It's not been just a short while since Nancy Pelosi through out the Nazi brand at those who disagree with the fiscal policies and other related characteristics of the Obama administration.

Godwin would be proud.

What is the intent of this language?  It is to marginalize and minimize.  It is to demean and smear.  There is no substance to this talk.

Chip Berlet's language is not so obnoxious.  He does, though, encourage marginalization instead of dialogue.

Then comes the comment which has remained undeleted.  Irrational as it is, the accusation follows suite with Pelosi's comment:

Mr. Berlet (or someone on his behalf) had the good sense and integrity remove that comment.

Another commenter reflects the attitude and rehetoric of former Vice President Al Gore:

And they wonder why we think they are elitist.  Do tell.  Some do not even recognize when they have appointed admitted, self-acknowledged communists to administration positions.

What remains is some valuable criticism from commenter (and regular poster) Frank Cocozzelli:

It is good to see an acknowledgement on the Left that the method is elitist and destructive.  What they may not understand is that education is the current driving force of the conservative movement.  The exposure of the redistributive agenda as a component of a Marxist ideology has been spoken for the last two decades and is now sinking in.  Couple that with (at least) two self-acknowledged communists who are building on the Clinton/Wilsonian (definitely Marxist) foreign policy and the picture of the turn of 19th c. liberalism is becoming ever clearer.

When the well-meaning but naïve members of the progressive movement begin to understand the intention of the most recent incarnation of conservativism (being both social and economic), that it's goal is to tell the Left to (1) drop Marxism, and (2) control those knee jerks, then there can be dialogue.  Until then, the East coast elitists will dominate modern liberalism and will continue to evade the Constitution.

Yet Mr. Berlet expends additional energy using that old, trumped-up "RAAAACCCIIISSSSTTTT" shout that is part of the Left's regular rhetoric.  You see, any time you draw a characture of President Obama it just has to be racist.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  They have done it here for decades.  And for those who recall the reaction to the "conservative" seeking office in France a few years ago, it is an international phenomenon.

If you are conservative then your motives must always be questioned.  Off-the-scale paranoia.

Jimmy Carter did it.  So it must be right.

Tired clichés just wear down the dialogue.  But again, given Mr. Berlet's recent posts, dialogue is not what he has in mind.  Does he think this old party line talking point will work any longer?  It has already worn pretty thin, so much that the real racists, the specific ones who deserve legitimate criticism, may go forward with little damage. 

It seems to not matter that he found material regarding Al Gore.  Unless, of course, Al Gore was our first black vice president.  That might make it racist.  Must be.  Has to be.  Can't be any other way. 

As conservatives we must maintain our ownership of our own political property, for our sakes, and for the sake of the popular liberal and Left voting block (and even bloggers) who have no idea what is going on.

The first question is the most fundamental: Does he have one?  Does President Obama have a coherent foreign policy agenda and philosophy that sets him apart from his predecessors?

Oh, he has a list of objectives that are quite clear as specifics.  But it takes a little, just a little, reading between the lines to see anything more.  But the problem with reading between the lines is that one can easily read into the text some things that may not be present.

Looking at his objectives is much like listening to his speech on nationalized (Yes -- it is.  Yes -- he lied.) health care.  What you get is a laundry list.  You do not get a method.  You do not get a plan.  You do not get a systematic set of relationships between the component parts.  It is a box of Lego blocks, nothing more.  No Lego city.  No Lego building.  No Lego car.  Just parts.

I also wonder if Obama is actually governing, or if he is giving a few orders to his czars and letting them, and Pelosi, run the country while he takes the role of PR man, giving more speeches than anyone I've heard before.  Is he governing or managing?  Is he even managing, or is the staff running itself?  Hard to tell, given what we see from this short distance.

Through 9/15 President Obama had given 434 speeches.  In 236 days he has given almost 2 per day.  Astounding.  Truly.  That one can govern and also prepare this many speeches is one for the record books.  Sort of.

All in all, this is the emptiest Presidency I've ever seen.  No substance.  No productive.  No creative thinking.  Just a recycling of old, worn out and failed tactics into a nice, pleasant package.

Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. The “public option” is not paid for by reducing the private insurance expenditures. All that means is that there is less money in the economy to generate wealth and jobs.

Everything trickles down. Wealth always creates jobs. Someone has to build those houses and boats that the rich buy. And someone has to work in the businesses that they operate. And welfare makes its way out to more and more recipients.

Insurance is not care.  If access to health insurance is changed it does not translate to having enough doctors or other resource meet the needs at hand.

We cannot have everything we want.  That is a fantasy. Need optional knee surgery that is not critical? Hospital near full? Surgeon booked ahead 3 months? Nice try, Squiggy.

Socialism is always destructive to liberty. All safety net ideas require a wall to keep the participants from avoiding participation. In a way, it’s like an iron curtain.

Exposing the Obvious

One of the charactistics of exposing Marxist and communist threats is that the discussion is, for the Christian, a theologically-informed discussion. The two major post-enlightement political philosophers, Harx and Hegel, not only attempted to support their positions with Christian theology but also spent a great deal of time building systems that exist in parallel with Christian theology in an attempt to supplant it. But more on that can and will be written later.

Now that one outright communist has been removed from this administration, we do well to patiently, accurately, and affirmatively exposing them at every turn.

Exposing the Apologists

There are, of course, those who act as blatant apologists for these communists. But we must be accurate as to their role. They speak in defense of those who would remove freedom. They may not be part of the functional problem in government and policy, and that is good. And it's a free country, so they are allowed to speak as they so choose. So it does the Christian cause good to expose the, and I think this is a suitable definition of communism, Marxist theocrats for what they espouse.

One example is my favorite target Crooks and Liars. Nicole Belle, who is known to support the use of violence by the Left, not only ignores the outright communist positions of Van Jones, but acts as though the whole thing was made up. She says that

this Van Jones scandal [was] created by Glenn Beck

That is a fascinating escape from reality. Even for Nicole.

Some of these apologists make their elitist attitude clear in everything they say and promote. And the sheeple follow with predicable bleating.

Keeping Things Straight

Of equal importantce is that we do not want to fall into the trap of calling everyone a communist. That is not only unproductive, it is both false and as such counter-productive. Whey they call us all "stupid" all that inidicates is that their argument is free of substance. In those cases we always win, so there is not too much need to do any more than expose the attitude.

Your every-day theologically- and educationally-challenged leftie, like C&L or Kos, often seem know little about their world view and its implications for freedom. But once in a while the contents of their world view will seep through and that provides an appropriate opportunity to confront this anti-American and anti-Christian way of thinking.

This is one of those question that defines our movement.  And theirs.  Justice, it seems, is an elusive term, one that is not quite so neat and clean as we would like.

Dictionary.com says:

No real disagreement here.  Both sides will agree on this definitions.  Where the difference lies is in how we implement justice.  For the leftist, justice come about through the elimination of class.  Again, from Dictionary.com:

Implementing this "distribution" requires a clarification of who has any advantage or disadvantage and putting in place a mechanism for redistribution of these advantages in order to resolve the perceived disadvantages.  This is what we know as the social dialectic.  Karl Marx observed that human rights and freedom are not natural but determined by external conditions and as such are resolved  by changing these external conditions.

The move for universal health care, with universal being a term that has been lost because it carries the baggage of its Marxist ideology, does much more than right an apparent injustice of available rights.  It also redistributes.  And it defines the rights of a person as external to that person.  Rights have become a managed commodity rather than natural.  (My criticism of the Left is the same that I level at Rome's misuse of grace as a commodity that can be distributed ad hoc.)