[cwo_ghwebb]

In the novel Catch-22 there is a character named Howard Snowden who is injured when his aircraft is shot. The novel's protagonist, Yossarian, treats the wound on Snowden's leg and thinks he's done a satisfactory job of tending to his injured crewmate. It is a recurring vignette in the novel, but we don't get to its conclusion until near the end of the novel.

After thinking Snowden's wounds adequately treated, Yossarian opens Snowden's jacket. He finds him basically eviscerated; his intestines are pouring out of a hole in his chest. His case is hopeless. Snowden dies muttering "I'm cold" and all Yossarian can do is say, "There, there."

I thought communism was defeated when the Berlin Wall came down. I'm now thinking the Wall falling was the equivalent of treating Snowden's leg. We did not defeat communism at all.

It is almost commonplace to accuse someone of being like Hitler or acting Nazi-like. (Googling "bush hitler" yields 1,300,000 hits, for example.) Yet you are considered beyond the pale, and possibly insane, to even suggest that someone might harbor Marxist sympathies. To question someone's dedication to traditional American or merely Western ideals = calling him communist = being Joe McCarthy = we now know you're nuts.

Case number one is Representative Michele Bachman. She merely suggested that the press should look more intently to see if some Democrats and Barack Obama in particular harbor anti-American attitudes. The headline at the Huffington Post? "Michele Bachman Channels McCarthy. Obama Very Anti-American. Congressional Witch Hunt Needed." Contributions to Bachman's political rival poured in.

Of course Rep. Bachman neither called Obama "very anti-American" nor called for a congressional investigation of any kind. But in a world where facts no longer matter, so what? (You can read the transcript of her Hardball interview here.) Even the Republican Party abandoned her, until it found out the controversy was bringing contributions into her campaign like crazy. Amazingly, she survived her re-election bid.

/snip

We are now at the point where any utterance at all that merely questions whether a politician leans Marxist is immediate grounds for dismissal, derision and even banishment from the Republican Party and the public conversation. It is "McCarthyism" in reverse, or more properly, real McCarthyism as it actually happened, meaning the accuser is the one who suffers, not the accused.

But what if they are Marxist?

Excuse me, but isn't the great lesson we were supposed to learn from Nazism to recognize such evil before it reaches critical mass - to quash such movements before things get violent? As a reminder, the Holocaust count was 11 million; communism killed 100 million.

If we do not allow ourselves to call something "wrong" or "evil", we yield the battle without even a fight. Yet to refrain from such "invective" is what is now called "civil discourse" and the right "tone."

Bill Ayers called himself a "small ‘c' communist." Is it OK to call him a communist? Barack Obama said this in one of his autobiographies (at least he said it on tape, whether or not he wrote the book himself ):

"To avoid being mistaken for such a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets."

Enjoyable article that somewhat supports Larry's (and others) argument that the United States is already socialist. The comments are outstanding too. This was my favorite.

From Jawbreaker:

We ,in the heartland, too have our manifesto, it's called the "five boxes of Freedom" a. the Soap box, b. the Ballot box, c.the Jury box, d.. the Witness box, and the most importent one of all , e. the Cartridge box. Like the first (soap box) we are hearing it played all over the lap-dog press already. The ballot box just reminded us that the process can be bought with the help of the former. The jury is still out but it's begining to look as if the country is split, by design, in preperation for the total control of everything normal to the American peoples. The witness box is full of remarks and no one is listening to the American public, the congress has taken a leave of absence, the Prez is lost in the mix because he means nothing to so many, and the marxist are about to be on the recieving end of something this country has not seen since the federalist took power in the early 18th century. The only thing left to do is pray someone does not mistake oneself for the evil that has hit this country right between the eyes. May God Bless yours and good luck.



American Thinker: Making the World Safe for Marxism