Democrat Diane Watson: Loves CastroCare, Hasn't Read ObamaCare

It's really not surprising anymore. The Democratic Party has made common cause with hardline Marxists and neo-Stalinist revolutionary organizations. I have reported on this first hand, and now we have another member of Congress lavishing praise on Fidel Castro and Cuban healthcare.

The conservative blogosphere's struck gold with this: Representative Diane Watson, at her town hall meeting in Los Angeles last night, heaped praise on the Cuban Revolution and the communist health system in Castro's bloody regime. Unsurprisingly, according to this report, Watson boasted of having not read the ObamaCare legislation in Washington, to the cheers of her consituents:

I went to Rep. Diane Watson's townhall meeting. This was a very unusual townhall meeting. It was quite apparent that Diane Watson was able to fill the townhall with an overwhelming number of left-wing lunatics who hold unreasonable and irrational political opinions. For instance, when Diane Watson talked about how she had not read the bill, the audience laughed and even applauded. That is not a very typical reaction from members of the public. In most parts of the country, such an admission would result in a great deal of scorn from the audience members.

A partial transcript is here:

WATSON: You might have heard their philosophical leader. I think his name is Rush Limbaugh. And he said early on, “I hope that he fails.”

Do you know what that means? If the president, your commander-in-chief, fails, America fails.

Now, when a senator says that this will be his Waterloo, and we all know what happened at Waterloo, then we have him and he fails. Do we want a failed state called the United States?

And remember: They are spreading fear and they are trying to see that the first president that looks likes me fails.

Now just understand what’s at the bottom line.

And you know we just got, 48 hours ago, we just go back, we were in Beijing, China, Hong Kong, China, we were in Taiwan, we were in Guam, we were all over the Far East.

I just want you to know: People look at the United States as a country that has changed its way and has elected someone from Kenya and Kansas, I’ll put it like that.

And they’re saying, “We thought you would never do that.”

So we don’t want to have this young man, and he just turned 48 — we want him to succeed, because when he succeeds, we regain our status. We regain our status.

It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, “Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?”

And lemme tell ya, before you say “Oh, it’s a commu–”, you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. [APPLAUSE]

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found … well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro ...

More at Memeorandum.

The Cuban Archipelago

From Jamie Glazov, at FrontPage Magazine:

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]

The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, Against All Hope, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]

Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]

Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of the individual, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]

The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]

The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar...

Keep reading.

President Obama gave this horrific totalitarianism a pass, one of the biggest blows to human rights in the last 65 years.

Code Pink Hotties for the Revolution!

I never thought I'd be "Rule 5" blogging on Code Pink anti-Americans, but there's a first for everything. Via Ace of Spades HQ and Blackfive, check out "Code Pink Cuties":

More seriously, This Ain't Hell reports on the "ANSWER March on the Pentagon."

The photo-essay includes a banner hoisted by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) that reads "TROOPS OUT NOW ... NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR ... OUT ENEMY IS AT HOME" ...

The PSL website boasts Che Guevara across the top banner, and the page features links to upcoming events, such as "SOCIALISM: THE TIME IS NOW - CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP," in Los Angeles, scheduled for April 25. Some of the PSL links for today's Pentagon protest are hosted at ANSWER's website, and the group also mounted a demonstration in Los Angeles this afternoon. Here's the list of sponsors:

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General; Cindy Sheehan; Ron Kovic, Born on the 4th of July; Paul Haggis, Academy-Award winning director and screenwriter; Edward Asner, actor; ActiAstLA, Addicted to War, After Downing Street, Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition (Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino Chapters), Alliance for Global Justice, American Friends Service Committee, Los Angeles, ANSWER Orange County, ANSWER South Bay, ANSWER Ventura County, Be Love, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid-Southern California, Citizens Awareness Network, Las Vegas, Coalition for Equal Marriage Rights-LA, Coalition for World Peace, Code Pink, Cuauhtemoc Mexica, DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association, Echo Park Community Coalition, Equality Network,Free Iraq Now, Frente Amplio Progresista en Los Angeles, Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), Frente Unido de Los Pueblos Americanos, Fullerton Junior College Invisible Children, Global Resistance Network, Granada Hills Peace Vigil, Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, International Socialist Organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, KmB Pro-People Youth, Labor Community Strategy Center, LGBT Greens, Middle East Children's Alliance, Minjok-Tongshin, Montrose Peace Vigil, Mount St. Mary's College-Amnesty International Club, Muslim American Society Freedom, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, National Council of Arab Americans, Nicaragua Network, Office of the Americas, Orange County KPFK Support Group, Out Against War: LGBT & Friends Coalition for Peace & Justice, Palisadians for Peace, Partnership for Civil Justice, Peace Bakersfield, Progressive Democrats of America, Riverside Area Peace and Justice Action, Santa Monica College Feminist Alliance, Tendencia Revolucionaria de El Salvador, The People's Coalition, The People's Party, Topanga Peace Alliance, U.S. Labor Against War, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Venezuela Solidarity Network, Veterans C.A.R.E., Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Voters for Peace - U.S., WeAreChangeLA, World Can't Wait-LA, Youth Speak! Collective Point Loma Nazarene University; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild-LA; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Mimi Kennedy, Actor and Activist; Elaine Johnson, Gold Star Mother; Tina Richards, Executive Director, Grassroots America; Angola 3 Defense Committee; Herman Wallace, Political Prisoner, Angola Prison, Louisiana; Albert Woodfox, Political Prisoner, Angola Prison; Raul Pacheco, guitarist, Ozomatli; David Swanson, After Downing Street; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild*; Michael Ratner, President, Center for Constitutional Rights*; Blase and Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas and so many others.

The Los Angeles Times provided the group media coverage for the event, with a map listing road closures adjacent to Hollywood and Vine. Here's a description of the scheduled events:

Protesters will stop in front of the Kodak Theatre and participate in a 10-minute "die-in," where demonstrators will lie on the street as loudspeakers blare the sounds of dropping bombs. Marchers will then carry coffins draped with the U.S., Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian flags toward an armed forces recruitment office at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. The march will finish off with a short rally about 3:30 p.m. there.

Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth

Following-up from earlier today, "The Execution of Che Guevara."

At Amazon, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.

 

The Che Guevara Democrat Party

From Peter Ferrara, at American Spectator:

Those who contribute to, vote for, or otherwise support today's Democrat party need to catch up to the curve. These are not your father's Democrats. George McGovern would be a moderate in this party.

This is the party that rejected Hillary Clinton because she was not left enough. Instead it literally took a Marxist street agitator from the Chicago political machine and put him in the White House. Barack Obama was actually teaching the social manipulation methods of openly communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky to other Marxist revolutionaries for the radical communist front group ACORN. His weird name reflects his personal rejection of American culture. This is the person today's Democrat party wanted for President.

But it is not just him. The leader of the House Democrats is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ultraleft San Francisco Democrat totem. She is virtually as far left as Obama, and her public statements make Sarah Palin seem like a Ph.D. in economics. She keeps telling us that unemployment insurance payments are the best way to restore booming economic growth and prosperity.

When the American people rebuked Pelosi's ultraleft leadership as House Speaker, turning to the Republicans for the greatest House turnover since the New Deal, House Democrats responded with their own rebuke of the people. They voted Pelosi right back in as their leader, effectively saying to the American people that they were too stupid to know what they are doing, and that Pelosi's ultraleft San Francisco values best represent the Democrat party's ideals.

The Democrats also elected as DNC Chairman the unreasoned and far left screamer and name caller Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also makes Sarah Palin look like a rocket scientist. She touts as her achievements in the Florida legislature the Florida Residential Swimming Pools Safety Act, and state regulation of dry cleaning prices. She compiled during her career there the widely noted most liberal-left voting record of any state legislator. The Democrat party considered that the perfect qualification for party chairman.

If you think that increased government spending, deficits, and debt are the key to economic growth and prosperity, then this is the party for you. That is explicitly its economic policy, as crazy as that sounds. Democrats call it Keynesian economics. If you don't agree that increased government spending, deficits, and debt promote economic growth, then you shouldn't be voting for, contributing to, and supporting Democrats, and you shouldn't let your friends do so either.

Continue reading.

Obama Associated With Known Terrorists

I've recently highlighted the disastrous implications of an Obama presidency for American politics and national security (see here and here).

More fuel for that claim is out today at the Politico, which reports that Obama had known ties with domestic terrorists in the 1990s:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from the Hyde Park left to a man closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president....

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home—part of a campaign courtship—reflects more extensive interaction than has previously reported....

The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.

It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features – while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best – provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present—not least the Ayers connection—is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.

A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb – designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But – unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

Failed bombers who became academics? Oh, that's reassuring.

The Obama campaign needs to make a national campaign address disavowing his past ties to domestic radicals, as well as his campaign's recent controversy surrounding the displays of Che Guevara paraphernalia within the Obama organization.

This is not likely to happen, as the Obama campaign, amid a hot primary, doesn't want to anger the antiwar base, a constituency perfectly in tune with the Obama organization's anti-American proclivities.

See more at Memeorandum.

Nelson Mandela 'Kept Portraits of Lenin and Stalin Above His Desk at Home...'

Black supremacist Ta-Nehisi Coates is leading the chorus of attacks on "racist" Cold War conservatives who questioned the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. See, "Apartheid's Useful Idiots."

You have to read the whole thing, but literally the bottom line is that to raise any questions about Mandela's legacy, regardless of the historical context, and most importantly, regardless of Mandela's terrorism and Communism, and you're a racist. Coates argues that "the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa's white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage." He then links to this Wall Street editorial as racist data-point for the right, "Nelson Mandela (at Google)":

The bulk of his adult life, Nelson Mandela was a failed Marxist revolutionary and leftist icon, the Che Guevara of Africa. Then in his seventies he had the chance to govern. He chose national reconciliation over reprisal, and he thus made himself an historic and all too rare example of a wise revolutionary leader.

Mandela, who died Thursday at age 95, had a patrician upbringing and a Methodist education. But his coming of age coincided with the rise of apartheid. Winning whites-only elections in 1948, the National Party lavished its Afrikaner base of European descendants with state jobs and privileges. Black, mixed-race and Indian South Africans were disfranchised.

Trained as a lawyer, Mandela was drawn to the African National Congress, which was founded by professional, educated blacks in 1912. He was not a born communist, but as he rose in its ranks the ANC moved toward Marxism and an alliance with the Soviets. Mandela kept portraits of Lenin and Stalin above his desk at home. Frustrated with the ANC's ineffective peaceful resistance, he embraced armed struggle in the early 1960s and trained to become a guerrilla leader. He was arrested for plotting sabotage.

His 1964 trial gave Mandela a platform. In his famous closing argument, he said: "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

This speech was the last the world saw of him for 26 years. He started his life sentence at Robben Island prison near Cape Town a would-be Lenin. He walked out of jail on February 11, 1990—at age 71—an African Havel.

Age mellowed him. Times changed. The apartheid leadership had opened secret talks with the ANC in the mid-1980s. While still in prison, Mandela became "president in training" under F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid leader. In early 1990, Mr. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC.

Mandela ditched the ANC's Marxism and reached out to business. Somehow—another miracle—the illiberal ANC and the illiberal National Party together negotiated a liberal new constitution with strong protections for minorities and an independent judiciary. "You do not compromise with a friend," Mandela often said, "you compromise with an enemy."

He won the country's first free presidential elections in 1994 and worked to unite a scarred and anxious nation. He opened up the economy to the world, and a black middle class came to life. After a single term, he voluntarily left power at the height of his popularity. Most African rulers didn't do that, but Mandela said, "I don't want a country like ours to be led by an octogenarian. I must step down while there are one or two people who admire me."

Look, these are just facts, but for the morally-stunted left, facts are "racist."

There's going to be lots more leftist hissy-fits over the weekend. Rightfully call Mandela a Communist and you'll be branded a reactionary and racist.

More at the Other McCain, "1987: Thatcher Responds to ‘Further Intensification of the Armed Struggle’."

And see Saberpoint, "Nelson Mandela: Some Sour Notes Amid The Chorus of Praise."

PREVIOUSLY: "Nelson Mandela: Terrorist and Communist."

Googe Doodle Honors Marxist Anti-American Yuri Kochiyama

When I first saw the doodle, I searched (Googled) Yuri Kochiyama and found out she was a rather reprehensible America-hating leftist. I was at work, though, and couldn't worry about it too much at the time. Lo and behold, though, this horrible woman's loathsome ideological background didn't go unnoticed. Lots of folks spoke out against her, particularly the part about how she endorsed Osama bin Laden as a great revolutionary hero.

In any case, Sara Hoyt posted on this that night, at Instapundit, "GOOGLE, BEING EVIL: Today Google is celebrating Yuri Kochyiama’s birthday."

And now here's more from Ed Driscoll, also at Instapundit, "HATING AMERICA AT GOOGLE: Yuri Kochiyama and the strange case of her being honored with a Google splash page on Thursday for her 95th birthday are explored by Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary...":

"Remember that consciousness is power" - Yuri Kochiyama https://t.co/BfCF6060MT #GoogleDoodle #freedomfighter pic.twitter.com/AEh0suSUhj

— Global Fund forWomen (@GlobalFundWomen) May 19, 2016

As the Washington Free Beacon notes, a sympathetic biography of Kochiyama, Heartbeat of Struggle by Diane Carol Fujino, reveals that she didn’t so much sympathize with American Muslims as support the 9/11 attackers. While all decent people should sympathize with her experience during World War Two, it turned her against this country in a way that caused her to embrace radical Marxism and to support anyone who attacked America, including bin Laden. She came to believe that “the main terrorist and the main enemy of the world’s people is the U.S. government.” She also said, “I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire. To me, he is in the category of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, all leaders that I admire.”

What is most curious about the decision to honor Kochiyama is that the Google page about her noted that she was honored during March — which is Women’s History Month — by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. So the Obama administration has as many questions to answer about this as Google.

At this late date, are there any questions left as to what Obama — and his allies at Google — think about the nation that naively entrusted them with so much power?

Now that is noteworthy, but not surprising at all. Americans elected an America-hating president in 2008, and reelected him in 2012. It's hate all the way down from the left, and this year's campaign is becoming a referendum on whether or not conservatives are willing to confront the left's ideological evil head on.

For more, go directly to Jonathan Tobin's Commentary piece, "Hating America at Google":

Yuri Kochiyama benefited from America’s freedoms and ultimately even saw the cause that affected her family — the internment issue — resolved in her favor. She agitated for many causes, some of which may have been just and others that were violent and destructive. Indeed, her biography shows backing for a laundry list of every ragtag radical anti-American, racialist, and pro-terror group to emerge after World War Two. She may have a place in the history of radicalism and even a footnote in the story of American women. But a woman who celebrated the mass murder of Americans and the admired the people who plotted that crime is not someone who should be celebrated or considered a role model for women, Asian Americans, or anyone else.

May 19th may have been Yuri Kochiyama’s birthday, but it should also have been the day that some of us started thinking a little differently about Google.

Well, that's for sure. As I tweeted:

Heh, sweet spot for today's progressive zeitgeist! You go Google, lol. #YuriKochiyama https://t.co/TcSRJqU8O0

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 19, 2016

Kathy Boudin, Weather Underground Terrorist of 1960s and 1970s, Dead at 78 (VIDEO)

She was the mother of Chesa Boudin, the radical San Francisco District Attorney who's up for recall on June 7. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the shooting death of Brink's security guard Peter Paige in the Weather Underground's 1981 armored truck robbery, in Rockland County, New York.

Chesa was raised by the notorious, violent Weather Underground militants Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin, a "model prisoner," served 22 years behind bars at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She was paroled in 2003.

As the New York Times reports, "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78":

She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates.

Kathy Boudin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s took part in the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck and then, in prison and after being freed two decades later, helped inmates struggling to get their lives on track, died on Sunday in New York. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Ms. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin.

On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her. She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block.

She then disappeared.

Within a few years, so did the Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, borrowing from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a 1965 Bob Dylan song with the lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground.

In that era of turbulence over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group set off bombs at the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If anything, it was more adept at issuing long manifestoes, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and asserting the world’s “main struggle” as being that “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”

With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.”

She proved to be a model prisoner at Bedford Hills, mentoring other inmates, attending to those with AIDS, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the Brink’s robbery deaths...

Shoot, she was *such* a model prisoner that even William F. Buckley, the august founder of National Review, wrote a letter to the parole board supporting her release. 

Still more here.

The video at top is a "Brave New Films" hagiography. 

Searching in vain, I found not a single television news report on her death by any of the so-called mainstream broadcast, cable, or streaming outlets. 

I did find, miraculously, an old "CBS Sunday Morning" segment (here) on the 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, which killed three Weather Underground bomb-makers, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbin. As reported at the Times' story here, Kathy Boudin was on scene, escaped, and went to ground after her three comrades blew themselves up. 

This television news blackout is no surprise: President Barack Obama was a known associate of Bill Ayers during the latter's post-Weathermen university professor's life; and indeed, Obama launched his 1995 Illinois state senate campaign at a meet-and-greet at Ayers' house in Chicago.

Not a word of this will be brought up by our irretrievably corrupted legacy news outlets, lest the Democrats' chances in 2022 and 2024 be further deep-sixed by the "resurfacing" of "old news" reports on the party's most esteemed Democrat Party president in modern history, who was"palling around with terrorists."

Shoot, the current Democrat-Media-Disinformation-Complex beats Winston Smith's "memory hole" operations seen in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four --- and that's no joke.

ADDED: From Gail Heriot, at Instapundit, "THE BRINK’S ROBBERY/TRIPLE MURDER WAS ON THIS DAY IN [OCTOBER 20] 1981":

Please keep in your thoughts Brink’s guard Peter Paige and Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown (who was Nyack’s first African-American officer). All three were murdered in the course of the 1981 Brink’s heist. Also remember Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, who was seriously wounded, but survived, only to be killed twenty years later on 9/11.

The perpetrators were six members of the Black Liberation Army and four former members of Weather Underground who had since formed the May 19th Communist Organization.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the trial of the first three defendants (one from the BLA and two from the M19CO)...

Still more at Instapundit. 

Dilma Rousseff, Former Marxist Guerrilla, Set to Become Brazil's President

Yeah, because there are no communists anymore, well, not the "bad" ones, at least.

From London's Telegraph, (via Theo Spark):

She is a former Marxist guerrilla whose organisation once stole $2.5 million from the safe of the governor of São Paulo.

Locked up and tortured by the dictatorship which ran Brazil during the 1970s, she was once branded by a prosecutor as the "Joan of Arc of subversion".

Yet in less than a month's time Dilma Rousseff is on course to become Brazil's first woman president, entrusted with running the largest and fastest-growing economy in Latin America ....

For someone who was once an active member of an armed Marxist group, fighting to overthrow the dictatorship, it is quite a change.

The daughter of a middle class Bulgarian immigrant and a schoolteacher in Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil, she realised upon leaving a privileged school that the world was "not a place for debutantes".

She was 16 when Brazil fell prey to a military coup in 1964 and like many was soon drawn into the world of underground opposition.

Introduced to Marxist politics by the man who became her first husband, Claudio Galeno, she helped build up one of the guerrilla organisations trying to overthrow the government - at one point spending three years in prison.

After democracy was restored she had a daughter, Paula, now a 33-year-old lawyer, with her second husband Carlos Araújo, a revolutionary leader who had met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. She trained as an economist she entered conventional left-wing politics and professional public service.

In 2001, by now divorced again, she joined Lula's Workers' Party and her experience in the country's energy ministry quickly impressed the new president. A cabinet job as energy minister followed before she was appointed his chief of staff in 2005.

But many have questioned how she can be running for the presidency.

Critics say she was simply the last senior Lula crony standing since one aide after another was forced to quit in scandals over alleged slush funds, bribery or blackmail - including, last week, her own former aide who had followed in her footsteps as Lula's chief of staff.

Her lumbering speaking style and lack of personal charisma do not make her an obvious candidate and - in what was seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to protect Ms Rousseff - the government made it illegal for television and radio broadcasters to make fun of the candidates.

The Only Survivor of the National Peoples Gang...

Legend has it that David Bowie wrote "Panic in Detroit" - one of the great hard-driving masterpieces of Bowie's 1973's Aladdin Sane - in homage to Iggy Pop's tales of urban revolutionaries during the late-'60s riots in Detroit. The studio recording is miles-away better than live cuts, so please enjoy this YouTube montage featuring an iconographic history of the song's origins and impact:

Police departments across the country are readying for urban unrest on Tuesday, which may be triggered by the dramatic circumstances surrounding this year's election (a close Obama defeat with electoral irregularities is my worst case scenario for violence).

I've been listening to the song quite a bit during my morning drive-time (thinking of all the crazed Obamaniacs in a panic across the land), so now's as good a time as ever to post it:

Ah oooh...
He looked a lot like che guevara, drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion, such a humble man
The only survivor of the national peoples gang
Panic in detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone
Panic in detroit (oh oh oh aahh, oh oh oh aahh)...

I'll have more tomorrow, dear readers.

Census Worker Was Naked, Bound: Leftists Blame Bachmann, Beck, Limbaugh, Malkin, and Palin

At the New York Times, "Witness Says Census Worker Was Naked, Bound" (via Memeorandum). Of course, that's confirmation that Bill Sparkman's death couldn't have been suicide. You know, the right-wingers killed him. From airhead Larisa Alexandrovna:

I ... think it is absolutely fair to ask why someone would target a census worker (and sadly, a single father of two)? I have never heard of a Census worker being murdered before. I am sure it happens and has probably happened even in recent times, but I simply have never read or heard another instance of such a crime. So at the very least we can say it is a rare crime.

And I think that it is also fair to question the role Rep. Michelle Bachmann [sic] (the psychotic, drooling, knuckle-dragger, ill-informed conspiracy theorist, birther and hater masquerading as a member of Congress) jihad against the Census Bureau had something to do with it.

Okay. Right.

And since Charles Johnson's also advocating this meme, it's no doubt ironclad! (Memeorandum link only - trying to observe the LGF embargo.)

How about at Democratic Underground, "Handy Guide to how Republicans and Fox News are Responsible For Census Worker Being Hanged":

We need to absolutely expose Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, CNN's Lou Dobbs, Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh and the legion of others parroting right-wing lies for trumping up this nonsense and getting people to now commit murder in a hideous fashion.

Conservatives getting people to commit murder?

Okay. That's a really credible hypothesis coming from folks who post with murderous Che Guevara avatars. It's kinda like, you know, communists don't have to "get" anyone to murder people - they just go out and cut down their opponents without provocation.

And how about that "Fed" graphic above? Oh, that's from The Brad Blog, "Was the 9/12 Murder Related to Inflammatory Rhetoric of Beck, Bachman, and Fox 'News'? Or to Recent Local Events That Have Rocked the Rural, Poor, Republican County? Or All of the Above?" Geez, all that, and the Photoshop's already enough for an indictment!

But wait! Maybe it wasn't the right wing after all. Even the nihilist Firedoglake is skeptical:

Before we assume that this apparent homicide was a response solely to the attacks Michele Bachmann and others have made on the census, it's worth recalling how Clay County made news earlier this year, when a bunch of local officials were indicted for vote fraud.

Whew! I feel better already. All that Fox viewing is turning me into a murderer!

Related: "Sparkman: Casualty of Methland, USA? Or Victim of Anti-Government Bile?" (via Memorandum). Plus Lindsay "Don't Spell My Name Wrong You Nazi Stormtrooper" Beyerstein's on the case, "Meth and Anti-Government Extremism Not Mutually Exclusive."

Obama's Socialism in America: UPDATED!!

For socialist commenter Tim Gaskill, here's Dr. Sanity, "THE POLITICAL LEFT: UNITED IN HATE WITH AMERICA'S FOES":

If the left understands anything, it is that in order for their ideology and its promised utopia to be born, they must thoroughly destroy America and undermine everything America stands for in the world. Once that has been accomplished, then their way is clear. Of course, they truly believe they will be able to control the Islamist genie they have encouraged, appeased and enabled along the way. That's why they are so nonchalant about terrorism and the threat of Islamic jihad. First, they see themselves on the same side politically; and second, they believe they won't have any trouble stopping the Jihad once they are in power. What's the big deal? They also intend to roll back the rising seas, stop global warming, and heal the planet, after all.

Cited there is Jamie Glazov's United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Fidel Castro agrees, and the results are witnessed below at Che Guevara's revolutionary firing squads:

Recall that Fidel has repeatedly endorsed Barack Obama, most recently in praising Democratic-socialist ObamaCare:

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform “a miracle” and a major victory for Obama’s presidency, but couldn’t help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

See also, "Obama's Socialism in America" (images from the Oceanside tea party).

RELATED: Ronald Kessler, "Obama Espoused Radical Views in College."

Barack Obama at the West Bank

Via Little Green Footballs, here's Palestinian artist Walid Ayyub completing a portrait of Barack Obama in Ramallah, West Bank:

As Barack Obama prepares to visit the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, a Palestinian artist sketches Obama among his other portraits of Jesus, “martyred” Hamas terrorist Abdel Aziz Rantisi (“The Pediatrician of Death”), and Che Guevara.

With a peace dove, of course. You couldn’t make this up.

See also, "Obama Reaps Whirlwind of Positive Coverage In Iraq."

Photo Credit: Getty Images

'Carlos the Jackal' Goes On Trial in France

I remember reading Robert Ludlum novels back when I was a teenager, and "Carlos the Jackal" was one of the mysterious terrorists in the background. There was almost a romanticism about it. Well, he's obviously not so mysterious or romantic.

At LAT:

The man known as Carlos the Jackal, once one of the world's most feared and hunted terrorism suspects, went on trial in a Paris court Monday for a series of bombings nearly 30 years ago.

Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was smiling and defiant as he was accused of being the mastermind behind four attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and injured nearly 200.

Asked to state his occupation, Ramirez, 62, replied that he was a "professional revolutionary," adding, "of the Leninist tradition."

He then insisted that although he had been born in Venezuela he had been given Palestinian nationality by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose cause he espoused.

With his gray hair, beard and reading glasses and needing a chair for his "bad back," Ramirez bore little resemblance to the photographs of him with dark hair, Che Guevara beret and sunglasses when he was at the height of his notoriety in the 1970s. While on the run from police in his heyday, he was reported to have had plastic surgery to change his appearance.

However, he had clearly lost none of his ability to provoke, giving a clenched-fist salute to a supporter on the public benches and leaping up to rage, in heavily accented French, about the "racist, Zionist state of Israel."

The outburst drew a round of applause from a group of young men at the back of the courtroom, prompting a warning against disorder from the president of the court, Olivier Leurent.

Amy Bishop Killed Minorities: Leftists Silent on 'Racist' Rampage; Victims' Families Ask, 'Why Was She Still Teaching?'

I just noticed something about the Amy Bishop case: Her victims were minorities. From left to right at the photo: Dr. Adriel Johnson Sr., Dr. Gopi Podila, and Dr. Maria Davis. The image is from CBS News, "Did Amy Bishop, Accused University of Alabama Shooter, Murder Her Own Brother?"

But I noticed this after watching the clip at ABC's Good Morning America below. And see, "Alabama University Shooting: Suspect Amy Bishop's Violent Past Gets Another Look":

The alleged violent past of the once-seemingly docile University of Alabama professor accused of a fatal shooting rampage has stunned the family of her victims and prompted investigators to probe deeper into her past.

Amy Bishop was a suspect in an attempted mail bombing of a Harvard professor. ABC News has learned that investigators will re-open the 1986 shooting death of professor Amy Bishop's brother. Declared accidental at the time, investigators say they were never comfortable with the ruling.

Investigators also revealed that seven years later, Bishop was the prime suspect in a 1993 mail bombing attempt on a Harvard Medical School professor.

"I just feel angry," LaTasha Davis, step-daughter of shooting victim Maria Davis, told "Good Morning America" today. "How did she even get a job working at the school when she had that type of background?"

This is really something: Not only is Amy Bishop a leftist who killed her brother and got a pass from the politically correct criminal justice system (especially Democratic Congressman and then-Massachusetts DA Bill Delahunt), she's also a suspected pipe bomber who is now accused of premeditated murder of three faculty colleagues who were presiding over her tenure case. But add on top of this the fact that the premeditation included the planned killings of three non-white colleages and this really should be explosive for the radical multiculturalists. They keep looking for "motive" (here) or they suggest that Bishop killed as the "result of growing up in a dysfunctional home" (here), which is a version of the "deranged individual" theory so popular among folks who guffaw at the thought that jihadis might actually wage holy war on the innocents (here). But perish the thought that Bishop's motive could have been racism? Maybe Harvard-trained left-wing professors get a pass on that. Leftists aren't asking, in any case. And there's been a deafening silence of the race of the victims from the Obama-enabling press corps. If the suspected killer of Drs. Johnson, Podila, and Davis had been a fan of Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh, the entire radical netroots would have by now mounted a lynch-mob campaign against the "fanatical right." And that's to say nothing of the Larisa Alexandrovnas and Al Sharptons who'd creep out of their victimology hell-holes to decry the "racist" murders of the diverse faculty members.

But it's a quiet few days on the left. The Amy Bishop case isn't fitting the template for the race-hustling outrage of the moment.
RELATED: "Quincy Man Recalls Amy Bishop Holdup." (Via Memeorandum.) Also blogging, Jules Crittenden and Gateway Pundit.

ADDED: Blazing Cat Fur, "Leftist Racial Killing Spree."

AND MORE: See also the first-hand report from Professor Joseph Ng, a former UC Irvine student, who witnessed the murders. Ng confirms Amy Bishop's premeditation and potentially racist motivations. Ng is a Chinese surname. I'll need more information, but so far one-fourth of those at the tenure meeting were ethnic minorities. I'll update later, but it very well could be that Amy Bishop was disgruntled because "quota hires" were denying her tenure. Perhaps the lady was "white trash" and never quite broke out into the more supposedely refined strata of the faculty elite (or, more likely, they're all like that). Boy, this just keeps getting worse for the radical leftists! See, "Former UCI Student Saw Faculty Shootings":

We were 12 all together (including the shooter) sitting around an oval table in a modest size conference room . There were only one door to enter/exit. The shooter was a disgruntled faculty member who didn’t get tenured after several appeals and a law suit. About 30min into the meeting, she got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head. Our chairman got it the worst as he was right next to her along with two others who died almost instantly.

That's almost like an assembly line, Che Guevara-ish in fact, or Taliban-ish.

Poor Turnout for May Day Protests, but Longshoremen Take Advantage

Yesterday' s May Day rallies around the country were much smaller than those held in recent years, as the New York Times indicates:

Thousands of immigrants and their supporters marched in several cities on Thursday to demand civil rights at a time when crackdowns against illegal immigrants are rising.

The May Day demonstrations were significantly smaller than in previous years, and gone were calls for a nationwide boycott of businesses and work, as protest leaders had urged last year. The Spanish-language D.J.’s who had heavily promoted previous marches stuck largely to their regular programming. And disagreements among advocates over the best approach to winning legal status for illegal immigrants had diminished organizing firepower, with many groups turning their attention to voter registration and citizenship drives.

In many cities, including New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, crowds were a small fraction of those in previous years, with few people outside protest areas even aware that marches were under way.

Some supporters said they had lost a rallying cry in the stalled effort in Congress to revamp immigration law. At the same time, with the government stepping up border and immigration enforcement, a cloud of fear has settled over immigrants who were worried that the rallies would lead to more sweeps.

Milwaukee had one of the more robust turnouts, with thousands of people gathering, as they did last year. Protesters called on the presidential candidates, each of whom has supported Congressional efforts to allow a way for certain illegal immigrants to gain legal status, to make immigration issues a priority.

“We want a commitment from the three presidential candidates to pass humane immigration reform in the first 100 days in office,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, director of Voces de la Frontera, the main organization behind the Milwaukee march.

In Los Angeles, where riot police officers beat and shoved demonstrators and journalists last year, some marchers were concerned about trouble, though across the nation the marches were largely peaceful.

So peaceful, in fact, that the West Coast dock workers, who argued for a work stoppage in protest of the war in Iraq, may have in fact took advantage of the nationwide events for some R&R outside of the legal framework on the longshoreman's ongoing labor negotiations.

See the Los Angeles Times, "Dockworkers Take May Day off, Idling All West Coast Ports":

Thousands of dockworkers at 29 West Coast ports took the day off Thursday, effectively shutting down operations at the busy complexes in what the union called a protest of the war in Iraq but employers worried might be a prelude to labor unrest.

The stand-down at ports including Los Angeles and Long Beach -- which combined handle 40% of the imported goods arriving in the United States each year -- idled ships and cranes, stranded thousands of big rigs and halted movement of about 10,000 containers during the eight-hour day shift.

The show of force by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which ended as workers reported for the Thursday night shift at Southern California's twin ports, came two months before its contract expires with the Pacific Maritime Assn., a group of cargo carriers, terminal operators and stevedore companies.

The action also, as one labor historian put it, added significant support for May Day, which has become the preeminent working-class and protest event of the year. The union may have taken a calculated risk that allowing its members to participate was worth potentially aggravating employers in the middle of contract negotiations.

What I found interesting is the longshoreman's union, which boasts some of the highest paid union workers in the country, appeared indifferent to the effects of their walk out on independent contractors and small-time laborers:

Perhaps hardest hit by the job action were the local ports' 16,800 independent truck operators, many of whom were greeted at terminal gates by guards with a blunt message: "We're closed. Turn around."

Among them was Guillermo Castillo, 35, of Calexico, who decided to wait it out near the TraPac Terminal in the Port of Los Angeles. Resting his head on a towel matted against his cab door, Castillo complained: "I heard nothing about this. I'm losing a whole day of work, and about $580."

A mile to the east at the Port of Long Beach, Nelson Hernandez, 25, of Bellflower was among half a dozen short-haulers killing time at a lunch wagon parked outside a terminal gate. Shaking his head in dismay, he said, "No work anyplace around here. Losing $400, at least. I'm going home."

So much for worker solidarity?

Photo Credit: "Flag-waving and placard-carrying marchers crowd Broadway in downtown, L.A.," Los Angeles Times (notice the Che Guevara images of totalitarian chic).

Amanda Marcotte: "The Actual Values of the Country"

Well, since Pam Spaulding lied about American Power, I've gotten more than my fair share of hits from Pandagon. So, checking my Sitemeter right now turns up this nugget from Amanda Marcotte on "wingnut psychology":

Conservatives have a major issue. The reason they feel under attack is that the dominant values of the country are officially liberal - it’s bad to be racist, sexist, or homophobic, it’s bad to suggest poor people are subhuman, etc. Couple that with the perception, often correct, that the actual dominant values of the country are sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-poor, etc. (Though less so all the time.) People don’t like to be thought of as sexist or racist, but they want to hang onto their beliefs, and Republicans need to communicate with those people.

Yeah, right.

There's a lot here, but I'll just make a few points: Yes, the dominant values in America are liberal, but classically liberal in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (more on this stuff, here). The classical liberal perspective wants limits on governmental power and respect for the rights of the minority within a constitutional regime of delegated powers. Classical liberals prefer markets to states, and they have faith in the capacity of human reason and reverence for the God-given natural rights of humankind.

Flowing from classical liberalism is a belief that the individual should be left alone by the state, and that the distribution of society's opportunities and resources should be determined by ability and merit. When government intervenes to "level the playing field" negative externalities result. If taxes are raised beyond a bare minimum required for adequate public goods provision, people will not work and invest for fear of confiscatory power and minimal returns to entrepreneurial activity. Society's overall product will reach a less optimal level as the state "disincentivizes" individual dynamism.

All advanced democratic states have passed through a developmental process of modernization of the regime, where elitist, racist, and sexist hierarchies were challenged and then overturned through extended democratization. In the United States, the process was long and violent, but throughout the twentieth-century the expansion of rights - through the suffrage and workplace democracy - has been extended to the point of widely acknowledged equality of opportunity across the land. The 2008 Democratic primaries marked the legitimation of the norm of political equality, when a black man and a white women - two members of a "previously disadvantaged group" - vied for the mantle of the Democratic presidential nomination, and thus the practically-assumed accession to the presidency.

For women and minorities today, a classically liberal ideological orientation predicts increasing integration and upward mobility into the great institutions of economic and political power in American life. Most women today feel themselves restrained only by their own aspirations and choices, not prejudicial structural barriers to entry into educational, economic, and leadership occupations.

So Ms. Marcotte's not really talking about "liberal" ideology, but secular progressive "rights" and radical "feminist" ontological constructions of "androcentric" patriarchical sex/submissive regimes of dominations. In this frame, American society is irreparably racist and sexist, and right activists are motivated by a Marxian-progressivism of activist "praxis." Under that model, reigning patterns of natural and meritocratic differences are inherently "hegemonic," and "unequal power structures" systematically subordinate gender and racial "minorities" to disparate treatment in law, politics, society, and the home.

Thus, we can see the problem for Ms. Marcotte: It can't logically be the situation that society is both "officially liberal" while the "actual" patterns of social interaction in "the country are sexist, racist, homophobic, anti-poor."

Hence, we have an inherent contradiction in Ms. Marcotte's meme of societal bigotry and hegemonism. And that brings us to what we're really seeing here: Rank demonization of traditional sectors of society as part of a perpetual campaign of victimology and grievance-mongering shakedown. If conservatives criticize "big government," with its unending entitlements and welfare handouts to the truly idle and brain-addled poor, they must be "sexist or racist." And since the left has reprogrammed the institutions of education and communications, it's "politically incorrect" to even make an off-color joke or to mention homosexuality and murder in the same breath: That's "hate speech," and demands censure by the thought mandarins of the progressive media-police.

All the while, people like Ms. Marcotte claim "the high moral ground," which is of course a little hard to do when people like this have been fired from a major Democratic presidential campaigns for anti-Catholic bigotry. Of course, leftists are so dumb, that their discourse swirls the drain of extreme secular inanity, and if it weren't for the lowest-common denominator media-culture of "up-is-down" socialistic relativism, conservatives in turn wouldn't be batting an eye one way of the other.

The problem is our dumbed-down anything goes culture - which makes celebrities out of terrorists like Che Guevara and William Ayers. We see a prevailing order whereby anyone gets a pass by the left's nihilist hordes in the name of "tolerance" and "enlightened" thought. Princeton economic socialists who are technically experts in international trade are reborn as Nobel-winning progressive rockstars, and snarky HBO cable-comedy airheads can call God silly on national and international awards shows with nary an outcry - indeed, all of this is considered profound and forward-looking.

In any case, that's the world we live into today, not one of "racist, homophobic, anti-poor" hierarchies, which are in fact manufactured crises in the minds of the dishonest Democrati-leftists who working feverishly to undermine this great nation from within.

The Left's Culture of Death

An essential commentary, from Bob Belvedere, "The Naked Face of Leftism: Death Mongers."

Genuine progressive ideology --- and by that I mean Marxist-infused social justice redistributionism and nihilist anti-morality --- is the contemporary evil of the modern political world. Make no mistake, Councillor Collin Brewer's comments, discussed at the post above, we're frankly depraved. But considering the left's abortion holocaust alone, as just one example, they were quite tame.

I'm personally horrified by much of what counts as "progressive" politics. It's taken me a long time to truly understand how deeply corrupted society is by the disease of leftism. I don't know how we turn things around, how we help young people realize that their interests are harmed by the Kool-Aid of radicalism, but whatever the answer, it's a program of civic renewal that should be the cause of any real conservative activist.

Folks should read Neo-Neocon's outstanding piece at PJ Media from a week or so back, "Why Do Some Liberals Become Conservatives?" Unlike other accounts of political transformation (change) from left to right --- and recall that Cinnamon Stillwell's, "The Making of a 9/11 Republican," remains the best --- Neo-Neocon (a.k.a. Jean Kaufman) offers an explanation based on cognitive consistency theory:

Rarely, if ever, are prospective changers actually seeking change. In fact their previous political positions on the left may be quite firmly and strongly held, and they would probably consider anyone quite mad who had the audacity to inform them of the transformation about to take place.

But although they may not be interested in change, change is interested in them. It usually begins with something external, some new information encountered seemingly by accident, something that starts to bug the person because it contradicts or doesn’t fit easily into his or her pre-existing framework. It’s like a buzzing fly that won’t quit and can’t be ignored. It causes discomfort, a sense of unease, and the disequilibrium that comes from the dilemma known as cognitive dissonance.

It’s such an unpleasant experience that people are usually eager to resolve it. How they do that is one point at which changers split off from non-changers. The latter group, if faced with that very same information, might just swat that fly — that is, in their discomfort at the knowledge that seems incongruous with their previous beliefs, they would either discredit the new information, minimize it, rationalize it, or shut it out entirely, thus ending the discomfort and the dilemma.

But those who ultimately end up as changers can’t seem to put it away that easily. For them, something once seen cannot be unseen. Perhaps they have a different habit of mind to begin with, one more accustomed to challenging its own beliefs and assumptions, one more uncomfortable with contradictions.

Keep reading.

That model theorizes something of an abrupt shift in ideology triggered by an event that jars an individual's sense of consistency. But that's not always how people change ideological positions. In contrast, for example, gradual change is consistent with the idea of politics as a life-long learning process. People become set in their ways. And hence, people become conservative in terms of doing things a "right" way. People might think they're "liberal" in their youth, but they realize they're quite traditional in a number of respects, especially regarding thrift, morality and personal enterprise. In my case, I thought I was "liberal" into my 30's. My dad especially was a New Deal Democrat and a black American who instilled the values of the civil rights movement in me and my sisters. But the Democrat Party of today bears little resemblance to the party of the middle 20th century. The notion of centrism here might apply, for while Democrats have always been concerned about using government to shift resources to those with less, the left today is an explicitly statist, far-left anti-capitalist tendency bereft of the moral epistemology of America's founding. The left today is at the least a movement toward (European-style) socialist democracy and more likely a movement toward a (Utopian) proletarian revolution through a re-engineering of society (i.e., popular entertainment and the mass media) and the corruption of the cultural institutions of the state (i.e., public education). I was always conservative in terms of personal responsibility, honesty, and hard work. When I realized that most people on the left didn't share those values I knew that I was no longer a Democrat. Most of all, the left's stab-in-the-back on the Iraq war sealed the deal and I became an activist for truth. Throw in becoming a parent and basically experiencing a religious awakening (in the personal sense of objective truth), I found out once and for all that everything I'd come to believe about "leftist morality" and being a "liberal" was stupid.

Progressives are evil. (Remember, "liberals" aren't liberal.) Nothing brought the truth home on that count more than blogging over this last 7 years. People know my battles with leftist ghouls and their program to destroy decent people on the right. The culture of death Bob writes about is seen in all of the manifestations of collectivist harassment, stalking, and lies. As I've said many times, leftists would actually murder their conservative opponents if they could get away with it. One of the main reasons conservatives should never cave on gun rights is some day they might need firearms to guard against the tyranny of a progressive majority that's captured the state. (It's not just state power that's a threat, but progressive majoritarian redistributionist state power.) Seriously. Patriots need to bear arms against socialists who want to deprive them of life, liberty and property through the corrupted power of the collectivist state. Nothing can stand in the way of this, from the left's ideological perspective, because it's truly totalitarian in its goal to eradicate all sources of resistance. Death then becomes part of the progressive agenda, as we've seen from Stalin to Pol Pot to Che Guevara. Liberals have no values --- they must make gods of men --- because their ungodly campaign of death and destruction demands it. There can be no other way for collectivists.

In any case, don't miss the all the good stuff over at TCOTs.

Shattering Myths on Domestic Radicals: "The Baader Meinhof Complex"

Jeffrey Herf's essay on "The Baader Meinhof Complex," the German documentary film on the Red Army Faction, the most prominent and deadly left-wing terrorist organization in postwar West Germany, may be the most stimulating essay you'll read today.

Here's Herf's key section on the ideological and terrorist core of the Baader-Meinhof program:

Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex begins with the anti-Vietnam and anti-Shah demonstrations in West Berlin of the late 1960s. Its depictions of left-wing leader Rudi Dutschke leading a chant of "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" at what is probably the Free University in Berlin, police violence against anti-Shah demonstrators, the shootings of Dutschke and student Benno Ohnesorg, and attacks on the right-wing Springer Press bring the viewer back to the maelstrom of violence out of which the Red Army Faction emerged. We see the evolution of Ulrike Meinhof from left-wing journalist to terrorist, as well as the emergence of Andreas Baader (a foul-mouthed thug with an appetite for violence) and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, a minister's daughter-turned-radical. Director Uli Edel and writer Bernd Eichinger present the RAF as it was - a brutal, violent organization - while flatly and effectively contradicting some of the myths surrounding the group. They show the RAF shooting an unarmed office worker in a successful effort to free Baader from custody, placing bombs in police departments and at the Springer Press building, and exchanging fire with police after being offered the option of peacefully surrendering. They present the RAF seizure of the German Embassy in Stockholm and the murder of its military attache, Andreas von Mirbach. Scenes of the murder of German banker Jurgen Ponto in his home (though disputed in its details by his widow) and of the assassination of German Attorney General Siegfried Buback and his bodyguards with machine guns by two assassins on a motorcycle leave nothing to the imagination; they are barbaric. In 1972, Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin were captured and placed in separate jails. But, in response to pressure from the prisoners and their supporters on the outside, they were moved to a special floor reserved for them in Stammheim prison. Many European intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, subsequently accepted the RAF's claim that the prisoners were being mistreated in Stammheim. One of the important accomplishments of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is to show that the prisoners resided in what was, as jails go, a relatively palatial environment. They had televisions, stereos, radios, and books. For the first time in post-war West German history, men and women were allowed on the same floor. They could meet and talk with one another in preparation for their trial. The film also depicts the role their lawyers played in conveying messages back and forth between RAF prisoners and RAF members on the outside--and in smuggling guns hidden inside legal briefing books to the prisoners. The high point of public attention for the group came in the fall of 1977 with the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, one of Germany's leading businessmen, in an effort to bargain for the release of the RAF prisoners. (Meinhof had committed suicide in 1976, but others were still alive.) The kidnapping began with a well-planned massacre. Schleyer's car was rammed by another. One of the RAF women pulled a machine gun out of a baby carriage. In seconds, other RAF members mowed down all of Schleyer's bodyguards and his driver with machine guns before seizing him. In a careful reconstruction of the crime scene based on the extensive investigation done at the time, Aust, Edel, and Eichinger have produced a cinematic moment that demolishes any of the romantic aura that may still surround these killers in some circles. In fact, police investigators found over 20 bullets in the corpses of two of the bodyguards. The film ends with Schleyer's murder in woods near the German-Belgium border. The film shatters one more RAF myth as well. When the West German government refused to release the prisoners, the RAF upped the ante and, with cooperation from Palestinian terrorists, seized a Lufthansa flight and threatened to blow it up unless its demands were met. After German special forces stormed the plane and released the hostages, the RAF prisoners in Stammheim committed suicide. The RAF and its gullible or cynical apologists insisted that they were murdered. Investigations by numerous judicial and parliamentary bodies have repeatedly confirmed that two of the prisoners shot themselves with guns smuggled into the prison, while another hung herself. A fourth attempted suicide by stabbing herself but was saved by prison doctors. Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex places on the big screen the truth about these self-inflicted deaths, which RAF supporters transformed into a politically useful story of martyrdom at the hands of the allegedly fascist state.

Now, I want to make a break here, because the following part of Herf's essay is so important it needs to be highlighted:

The admirable candor of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex provides a much-needed challenge to Hollywood. No major American movie has yet told the story of the Weathermen, or for that matter the Black Panthers, with equal honesty. To be sure, the Weathermen did not engage in a campaign of murder comparable to that of the Red Army Faction in West Germany - or the Red Brigades in Italy or the Japanese Red Army. But neither, as some seem to think, was it simply the angriest part of the anti-war movement. In fact, its stated purpose was to carry out "armed struggle" in the United States in solidarity with third world communist movements and with the Black Panther Party in this country. The bombs being prepared by Weathermen in a Manhattan townhouse that exploded in March 1970 were intended to be set off at an upcoming dance for soldiers and their dates at Fort Dix. Had they exploded at the dance, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people would have been killed. Members of the Weathermen were fond of arrogantly denouncing the great majority of participants in the anti-war and civil rights movements who declined to "pick up the gun." They mocked this decency as evidence of a "non-struggle attitude" or as the result of "white skin privilege." Today, former Weathermen leader Bill Ayers continues to rationalize the actions taken by his group - most prominently in a recent New York Times op-ed piece. An American equivalent of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex - a movie that aimed to set the historical record straight by portraying the most violent 1960s radicals as they truly were - would do an enormous service.

I think it's hard for people nowadays - especially young people, hypnotized by today's "progressive" teachers and activists - to make connections between the intense ideological radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s and what's essentially the mainstream commercialization of far-left extremism today. Notice how the RAF was in deep alliance with European intellectuals and Palestinian terrorists. Today we have much of same thing: For the last five years we've had American leftists march hand-in-hand with pro-Palestian activists denouncing the "fascist" Bush regime, and right now across Europe protesters have taken to the street waving anti-Israel banners emblazoned with swastikas to denounce Israel's "genocide" against "innocent" Gazans. Indeed, since 2003, we've seen the mainstreaming of a worldwide alliance between socialism and Islam that finds backing in state capitals from Caracas to Tehran. At home, Bill Ayers is feted on "Good Morning America" while Che Guevara's murderous ideological program has been turned into "one of the most amazing displays of historical ignorance of the last half century." It couldn't happen here? Baader-Meinhof's violent terrorist program was a "'70s thing," right? Actually, no. Perhaps today's radicals are less willing to die for a cause than in earlier decades, but when we see International ANSWER as the key sponsor of the protests against California's Proposition 8, we're seeing the mainstreaming of neo-Stalinist agitation. The group's allied cells are busy conducting Soviet-style show trials against those who made campaign contributions to the Yes on 8 forces. As I've noted many times on this blog, the same groups of radical agitators from the 1960s counterculture have shifted gears, taking the revolution online, in the comfort of cushy living rooms and partitioned office cubicles. People like this have not abandoned the struggle, only the armed component. William Ayers just published a new book of "educational pedagogy" focusing on America's system of white racial hegemony, called Race Course Against White Supremacy. Tom Hayden, who collaborated with the North Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War, is now a prominent Barack Obama supporter who maintains an active website that publishes the "Port Huron Statement." Extreme left-wing bloggers such as Chris Bowers, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas are routinely welcomed on the network news programs as "authoritative" voices of the "progressive left." Meanwhile, supporting the Iraqi resistance has been de rigeur at comment threads at mainstream blog outlets such as the Huffington Post, and smaller radical blogs such the Newshoggers cheer the deaths of mentally-impaired female suicide bombers in Iraq as brilliant tactical adaptations to American military hegemony. Times have changed, of course. Most of today's "progressives" would recoil in faux horror at the mention of taking up AK-47s against agents of the American state. Yet, these same people are all too ready and able to denounce any and all manifestations of traditional culture as "fascist" as they work to destroy American exceptionalism through hare-brained but relentless subversion from within. Keep this in mind when you get a chance to see "The Baader Meinhof Complex."