Boo!
It goes with Pelosi’s saying they had to pass the bill before we’d know what’s in it, offered today by Patriot Post.
These were her famous last words before “ramming [it] through.”
I’d make the hammer and sickle a fasces bundle. As Tom Roeser notes today, citing Ron Paul in a recent “lucid moment,”
Obama isn’t a socialist but a “corporatist.” . . . What we have now is the federal government owning just under 50% of the private economy: and if that isn’t corporatism I don’t know what is. Socialism is the takeover of industry; corporatism is the “investment” of government in industry such as the auto bailouts, the big bank bailouts.
And a little bit of political history:
A pioneer of this kind of thing was FDR’s Rexford Tugwell whom I knew well (he guest lectured for me at the Wharton School). Tugwell went to Italy to interview Benito Mussolini, an ace corporatist, came back and designed the NRA whereby big business would cooperate with each other in a government-tailored design to reach markets without cumbersome and what some liberals say is “wasteful economic competition.”
I’ve been calling O. a fascist at least since my Wednesday Journal column that precipitated severe excretory shots at the fan in October of ‘08. in which I hearken to Alinsky’s “man of action,” as in Rules for Radicals, and expatiated:
The “man of action” business is particularly foreboding. It’s a staple of fascism, of course. . . . [FDR’s] political appeal was based on admiration for the strong man who brooked no opposition.
Mussolini was crafty about it and inspired admiration in “progressive” circles in this country, as he had admired American pragmatism in Woodrow Wilson, the college professor-become-president with a yen for power that puts even today’s tenured radicals to shame. Then came FDR, the roaring pragmatist . . . . Progressives, later called liberals, yet later progressives again — the name changes keep them ahead of the awareness curve — love the man of action.
Now they have one. He’s The One, our smooth-talking Democrat presidential candidate with a yen for deciding how much you should earn before being hit with a tax hike-to “spread the wealth around,” as he unfortunately told that plumber in
Ohio.
I delete some references that show I was only, say, 80% right, the worst of them being my finger-in-the-wind, wistful, wholly mistaken closer, speaking of what he told the plumber, “Could this be the slip that sinks Big O’s ship?” It’s stuff like that keeps me from scaling the heights of pundit-dom.
Blithe Spirit 