And Obama’s dad was not a socialist.
Yet another bit of specious bullshit thrown up by wingnut bloggers that will, undoubtedly, be barfed up in a Howard Kurtz piece or on CNN’s situation room by the end of the week. And once again, after digging up the paper written in 1965 by Obama’s dad, the bloggers prove they don’t understand anything, and the paper, contrary to previous assertions of Marxism, proves nothing of the sort.
Is this really the farce that our elite core of right-wing bloggers have descended into- nothing more than half-witted red baiters? This is really the best they can do? Obama is a snob and a commie?
Pathetic.
Dug Jay
I agree with you that Obama is not a snob or a commie. I also agree with your characterization of him as, “Pathetic,” as you put it so elegantly.
ThymeZone
What’s really disturbing is the way that MSM pimps total nonsense and fiddles while Rome burns. Our media in general are a destructive force now in this time in history. I used to not think so but this campaign has changed my mind.
Jake
What else are they going to talk about? How well the war is going and gee look gas is over $4 a gallon? Bush is teh AWESOME!?!?!?
DougJ
I was very reluctant to admit this as well, because I know some local reporters and they are smart, hard-working guys. But the national media has nothing to do with that. The national media is purely a destructive force with no redeeming qualities of any kind.
cleek
they’ve never been anything but.
Jamey
Okay, I’m gonna go “there”:
McCain, like Bush, went into his daddy’s business. Like Bush, he wasn’t exactly a rousing success:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_11_16/ai_61361646
http://forums.military.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8430006241001/m/1250002671001
The question I’m waiting for any Repub to answer is this: Other than suck Bush’s and Pat Robertson’s dicks (metaphorically, of course), what, exactly, has John McCain done in the past eight years to reverse your party leaders’ stance–the one taken during the primary campaign in 2000–that McCain is too crazy to be president?
Jen
The patheticity of the Marxist stuff is kind of amusing. In addition to being ludicrous on its face, the Berlin wall has been down for the entire lifetime of many of Obama’s voters.
As a smear, it resonates approximately as much as calling McCain a mugwump would.
But what else are they going to go, sell McCain on his merits?
PeterJ
9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11
Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq
Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran
ThymeZone
Yes, a good point, we can’t paint the entire bunch with one brush. There are good reporters out there, but the national media are a machine for profit and do not give a rat’s ass about anything else. They will peddle dog poop and call it a Tootsie Roll if they think it will gain them audience share.
Tim
Brilliant reporting from Politico. But actually my favorite article today is from Roger Simon.
Fucking idiots.
dnA
Well, I hear Obama’s also black.
protected static
From dust thou art, yadda yadda. Dunno if you’ve noticed this John, but red-baiting (part and parcel of that whole god, guns & gays schtick) has worked pretty well for ’em for a while now.
Jamey
Jeez, it didn’t seem like a rhetorical question when I thought of it . . .
protected static
Also, what Roy said.
les
I fear you take this too lightly. Yeah, commies are hardly scary anymore; but a commie who is snobbish??? That’s fuckin’ scary, man; when the proletariat seize the means of production, he may not let all of us play! No wonder Politco has their knickers in a twist.
Rick Taylor
At Taylor Marsh they’re all oohing and ahhing over a video that doesn’t make a bit of sense but makes Obama sound scary and sinister and shows a burning American flag.
DougJ
That’s a good piece on the story in the Politico. Credit where credit is due. Ben Smith is a good reporter.
Rick Taylor
Let’s see, Kerry was an elitist, a flip flopper, and faked his war wouunds.
Gore was an elitist and a fibber.
Honestly you don’t need much
AmIDreaming
It’s the Bible Code, stupid. If you take every 37th letter of the Koran starting at letter 4,264, you’ll see the whole Marxist-Islamofascist conspiracy laid out in complete detail.
Same thing with Obama’s speeches — you don’t realize what he’s *actually* saying in them until you subject them to the most rigorous and *very selective* analysis of the text.
Suckers. The public statements in their entirety mean *nothing*.
Jen
I’m just sayin’, if us moonbats decided we needed to look into whether McCain, Sr., born in 1884, was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal, I would feel less than confident about our candidate’s chances.
jrg
Right wingers clamoring about socialism. Film at 11.
I just walked past a TV and caught a couple of seconds of a McSame speech, where he was complaining about the corporate tax rates.
Give me a break. These assholes incorporate subsidiaries overseas and in the Caymans to prevent paying taxes in the U.S., then, when things start to look bad here in the U.S., these same companies (Bear Stearns, anyone?) get bail outs from tax payers. Now we’re supposed to believe that the likes of BS was paying too much in taxes to begin with?
It’s astounding to me that Americans are stupid enough to keep buying this “socialism” claptrap while the feds continue to bail these companies out, not to mention the tax incentives municipal governments give to corporations to move into town.
Yep, our government has gone from paying down the debt, to a massive deficit under the Bush admin’s watch, and the solution is lower taxes for corporations! These people are completely f*cking insane.
These corporate crooks are going to continue gaming the system and gorging at the taxpayer trough until the economy is wrecked and we’re seeing 20% unemployment. At that point, we really will be considering socialism as a country, and the same rubes that were railing about corporate tax rates will have no problem simultaneously siphoning money from our paychecks while using the government that we finance to enforce their socially conservative jihads (abstinence only education, tax breaks for mega-church snake oil salesmen).
Can’t these people just find a bridge and jump off of it?
Dave L
“That’s a good piece on the story in the Politico. Credit where credit is due. Ben Smith is a good reporter.”
Lord, even the headline of that “good piece” is beyond parody:
LONG-LOST ARTICLE BY OBAMA’S DAD SURFACES
– ‘Long-lost’?!! – What, scholars have been ransacking archives on three continents looking for this thing? – Or maybe the idea is that it’s been ‘long-suppressed’!!
– ‘Surfaces’ – Oh, yes. Just bubbles to the surface more or less spontaneously. “Well, look at what showed up in my in-box!” exclaimed ace reporter Ben Smith. “Wonder where it came from?”
This thing ‘surfaced’ the way that Red Sox jersey in Yankee Stadium did.
Tertiary enhanced-recovery crude oil surfaces more spontaneously than Obama’s Dad’s article did.
And by the way, on THIS topic I’m strictly neutral between Hillary and Obama. We’re going to be regaled with this species of journalism no matter which one wins the nomination. So just grab your stomach, hold your nose, and vote.
jenniebee
Descended? No, they were always farcical.
SASQ
Warren Terra
I must have missed this particular vein of slime. Someone decided that Obama’s dad – a man he basically met once as a conscious individual – was Teh Red Menace! and that because of this alleged fact Obama must be about sixty seconds from nationalizing the means of production and re-educating the Kulaks?
I mean, I’ve heard of “from each according to their abilities”, but this particular line of slander is just weak.
Brainster
I take it you did not actually read the article yourself, John? No, the dad was not a socialist; he was a communist. He decries private ownership of land (favoring communal ownership), he says there should be no limit to taxation provided “society” receives value, he talks about price controls on hotels and tourist attractions, etc.
Argue that his dad’s nuttiness shouldn’t be held against him. Don’t argue that his dad wasn’t a Marxist.
mrmobi
Yep, and even sadder is that at places like “Talk Left,” democrats and progressives of the Zell Miller variety are also all fully on board the smear, guilt-by-association and half-truth express.
John, I think you’ve been unfairly harsh regarding Hillary, but as an Obama supporter who will still vote for her if she gets the nomination, I’m stunned at the visceral hatred of Obama I’m seeing at supposedly progressive blogs.
As you are learning, it’s no fun watching Democrats eat their young.
Scotty
All of the issues have pretty much been gone through. Now all that’s left is to sling the mud.
The Moar You Know
Shorter Brainster: Can somebody help me? I’m lonely and I think I may have peed my pants.
Desmond
Has it ocurred to you that the economy of 1960s Kenya falls outside of the traditional left vs. right paradigm of the industrialized world? Kenya was a dirt-poor, post-colonial, pre-industrial economy. They were trying different ideas, and these stupid ass right-wing bloggers obviously know nothing of the historical context.
Jen
I thought we were arguing you guys were a sorry-assed bunch of ridiculous red-baiters who can’t stand your own sorry-assed candidate and are looking for any goddamned thing in the universe, no madder how, pointless, irrelevant, and idiotic, to spew onto the internets because you’re pointless, irrelevant, and idiotic, and you couldn’t get a clue about what voters actually care about, even if clue trees reproduced through clue pollen and it was April.
At least, that was the point I was trying to argue. I’m sorry if that was unclear.
The Grand Panjandrum
Whoa. I just played an Obama speech backwards and I’m pretty sure he’s going to close Gitmo and put all the terrorists on the fast track to citizenship.
Herb
Forget Obama. I’m voting for the McCain-Clinton Unity ticket.
Tom
Rog from What’s Happening? is Obama’s dad?
scarshapedstar
Price controls at hotels! What a commie! Yeah, I remember Marx harping on and on about how the workers should control the means of hotel pricing. Ipso facto, communism!
Worst. Troll. Ever.
El Cid
Wow, I think it’d be awesome to come up with the stereotypical trope that combines elitist snobbery with communist revolutionism.
What, he prefers getting his hammers & sickles at expensive boutique stores?
He supports proletarian revolution but prefers to outsource it to temp firms?
He commissions socialist realist sculptures to be made out of caviar?
What?
Cyrus
Yeah, I point this out every chance I get. (To be pedantic, the Berlin Wall “officially” fell on Nov. 9, 1989, so someone born that day would now be 18 years old — a small minority of eligible and likely voters. However, there are a lot more people for whom it’s only a vague childhood memory. I’m 25, for example, and while I’m sure I saw the news at some point while I was seven years old, the earliest reference to the fall of the wall I can remember personally seeing was in an X-Men comic book.)
Communism or socialism for someone in their seventies: an international conspiracy devoted to the destruction of everything about American beliefs and ways of life. Tense relations with a rival superpower and losing a costly war.
Communism or socialism to people in our twenties: countries with pretty good health care and economies that aren’t that great but aren’t all that much worse than their neighbors either. Alternately, what Republicans call anything more economically left-wing than trickle-down economics.
I can’t get too triumphalist about this because I know that old people tend to be more likely to vote, but still, I find red-baiting more funny than threatening or insulting, and I know I’m not the only one.
cleek
OMFG: Fuck Lieberman with a rake
Gus
scarshapedstar, if you want to see some pathetic trolling, mosey on over to Yglesias’ post about Geoff Davis. Post after post of people questioning whether or not “boy” is an insult or a term of endearment.
tBone
These attempts to reinvent Hillary as a rugged, pistol-packing, hard-drinking, tough-talking, salt-of-the-earth gal get funnier by the minute. I can’t wait for the press conference where she armwrestles a longshoreman, downs a bottle of Wild Turkey and catches a bullet with her teeth.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
The Other Steve
That’s actually incredible. It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve seen the media actually question a right-wing talking point.
But it also shows just how out of touch Republicans are, and not to mention how fucking stupid and desperate they’re already becoming.
The Other Steve
I was 21 when the Berlin Wall fell, and to be honest, I had no comprehension of the signifigance until later in life. Even so, for most of my adult lifetime, communism has been dead.
Since 1992, when Clinton and Tsongas ran, the economic policy of the Democratic party has been job creation, rather than wealth redistribution. In fact, this is why Nader keeps claiming the two parties are the same.
The difference is the Democratic party thinks of job creation in terms of spawning new technology areas, such as funding the internet, or funding for renewable energy, etc. to kick start new markets.
Republicans think job creation means lower corporate tax rates.
The Other Steve
Along those lines, historically the Republican party has always been motivated by protecting wealth. They have always been the party to enact tarrifs to protect companies, etc.
I would argue that lowering tax rates is more about job protection than job creation. The problem is in an ever changing economic market, you cannot protect jobs. They’re going to go away.
The key is, you have to create new ones to replace them.
That’s the problem in the rust belt. Tax cuts ain’t going to ever fix it.
Xanthippas
“Brainster”, he’s talking about Kenya, which I know from extensive study of Wikipedia to not be the same as America. And secondly, what you described is socialism, not communism, which you would know if you knew anything more about the two than that the former is a buzzword for the latter to the right-wing and that someone somewhere told you communism is really, really bad.
Mr Furious
Is Communism genetic? Because if I recall correctly didn’t Obama’s dad leave and go back to Africa when he was a little kid never to be heard from again?
How could this possibly have anything to do with Obama forty-plus years later?
Did the long-lost paper turn up in Obama’s pillowcase? No? then talk about torture please. Even bowling would be an improvement.
Dulcie
They were in his socks. Tucked under his pantleg.
John Cole
I actually had a comparative politics of Africa course way back when, and all these shitheads would freak if they even began to understand the history of Africa. If those ahistorical motherfuckers knew half the writings and thoughts of Julius Nyrere and the history of Tanzania, Zanzibar, and TANUas well as his writings on ujima, they would be writing about the great socialist threat of Africa and the Weekly Standard would be freaking out and starting to draw up plans for invasion.
And Tanzania is the portrait of stability compared to the rest of Africa.
Total fucking ignorant shitheels. I can not believe I used to link these idiots.
Original Lee
TOS, I was 25 when the Wall fell. I remember feeling this incredible optimism about world peace ‘n’ stuff. I may have had more inkling about what it all meant than the typical American my age, though, ’cause li’l ole elitist me had a full ride college scholarship a few years before (due to my family being kinda poor from the recession and all), and that scholarship included a year of study in (then) West Germany. The West German government herded us foreign students on a week-long trip to Berlin, so we would have some experience with what the division of Europe meant and so we could see the Wall. We had two days in East Berlin – one day as part of the tour group, and one day on our own. The day on our own was the day that Russia announced that Brezhnev was dead, so it was a freaky experience for us. Going through Checkpoint Charlie is something I will never forget, but explaining it to anyone more than about 10 years younger than I am usually gets me a huge blank stare and a yawn.
That feeling of incredible optimism from the Wall coming down is to me similar to what the Obama campaign is bringing to many of us regular voters – the potential for us to start doing things in a different (and hopefully better) way.
\end blissout
Original Lee
correction: the day that the USSR announced Brezhnev was dead. It’s been a long day.
Bruce Moomaw
Roger Simon: “When I saw a video of Hillary Clinton downing a shot of Crown Royal whiskey in Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday night, I was delighted to see that she has finally learned what campaigning for president is all about.
” ‘I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small-town America,’ Clinton said.
“But Clinton’s statement was not as important as her downing that shot of whiskey.”
What’s next? She proves her presidential qualifications by getting drunk and shooting up a bar?
Xenos
Immediately after the President of the United States admitted to war crimes, the Pope has visited and refused to meet with him, a diplomatic snub that must be unprecedented.
This, of course, is not newsworthy.
Xanthippas
Or anything else they ever wrote about. It’s the now-classic modus operandi of the right-wing blogger that when he/she writes about something they don’t know the first thing about, they still write as authoritatively as is possible, coming to grand and sweeping conclusions with bonus links to articles and webpages they found via google that support their assertions and demonstrating in a completely transparent manner that before they started googling they didn’t know a damn thing about that particular subject. And after that particular item is no longer of interest to them, they will decline to educate themselves further and forget everything they might have accidentally learned in the process while they move on to the next hot item so they may opine as ignorantly upon it as well. That’s how you end up with a set of blog posts based on what Obama’s dad wrote about politics in Kenya, with no acknowledgment by or information from that blogger of how Kenyan politics and society differ from ours, nor any acknowledgment that it’s even important to discuss how Kenya is different from us. Because in truth to the right-blogger, it is not. What is important is convincing us that Obama has socialist/communist leanings because his dad supposedly did, and that it is completely and totally irrelevant that his dad was talking about a completely different society than ours.
dadanarchist
Wow, pathetic, even by the Politico’s already abysmally low standards.
Anyone who has studied anything of the history of decolonization will know that there was hardly a single country, in Africa or Asia, that did not declare itself “socialist” in one way or another. Socialism in those days was basically conflated with a desire to be modern, with the dream of building prosperous, stable, consumer-based economies that could hold their own with the US and the former colonial powers. Socialism, in this case, was a desire for European-style social democracy, and, more rarely, Soviet-style state socialism.
One could also point out that materialism, in the Marxist sense, has nothing to do with conspicuous consumption, as Smith and Ressner suggest. The break suggested by “African socialists” was from the *philosophical* materialism (i.e. the sensual world is the only world that exists, and that ideas follow action, and not the other way around – the core reversal of Hegel at the heart of Marxist epistemology) of European Marxism. In its place, African socialists proposed a more idealistic and spiritually-minded (believed, at the time, to be more in line with “traditional” African ways of conceptualizing the world) epistemology that would found their societies.
So Smith et al. have no idea what the fuck they are talking about, but then again only NE liberal elites care about nuance, rather than screaming, “ohmygod a dirty red…. er red diaper baby.”
El Cid
Thinking you should know something about something before you write authoritatively about it is elitist.
JackieBinAZ
I grew up with Duck and Cover and the understanding that we were fighting Commies in Vietnam so we didn’t have to fight them here. In the Army, I did a tour in then-West-Germany, where they bused us to the literal “edge of the free world” so we’d know why we were there. Even as a child of the Cold War, I can step back and say that without the ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation, fear of Teh Communists seems just a tad bit dated.
Pug
I must have missed this particular vein of slime. Someone decided that Obama’s dad – a man he basically met once as a conscious individual – was Teh Red Menace! and that because of this alleged fact Obama must be about sixty seconds from nationalizing the means of production and re-educating the Kulaks?
Yours is a good synopsis of their basic point. However, they would prefer to keep it simple for the slow among us, other wise known as rural Pennsylvanians: Like father, like son.
vwcat
I think I’ve alread said this but, it bears repeating:
The republicans are just so predictable.
John Cole
I was actually stationed in the Fulda Gap in the army for Unification Day in Germany in 1990. I got hammered. It was an all day party.
El Cid
Using the correct proper names for when you were stationed in foreign countries is elitist.
misc
Hell, the act of existing for a time outside the U.S. is elitist.
Tax Analyst
I’ve got one word for you, son: Counter tops. Granite.
Well, actually that’s three, but if I decide what the truth is for everybody I can call it one, can’t I?
I think they did this shit to Winston Smith back in 1984. Still, I recall it was a Good Year, even though we were still at war with Eastasia recall it was a Good Year. I remember ’cause Big Brother said it was so.
I’m glad the surge is working now, because Big Brother has said we’re really going to have to focus our energies on Eurasia.
I’d complain about the dreadfully high price of things such as motor fuel and, of course, food, but I would hate to seem ungrateful at all that Big Brother and the Party have allowed me to have…TV and all, you know.
Besides, I’m terribly afraid of rats and I think that somehow they know it.