Donnerstag, August 21, 2008

Connecting a few more dots...

A couple of days ago I wrote this.

Now we can connect a few more of the dots about who Obama really is when you read this.


Now you know why Bill Ayers is anyone but "a guy living in my neighborhood" and you can know understand better why he's, basically, untouchable:

"Bill Ayers—I've said this—his father was a great friend of my father," the mayor said. "I'll be very frank. Vietnam divided families, divided people. It was a terrible time of our country. People didn't know one another. Since then, I'll be very frank, [Ayers] has been in the forefront of a lot of education issues and helping us in public schools and things like that."

In other words, cronyism is the key factor: a hard-core left-wing agitprop guy who is fundamentally a traitor to the principles of democracy and the US constitution gets a job, gets his ass covered, is allowed to work further on ruining the schools (the project he worked on was a complete and total failure and actually made things worse), and all because this guy's father was buddies with the Mayor's father.

To repeat: the man is an unrepentant terrorist and believes in violent revolution...

They're friends. So what?

Obama has some odd friends:

Sam Graham-Felsen
, hired to run Obama's blog, is a hard-core leftist who publishes in the Socialist Viewpoint, a magazine of the Socialist Workers Organization, which: "was formed to advance the revolutionary Marxist political program in the United States."

This is not some wacko in the office, but the guy who runs Obama's blog. See this for more (oh, and for the record: that's from an anti-war blog...not some right-wing wing nut...). Of course, he also got his start in Chicago...


Connecting a few more of the dots? Crony politics, infiltration of the party by extreme left-wingers...is there a pattern here either of extreme incompetence (in vetting these people) or of malice? Or does Obama simply not care because he couldn't give a shit, as long as he's elected?


To repeat: why is this even a contest?

2 Kommentare:

Anonym hat gesagt…

As far as I can see, exactly one article by Graham-Felsen was published in _Socialist_Viewpoint_, and it is a reprint of an article that was originally published in the Nation. You are cherry-picking and spinning to smear him as a revolutionary Marxist.

Hanging a communist flag behind a bar in an Ivy League dorm- does this mean that Graham-Felsen was a COMMUNIST?! No, he was a leftie, and that's the kind of things leftie Ivy League undergrads do as a joke. Do you think his political views today are identical to his views when he was in college?

There is a political Left and a political Right, and a distinct number of groups at various points along that spectrum. I am a Green, and I do not support revolutionary Communism, yet if there is a coalition of groups working together to close down a nuclear reactor, I will not exclude them as long as they do not try to push their own agenda. And I think that Karl Marx was an important and influential thinker. And I don't think that reading Marx and thinking about class struggle means that one has anything but contempt for Stalin, or has any desire to violently overthrow the American government. Yes, I am a leftist, I am for class solidarity and class struggle against the oppressive tendencies of capitalism. Being opposed to capitalism does not mean being un-American. It does not mean being opposed to democracy. The United States has a political system founded on democratic principles, and the economic system of capitalism. Capitalism is not perfect; the Right would say that it's the best economic system in existence, and the Left says: Make it Better!

John F. Opie hat gesagt…

Anonym -

And where are the differences on the spectrum? Where do you draw the line, especially when you are dealing, amongst the left, with people whose epistemological commitment to the truth is determined by political necessity and convenience?

You sound like a watermelon: green outside, red inside. There is no compromising with marxists of any kind, as what Marx argued for - the dictatorship of the proletariat - cannot be discussed away, but is a fundamental part of the core of leftist thinking. If anything you're the one cherry-picking: you pick and choose your ideological traveling companions at your leisure in the name of your own political goals without regard to the greater picture.

Marx was a revolutionary, but a very bad economist. His concept of labor, the core of his economic thought, is fundamentally flawed, as labor is not fungible, as any employer will tell you. His work even back then was a massive oversimplification at best. Social critic, yes.

If you are for class struggle and for class solidarity, how can you be anything but against the modern American republic? It is based on the rejection of class struggle, that all are created equal. I fear that you have not thought this out completely.

And if you are opposed to capitalism what is your alternative? Socialism as a political-economic system is morally and intellectually bankrupt, so what is your alternative? To make capitalism better?

I fear that you are typical of the left that has failed to understand what the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and Russia really has meant: your Utopian system has failed in the real world because humans cannot prosper under it and it requires the abandonment of too many freedoms that are inherent to humans regardless of who they are and where they were born.