate and prominent "birther" Alan Keyes.
And Alan Keyes has got that Glenn Beck religion. Or is it that Glenn Beck has that Alan Keyes religion? Let's just say they both have that W. Cleon Skousen religion.
Watch.
I'LL BET the Catholic Keyes was surprised to find out that having that old-time Skousen religion . . . makes him a pretty hardline Mormon.
On the other hand, the Mormon-convert Beck has no such problem.
Which is good, because Beck loves the works of Skousen, who viewed the world through the eccentric lens of Mormon theology and saw a grand conspiracy of the "super rich" and the communists, working toward a "one-world order." To that end, the State Department handed Eastern Europe to the communists after World War II, and we abandoned China to Mao Zedong.
IT'S ALL those damned "secret combinations." The Rockefellers are selling us out to the commies, and ol' Dwight Eisenhower was a comsymp, too. Ike gave Cuba away to the Russkies after forcing Fidel Castro onto the Cuban people, who didn't want him.
Hell, don't you know that it was Harry Hopkins -- that longtime adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman -- who gave the Russians not only the plans for the atom bomb, but a cache of enriched uranium, too?
What, you don't know that? Obviously, you've been "brainwashed." So said Skousen in 1976, when the above recording was made.
And this brings us full circle to Glenn Beck, from earlier this month:
OY VEH. Swords into plowshares as a communist plot. Isaiah must have been part of a secret combination.
And then there's this, from today. W. Cleon Skousen, no doubt, would be so proud:
IF THE MASTER can come up with "Harry Hopkins gave the Russkies the Bomb," why can't the student come up with something as piddling as "Barack Obama hates the Constitution?"
There's a little problem though. Why in the world wouldn't the nation's first African-American president judge that the original document -- which not only did nothing to abolish slavery but went so far as to count slaves and Indians under U.S. jurisdiction as three-fifths of a person for apportioning purposes -- was objectively flawed in some way?
And, in fact, President Obama went on to expound upon the flaws. And Beck's staff at Fox News Channel edited that out -- rather badly, actually. I could hear the edits.
I'll take my leave by posting the unedited version of Obama's remarks. Glenn Beck and Fox News: Fair and balanced? You decide.
Glenn Beck, as he "war gamed" a coming American civil war with an expert panel, professed to be horrified by the mere prospect.
So why is he going out of his way to stir up mobs of cranks, nuts, racists and simpletons against the "socialist" and "communist" Obama regime, one full of czars and "oligarhs"?
Salonhas some answers for us. Short version: It's because he's a disciple of a dead Mormon nutjob who was so far right that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered him a national threat.
AND IF J. Edgar Hoover was scared, imagine how scared we should be. Read on:
In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.
Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."
What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."
As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.
After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."
During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called "The Naked Communist." In the late '50s, America's far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar "domestic right-wing extremist threat." Then as now, they were very much on the government's radar.
After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."
How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen's work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen's nearly 2,000-page FBI file. "Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters," says Lazar.
When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."
(snip)
By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."
When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.
With Glenn Beck, it's not about Van Jones. It's not about the "green" adviser to President Obama at all. It's about proving Obama a communist. That and the spirit of Dallas . . . and of right-wing nutism.
The bloggers and detractors can say I'm targeting Van Jones, but too many things have been happening in this country that just don't make sense. Amazing things like President Bush telling us he's all about security, but leaving our borders wide open. All the way down to the latest: Medicare and Medicaid are broke, so let's double-down and have an even bigger system modeled on that.
It doesn't make sense. During the campaign, the president said, you want to know what my policies are, look to the people I surround myself. So we did.
Van Jones said the same thing: "personnel is policy." What does this tell us? Well, in the case of Jones and several others in the administration, it says the president has an agenda that is radical, revolutionary and in some cases, Marxist.
We've laid this all out in their own words, for weeks. But, for the last 24 hours, everybody has been talking about the Republicans instead. Apparently what's captured the notice of so many people since we played the video on Wednesday, is the fact that Van Jones called Republicans a naughty name in February of this year.
Well, Jones has apologized. He's sorry he said the A-word about Republicans.
He is not sorry however, about any of these things:
— That he's an avowed communist
— That he believes we need a "whole new system"
— No apology for his campaign to free communist cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal
— Not a word from Van Jones about being a member of the revolutionary, communist group, STORM
— He has not apologized for his radical past as a black nationalist
There's been no apology for saying that we should redistribute wealth to Indians:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
He's not sorry for that.
BECK, BY HIS own admission, is using people like Van Jones to "prove" the president of the United States is a communist. Communist.
In the modern American lexicon, can there be anything worse than that? Communist. The word we can't say without a sneer.
Communist. The Soviet Union was communist. Ronald Reagan called it the "Evil Empire." For more than 40 years, we were prepared to blow up the world, if need be, to protect ourselves from it.
Communist. What can be worse than that in the all-American, pro-capitalist universe. Communist equals tyranny. Communist equals totalitarianism.
"Better dead than red." Better yet, "Better dead Reds," right?
This is the uniquely American context in which the unfortunately American Mr. Beck makes his accusations against Jones and the president.
When the right called Bill Clinton a communist, you always got the sense -- or at least I always got the sense -- that it was in the "hippie pinko commie lib" sense of the word. With Obama, I think people like Beck and his fellow travelers really, really mean it.
And you have to wonder how much of this is just an extension of the "Obama is a Muslim" paranoia accompanying the rise of The Other -- the rise of a black man -- to the pinnacle of American politics and, now, to head of state.
I think the last time the right was this unhinged -- and this serious with its "communist" talk -- was the ascension of another Other to the presidency . . . the nation's first Catholic in the White House, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
We remember the kind of rhetoric unleashed against him, particularly across the segregated South. And we remember what happened to him, and how some on the right cheered that the fringe-leftist Lee Harvey Oswald got to the pinko first.
This is the kind of fire with which Glenn Beck is playing. Somebody's going to get burned.
And he left us with the film Network in 1976. Paddy Chayefskymay have been the last of the Hebrew prophets of God.
It's eerie, actually. Now that the Fox News Channel has its own Howard Beale -- really, just replace the fainting spells with crying jags, and you have Glenn Beale . . . or Howard Beck -- there's only one place for it to go.
If I were Glenn Beck, I wouldn't be worried that it's the Obama lovers lurking in the shadows, assembling a hit squad. I'd be worried about keeping my ratings high.
THEN AGAIN, if the flat-topped demagogue keeps up his Mormon incarnation of Father Charles Coughlin, we all may have bigger problems than FNC turning into UBS. See, Beck's problem -- and ours -- is that he's doing the shtick of another spiritual predecessor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and turning the volume up to 11.
McCarthy saw communists behind every bush and in every nook of the U.S. government, then set out to use legislative mechanisms to effect an internal purge. Beck, on the other hand, is telling us that the president is a communist -- that the Reds have taken over the whole government -- then says we have to do something about it.
And his followers are left to fill in the blank. It sounds to me like a chickens*** call to revolution -- ginning up the mob, then maintaining plausible deniability with a wink and a nudge.
THE LATEST "commie" Beck sees lurking in the Obama administration is Van Jones, the new special adviser on "green" jobs.
Beck thinks Jones is a commie. Beck thinks Jones poses a threat to the republic -- a threat to constitutional democracy.
A new system of what? Is he talking about more than just solar panels? Let's look again at the entire context of this statement — he's saying that this can't be only about new forms of energy:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: If all we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system, and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system. When we don't deal with how we are consuming water. We don't deal with how we're treating our other sister and brother species. We don't deal with toxins. We don't deal with the way we treat each other. If that's not a part of this movement, let me tell you what you'll have: You'll have solar-powered bulldozers, solar-powered buzz saws, and biofuel bombers, and we'll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines and we'll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! We're gonna change the whole system! We're gonna change the whole thing!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
This is social justice.
Can we stop claiming that this man is just an average, everyday, capitalist American? Can we at least start having the necessary discussion of whether we want communists in the United States government as "special advisers" to the president? Do we even want communists to have lunch with our president?
Barack Obama did not campaign openly on "changing the whole system." He did, however, five days before Election Day, tell us this much:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) [sic]
Very few Americans paid attention then. Are you paying attention now?
If our founding principles are no longer relevant — if the system with which this country was founded is somehow unjust or unworkable now — and communism, Marxism or socialism is the right and relevant path, then let's have that discussion in America. But to subversively bring in a "new system" through the back door, in the middle of the night — no, that's unacceptable.
But this goes further than whether Van Jones is a capitalist or a communist. Look at what else Jones said at this conference: (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what? Renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! Give them the dignity. Give them the respect that they deserve. No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Give them the wealth? Is that what you voted for?
Does that sound familiar at all?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else too.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
It may also bring to mind the man who gave the prayer at President Obama's inauguration ceremony, the man on whom President Obama just bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Reverend Joseph Lowry:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REV. JOSEPH LOWRY: And in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
No? Let's try it again. Here's more from Van Jones — again, to be fair, this is from his "ancient history catalogue" — this past March:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who come here from all around the world who we're willing to have out in the field, with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights and we don't want to give them dignity and we don't want to give them respect?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHAT WE HAVE HERE is a delusional, paranoid "political commentator" -- or perhaps just a cynic for the ages -- who not only sees unfiltered social-justice rhetoric and thinks it's Marxist, but who also thinks the entire concept of social justice is a communist plot.
And on top of that, he has the gall to single out a living hero of the civil-rights movement -- Lowery -- and cite his inauguration benediction as further evidence of the "red menace" descending upon us.
Yes, there is a menace afoot that threatens our civil society and American democracy. It's not Van Jones . . . or Joseph Lowery . . . or even Barack Obama.
It's Glenn Beck and the right-wing, tinfoil-hat masses who take him seriously.
If what Van Jones said is evidence of communist intent, then color me red. (And can you believe Beck's disputing settled history that Native Americans were horribly mistreated amid an avalanche of treaties broken by the U.S. government?)
IF WHAT Beck excerpted of Jones' remarks is proof-positive that the man is a Marxist, then so am I. And so is the pope, and all the Catholic bishops of the world.
And so is every American Catholic who believes what the church proclaims . . . what Jesus Christ proclaimed.
Here is a lengthy except from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on (gasp!) social justice:
1929 Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man. The person represents the ultimate end of society, which is ordered to him:
What is at stake is the dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and responsibly in debt.
1930 Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. These rights are prior to society and must be recognized by it. They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy. If it does not respect them, authority can rely only on force or violence to obtain obedience from its subjects. It is the Church's role to remind men of good will of these rights and to distinguish them from unwarranted or false claims.
1931 Respect for the human person proceeds by way of respect for the principle that "everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as ‘another self,' above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity." No legislation could by itself do away with the fears, prejudices, and attitudes of pride and selfishness which obstruct the establishment of truly fraternal societies. Such behavior will cease only through the charity that finds in every man a "neighbor," a brother.
1932 The duty of making oneself a neighbor to others and actively serving them becomes even more urgent when it involves the disadvantaged, in whatever area this may be. "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."
1933 This same duty extends to those who think or act differently from us. The teaching of Christ goes so far as to require the forgiveness of offenses. He extends the commandment of love, which is that of the New Law, to all enemies. Liberation in the spirit of the Gospel is incompatible with hatred of one's enemy as a person, but not with hatred of the evil that he does as an enemy.
II. Equality and Differences Among Men
1934 Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an equal dignity.
1935 The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:
Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design.
1936 On coming into the world, man is not equipped with everything he needs for developing his bodily and spiritual life. He needs others. Differences appear tied to age, physical abilities, intellectual or moral aptitudes, the benefits derived from social commerce, and the distribution of wealth. The "talents" are not distributed equally.
1937 These differences belong to God's plan, who wills that each receive what he needs from others, and that those endowed with particular "talents" share the benefits with those who need them. These differences encourage and often oblige persons to practice generosity, kindness, and sharing of goods; they foster the mutual enrichment of cultures:
I distribute the virtues quite diversely; I do not give all of them to each person, but some to one, some to others. . . . I shall give principally charity to one; justice to another; humility to this one, a living faith to that one. . . . And so I have given many gifts and graces, both spiritual and temporal, with such diversity that I have not given everything to one single person, so that you may be constrained to practice charity towards one another. . . . I have willed that one should need another and that all should be my ministers in distributing the graces and gifts they have received from me.
1938 There exist also sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women. These are in open contradiction of the Gospel:
Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.
III. Human Solidarity
1939 The principle of solidarity, also articulated in terms of "friendship" or "social charity," is a direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood.
An error, "today abundantly widespread, is disregard for the law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to. This law is sealed by the sacrifice of redemption offered by Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father, on behalf of sinful humanity."
1940 Solidarity is manifested in the first place by the distribution of goods and remuneration for work. It also presupposes the effort for a more just social order where tensions are better able to be reduced and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation.
1941 Socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all the forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples. International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.
1942 The virtue of solidarity goes beyond material goods. In spreading the spiritual goods of the faith, the Church has promoted, and often opened new paths for, the development of temporal goods as well. And so throughout the centuries has the Lord's saying been verified: "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well":
For two thousand years this sentiment has lived and endured in the soul of the Church, impelling souls then and now to the heroic charity of monastic farmers, liberators of slaves, healers of the sick, and messengers of faith, civilization, and science to all generations and all peoples for the sake of creating the social conditions capable of offering to everyone possible a life worthy of man and of a Christian.
IF YOU'RE GLENN BECK, the compiled doctrine of Christendom's most ancient religion is just as good -- or bad -- as the Communist Manifesto. And 67,515,016 American Catholics apparently must be poised to reprise Mao's Long March -- this time straight through the U.S. Constitution, all the nation's running-dog capitalists and right into the Fox News Channel studios.
Beck passed from the realm of broadcast buffoonery long ago. Now he apparently fancies himself the leader of an all-American, pro-capitalist "counterrevolutionary" army.
Well, maybe he doesn't. The dangerous thing, though, is that he wants his audience to think he is.
IF AMERICA is indeed still possible, Americans will consign this present-day leader of postmodern Know-Nothingsto the ratings cellar and the ash bin of history.