All That Is Old Is New Again
Forty years ago radical student groups took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam war and the Establishment and staged violent protests at the Democrat's National Convention in Chicago while shutting down university campuses across the country. Back then they largely rejected politics in favor sex, drugs, rock and roll and blowing things up but since then many of the leaders have mellowed out and become professors, actors and even politicians. So what are all those radicals from the '60s up to today when they are not attempting to brainwash our youth as their teachers? Well they are supporting and campaigning for Barack Obama. So why do all these aging hippy communists and anarchists now support Obama so fervently? Do they believe that he is one of them in thought and policy? Obama has admitted in his books that he sought out these types while in college and has surrounded himself with radicals ever since.
Daniel Flynn has a must read piece in City Journal that looks into the leaders and history of those radical student groups from the '60s and their connections to Obama today, Ayers and Dohrn are just to tip of the iceberg. They know the American people won't go for socialists or communists so they now call themselves progressives in the hope of pulling the wool over our ideas so they can regressively change America for the worse. Yep that is the hope and change you can believe in. Here is a snippet but you should really read the whole thing.
Progressives for Obama resembles a Who’s Who of SDS luminaries. In addition to Hayden, Rudd, and Davidson, the group includes Bob Pardun, SDS’s education secretary during the 1966–67 school year; Paul Buhle, a radical professor who has recently attempted to revive SDS; Mickey and Dick Flacks, red-diaper babies who helped craft 1962’s Port Huron Statement, a seminal New Left document; and SDS’s third president, Todd Gitlin. Age and experience have mellowed some of the SDSers in Obama’s camp. Gitlin, for instance, has evolved into a respected Ivy League professor and milquetoast liberal. But others still glory in a past that can only damage Obama’s future. The aging New Left still practices a therapeutic politics that places a higher value on feelings of personal liberation than on restrained pursuit of political aims.
Plus many of today's radical anti-war groups like the Code Pinkos are backing Obama and planning massive demonstrations for this years DNC in Denver.
(HT:Gateway Pundit)
3 comments:
This crap is just silly.
Yes, I met Obama in 1995, along with some ACORN ladies, for less than an hour. I later lobbied him to spend some state money on learning centers with computers for inner city kids, which he did. I was one of several inviting him to speak at our first antiwar rally, but never talked to him that day. A little later, I said hello to him at a fundraiser for his senate race for two minutes.
That the complete total of my 'connections'.
I'm an 'acquaintance,' not a 'friend' and if he even remembers my name at all, it's because of bugging him to spend money on the learning centers.
Today I run 'Progressives for Obama', a web site completely independent of him. We distance ourselves from him, and he can do likewise. Technically, we don't even endorse him; we simply say he's our 'best option.' So there's no need for him to reject what's not there. We do want people to vote for him, mainly as a way to end this horrible, unjust and stupid war. But we criticize him on many things all the time
But if you look out there in rightwing cyberspace, I'm the dreaded 'terrorist' and 'Communist Mentor' responsible for shaping the 'Marxist Obama.' I kid you not.
And this crap gets bounced around as 'Research' and 'Fox-Hannity truth.' Spare me. These guys have such tiny brains that they wouldn't know serious research or polemic if they saw it.
With my trusty Google, and six degrees of separation, I can show 'connections' between this author and advocates of Biblical slavery and worse, and it would mean just as much.
What he really wants to do is 'Willie Hortonize' the entire 1960s new left, which number in the millions, and 'demonize' them to shut them up.
He doesn't even bother to ask the most interesting questions. Why is Bill Ayers a widely respected educator and school reformer, acknowledged and defended by even Mayor Daley, despite his over-the-top politics of 40 years ago? Or why Mike Klonsky is respected enough to be a voice on national commissions on prevent school violence? The irony is that none of these guys, including me, could give a hoot if Obama 'throws them under the bus,' because it's not about us, and never has been. Here, we're only scary, carefully made-up cartoons, with little connection with who we really are, designed to scare gullible people, to play all of you as suckers, and some of you are falling for it.
I've been part of the real Chicago left for decades, and believe me, Obama has never been part of it. He's a decent reformist liberal with ideas far removed from socialism or Marxism.
Obama is a 'high road' industrial policy capitalist and multipolar globalist--just read his Cooper Union speech a while back. Clinton is a garden-variety corporate liberal capitalist, which got her on the board of Walmart for years. And McCain is a US hegemonist and an unreconstructed neoliberal capitalist--'state all evil, market all good'--that kind that says 'We're in business to make money, not steel, so we'll gut these plants and speculate in oil futures, and the workers and towns be damned.' In other words, the ones who 'cut taxes' by putting everything on the China Visa card and got us into this mess.
Actually, truth be told, Obama's brand of capitalism is best for productive businesses, as opposed to many speculators, and does least harm to the working class. That doesn't mean we can't press him to be better at it, as in promoting and building infrastructure for new green businesses and green jobs for youth. All those solar panels and wave and wind turbines have to be built somewhere by someone.
If you want to criticize him, all this stuff is fair game, that is, if you want to get out of the nasty-name calling of the kindergarten sandbox and learn enough to play with the big kids, let alone the grownups.
But being enthralled by Mr. Flynn just means you have a ways to go.
Well isn't this an interesting discussion I've stumbled into.
Carl Davidson, are you defending an unrepentant terrorist with this comment;
"Why is Bill Ayers a widely respected educator and school reformer, acknowledged and defended by even Mayor Daley, despite his over-the-top politics of 40 years ago?"
Because if you are, you're a moral idiot.
As far as Obama being a "decent reformist liberal", anyone who for 20 years listened to and tolerated that racist hatemonger Jeremiah Wright is hardly a "decent reformist liberal"
Good one two punch Tom, he just dropped all cover he had.
Post a Comment