'Radical in the White House'

From Jeff Goldstein:

Gee. I can remember a time not too long ago where saying such things was unhelpful, its utterers “extremists” and “purists” who were hurting the GOP’s cause by alienating “moderates” and “independents”. Comity — that’s what was needed. A willingness to recognize the basic goodness and decency of Good Men like Barack Obama, whose disagreements with us weren’t at all personal, but were instead merely a matter of policy differences as filtered and distilled through his own moderate pragmatism. Protesting forcefully against such an historic, symbolic president — who would lower the oceans and such — would turn the grand old party into a regional curio; conservative “idealists” were wrecking the electoral chances for Republicans, what with their unwillingness to do what the American people clearly want: compromise, move leftward, join in the expansion of government and the furtherance of an ever-increasing deficit spending, over-regulated nanny state. They were instead paranoid, suffering from an imagined “persecution complex”.

Funny how times have changed.

Katherine Lopez interviews Stanley Kurtz on his new book, Radical-in-Chief; as does Hugh Hewitt — who not too long ago would hang up on all the unserious rightwing “nutters” who intimated that Obama was a Marxist or socialist, in between shilling for whatever candidate the GOP establishment put forward.

Turns out that the evidence, largely circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless, suggests that Obama is a candidate trained in stealth socialism, both a product of — and culmination to — the New Left’s long march through the institutions. Of course, today the “New Left” self-identifies as “liberal” or “progressive,” to hide their socialist/Marxist roots. Their governing style is “pragmatic,” “forward thinking,” and “transformative”; and their message is one of economic populism, class warfare, and identity politics — all couched in the Orwellian inversions of protected groups, set-asides, government-approved speech, and the nannystate tentacles of a growing liberal fascism, into the (ironic) buzzwords “fairness” and “tolerance” and “security.”

And it turns out that those who refused to recognize all this early on — and who openly went to war against conservatives / classical liberals over such (rather obvious) observations, diminishing them as extremists or “purists” who were looking to “purge” the party of solid intellectual Republicans — however late to the party they are, are nonetheless now joining in the wave.

More at the link.

I think Jeff overstates the case a little (or at least the Obama-enablers on the right have been losing steam for some time now, the Frum Forum dweebs and the McCainiacs especially). Great piece either way. And if you haven't yet, be sure to get yourself a copy of Kurtz's book. Scholarly and authoritative, Radical-in-Chief will be the go to volume over the next couple of years, as Americans reject the Obama-Dem socialist regime in increasingly large numbers.

RELATED: Kathryn Jean Lopez interview here and Hugh Hewitt interview here.