Obama’s ‘socialist revolution’
Hey, what happened to the L word? No, not the dreary TV show (guess what? Lesbians aren’t inately any more interesting than anyone else). No, I mean the use of liberal as a political swear word.
From Dukasis, through Clinton and Gore and beyond Liberal was the de-rigour swear word. Even Hillary Clinton wondered whether Barack Obama was too liberal. But all of that seems to have goner by the wayside. No, Obama isn’t a liberal…he’s a socialist. So they say.
On the March 31, 2009 edition of Lou Dobbs’ programme on CNN, Dobbs featured a segment on ‘Obama’s Socialist Revolution,’ with dire warnings about government ownership. A lead-in for later in the programme announced people were worried about the possibility of totalitarianism (!), although I think I missed the actual report.
My favourite part of the report was Peter Schiff’s soundbite. Schiff is a US stockbroker and libertarian advocate (he supported Ron Paul’s presidential bid, and his father Irwin Schiff is a well-known tax resister currently serving time). Schiff argued that government intervention into the economy could only cause disaster (no surprise there) and that it was the New Deal caused the Great Depression. (this would presumably be a different New Deal to the one which began in 1933, four years after the 1929 start of the Great Depression – Hmm)
I almost checked my calendar to see if it was April 1st.
If Obama were carrying out a socialist revolution, it would be the first time in history a capitalist class had actually lobbied the government for its own expropriation. No, none of these guys are lining up to fall on their swords. The concept of state-capitalism seems not to have entered the political vocabulary yet.
When I think back over why I became a socialist, wanting a bigger government isn’t one of the reasons.
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NB: The New York Times ran an article on February 28, 2009 called ‘Socialism! Boo, Hiss, Repeat…’ looking at this development in political missreporting.
Notes from Underground 