My conservative friends are fond of tossing around the statement that "the only GOOD liberal is a DEAD liberal." When I hear this phrase, I'm often heard retorting that they should "bite their tounge" because without political liberalism, there would be no United States of America today. The truth of the matter is that our founding fathers were ALL political liberals. But as another old saying goes, "the devil is in the details."
The concept of "innocent" political liberalism can best be exemplified in a quote by Robert F. Kennedy which said something to the effect of "Some men see the way things are and ask Why? I see things as they never were and ask Why Not?" The "innocent" liberal honestly wants to do the most good for the most people and is not about his own self-aggrondisement. Likewise, he or she wants to make a better world, but unlike the not-so-innocent idealogues, does not come from a place of hate, especially when it comes to America. The "innocent" liberal is aware that we have less than pleasant chapters in our long and diverse history, but can also appreciate all the good that this country has done in and for the other nations of our world. Then there are the not-so-innocent politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, etc. who are all about their own wealth and power. Then, last but not least, are the committed idealogues like Rosie O'Donnell and Janeane Garafalo who genuinely HATE this country and all it stands for but probably have no rational foundation for this hatred or any conscious knowledge of WHY they have such rage and hatred in them.
Thus the modern liberals can be broken into 3 types. The first of these is the "innocent" liberal. This type of liberal can be summed up in the Three Musketeers motto, "all for one and one for all." Personalities that represent this type would be George Cloobey, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Darryl Hannah, Matthew Modine, etc. These are people that put their money where their mouths are and actually WALK the walk, not just talk the talk. While I may disagree with them politically, I respect them personally and they do a lot of good in the world.
The second type is the "not-so-innocent" type. This would include the career politicians such as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, etc. These can be summed up by altering the Three Musketeers motto as follows: "all for one and that ONE is ME." Celebrities can also fall into this type as well. These are the ones that put their names and faces out front of any political or social cause they get involved in, but that involvement is more about self-promotion than doing anything for anyone else. I'm not going to name any specific celebrities here, but you know who they are. These are the types that run around the globe taking smiling photos with some of the world's worst dictators and happily take starring roles in movies that are going to bomb at the box office to bolster their political bona fides. Also included in this category would be hypocrites like Al Gore and John Edwards. Al Gore espouses environmental causes like Global Warming but puts down one of the biggest carbon footprints attributable to any single human being on the planet. Likewise, John Edwards runs for President espousing family values and concerns for the poor when he is unfaithful to his wife, and lives like a Roman Emperor.
The last type is the commited idealogue. This type hates all things American, and spends all his or her time telling anyone that will listen what a horrible country this is and what awful people we Americans are. This is the category I reserve for Al Franken, Rosie O'Donnell, and Janeanne Garafalo. These people cannot love this country and knowingly say and do the things they do on a daily basis. Several leading Democratic politicians fall into this category as well, but I'll not feed their egos anymore by mentioning them here.
The ancient oriental general/philosopher Sun Tzu made two statements in his treatise "The Art of War" that were eerily prophetic to our current political situation. The first statement is paraphrased as: "The closer the enemy is, the harder he is to see." The second statement is paraphrased as: "In order to defeat an enemy you must first be able to identify him." When Howard Dean succeeded Terry McAuliffe as head of the Democratic National Committee, I remember reading and hearing statements from various political pundits that the Democratic Party had been hijacked by its' liberal wing and that it was no longer Grandpa's Democratic Party. Like most things reported in the press, some is true, and some is innacurate.
The Democratic party is no longer Grandpa's Democratic party, that's for sure. To clarify, only ONE of my grandfathers was EVER a Democrat but he would have ripped up his membership card if he could see them today. The media's deception is in the identity of the hijackers themselves and this is largely because the media has been complicit in the hijacking process. The hijackers of the Democratic party of Thomas Jefferson and dear old Grandpa are neither liberals, nor Democrats. They are the resurgents of the American Communist Movement and Party.
Now, before you go relegating me to the status of that crazy old uncle that every family has and doesn't claim, let me clarify a couple of points. I am well aware of the negative visceral reaction most Americans have to the words "communist," "marxist," and "socialist. Like most things we base on emotion, the facts tend to get lost in the feelings and more times than not, we get it wrong. When I refer Communism, I'm not talking about the former Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. The sad truth is that the actual practice of communism as defined by Karl Marx in his book "A Communist Manifesto" occurs in only one country that I'm aware of and that country is Israel. True communism is not the central form of government in Isreal, but it is the form of government in the agrarian kibbutz comminites. There, the maxim "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs is actually put into practice effectively.
The countries that purport to be communist countries have about as much to do with Marx's philosophy as the Islamic terrorists have to do with the Quoran. The Soviet, Cuban, and North Korean governments are totalitarian dictatorships and not communist despite their usurpation of the title. I could call myself Hercules, too, but it does not mean I can bench press half a ton. Still, so as to remain on point, the communism I will be talking about here is the philosophy as defined in the Manifesto of Karl Marx.
The book "A Communist Manifesto" was first published in Germany in 1848 as a work of philosophy, not a political writing. As such, it was embraced by the universities and colleges in Europe and The United States. It was so embraced because at the time the words had not been tainted by the bloody deeds of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. The book itself speaks of nothing resembling the totalitarian dictorships of Russia, Cuba, and North Korea, but rather of a socialist Utopia in which all are equal and no man is richer or more important than any other. It is this last concept that makes the work appealing to the liberal minds of college students to this very day. The difference is that the students who began class after the 1920s were not aware of what it was they were studying or by whom they were being indocrinated. The reason for this is that by the mid 1920s the deeds of the Bolsheviks were well known and words like "communism," "marxism," and "socialism" had taken on the more sinister connotations we have of them to this day.
As to how all of this ties today's liberal Democrats with the American Communist Party, the string that tied the bow for me came in this quote from Norman Thomas, the last man to run for President in 1948 on the American Socialist Party ticket. He said, "The American People will never knowlingly accept Socialism, but under the label of "liberalism" they will accept every fragment of the Socialist progam until one day America will be a Socialist nation without ever knowning how it happened." This idea a socialism-by-stealth fits perfectly with the program of indoctrination disguised as education adopted by the Communists that became university and college professors following the demise of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the "red scares" of the 1920s.
The American Communist Party as a political organization came into being in 1919, even though Communism as a philosophy had been generally accepted and embraced by academia since the 1850s. American Communists, emboldened by the Russian Revolution and the establishment of a communist state, decided the time was right to bring similar change to the American way of life. Unfortunately for the founders of this party, the atrocities of the Bolsheviks in Russia came to light causing the public to react violently against all things communist. To see how dangerous it was to be a communist in America in the 1920s, watch the movie "Reds" starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton. Given that declaring oneself to be communist could result in anything from arrest to assault and battery, most American Communists felt that discretion was indeed the better part of valor and abandoned the party opting for safety over ideology.
Americans thought they had seen the last of the Communists in this country, but like the cockroach, communists don't go away. They hide out of sight and flourish in the shadows. Like the cockroaches who scatter when you turn on a light as a survival instinct, so the communist hid from the light of public scrutiny, but they were committed more than ever to their goals of making America a utopian state. To accomplish this, they needed to be able to get their message to people open-minded enough to receive it and what better place can this be accomplished than in colleges and universities. Students are by their very nature open to new ideas and what better way to get a message to young, eager, and captive minds than from the bully pulpit of the university classroom.
Now if you walk up to a liberal democrat and call him or her a communist, they will probably respond to you by calling you something very insulting. They may deny the allegation outright, but more often than not, they'll just attack you. The degree and nature of the attack will depend largely upon whom you attach the communist label. If you choose a minority female like Shelia Jackson-Lee or Maxine Waters, you'll be called racist, sexist, and stupid. If you choose a minority male like Jesse Jackson, Jr., you'll be called racist, and stupid. If you choose a caucasion female like Hillary Clinton, you'll be called sexist (although she'll probably use "mysogenist" because she did go to Wellesley and Yale after all). Finally, if you choose a caucasion male like John Kerry, you won't be called anything. He'll just look down his nose, his upper lip will make a snarling gesture demonstrating utter contempt for you as he opines that you don't understand what you're talking about (elitist for "stupid"). This was seen many times in his presidential campaign, especially when the press actually did its' job and asked him tough questions or questions that clearly made him uncomfortable.
The sad reality is that many of today's liberal communists don't realize that they are, in fact, the idealogical successors of the original communist movement because their indocrination was most likely done without revealing to them either that they were being indocrinated or by whom. I doubt seriously that in the wake of the red scares, a communist professor would stand in front of his class on the first day of the semester and announce that he was a communist and he was going to make communists out of them. If he didn't get beaten to death by his students, he would certainly have been out of job when one of them reported him to the dean. So it's most likely that this indocrination would have been by stealth. Likewise, I doubt any college professor in the 1920s would have whipped out a copy of "The Communist Manifesto" and lectured from it openly. More likely, the professors would have started with Plato and the importance of the State over the individual and progressed from there. Still, if today's liberals don't realize they are indocrinated communists, it's only because they don't WANT to know, or better still, they don't want YOU to know. Another juicy little secret is that the indoctrinated ones are not just on the the Democrat side because, contrary to popular belief, Republicans go to college, too.
In spite of what I just said about the Republicans, it is in the Democratic constituency that you see a veritable rogues gallery of American Communist legacy organizations. First among these is the American Civil Liberties Union, often jokingly referred to as the Amercian Communist Lawyers Union. As with most jokes, we laugh because they're funny, but they're funny in part because there's some truth in the humor. The same holds true here because even though the letter C in ACLU doesn't stand for Communist, in many ways it really IS the American Communist Lawyers Union. The initial director, Roger Baldwin, as well as initial members like Crystal Eastman, and William Z, Foster were purported to be card carrying members of the American Communist Party. This is not to say that the ACLU hasn't done some good for our citizens in its history, but in the time since the Vietnam era, the ACLU has been more about attacking our American values and way of life than anything good it may have done before. This makes sense when you consider that in order for the Communist ideas to succeed, you first have to remove morality from the American psyche and the best way to do that is to attack the foundation of that morality, our Christian values. Regrettably, they have succeeded in this endeavor all too well.
Next up in the communist cavalcade are the unions. While they will strenously object to any links between unions and communism, the fact of the matter is that the labor movement did not exist in this country until the communinsts came together. Unions will argue this point by saying that the labor union goes back to the guilds that have been around since Egypt was building pyramids. This is true, in part, but the fact remains that there was no organized labor union in this country until 1875, well AFTER Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto. Unions also point to the Upton Sinclair novel "The Jungle" which served as an expose on the conditions for the workers in an industrial manufacturing plant and called for workers to organize to protect themselves from corporate abuses. While it's true that "The Jungle" was published in 1906, well before the American Communist party came into being in 1919, its' writer, Upton Sinclair, studied Marxism in college and was an avowed Socialist, which was the same as a Communist, especially after the "red scare" of the 1920s. That the letter "U" stands for Union in the ACLU is NOT a coincidence. Unions owe their existence to the efforts of the American Communist Party, whether they want to admit it, or not.
Last, but certainly not least, is the group, ACORN. This body of community organizations owes its' existence and sustenance to Saul Alinski, author of "Rules for Radicals" and a hero to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Alinski was himself a community organizer dedicated to the proposition that communities should organize and use their organization to bring down both the goverment and business structures of the United States. His "rules" combined with the lessons of Nicolo Machiavelli provide the blueprint by which the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, our first Communist President, ushered in the "politics of total destruction," a practice honed, perfected, and used with deadly precision by the modern communists of the Democratic party and their supporters to date; and, "political correctness," an insidious form of censorship and thought control and prevents us from speaking our minds in most situations.
Ironically, all these organizations, the ACLU, labor unions, community organizers, and communism itself all come from the latin word "unum" meaning "one." The word is featured in our own national motto "E Pluirbus Unum," meaning "from the many - ONE. Our founding fathers interpreted this to mean from the many, i.e. the 13 colonies, come the ONE, the United States of America. Our current liberal communist democrats interpret this to mean: "from the many, our private wealth and property, to the ONE, the Federal Government. Like a swarm of termites, these liberal communists have infected and infested both the super structure and infrastructure of the great House that is the United States of America. Like a large Victorian mansion so infected, that house is today buckling under its own weight and in serious danger of a total collapse. Now that we have, in fact, become the Socialist country we have so long feared, somewhere in the vast reaches of the infinite universe, Norman Thomas is smiling.
