Leninism in the USA
Leninism in the USA
First let me define Leninism. To me the key feature of Leninism is that Lenin declared the party to be the highest good. Thus acts were to be judged as pro-party or anti-party. In fact the very same acts were good or bad depending on whether they were done by the party or some other organization. Claims of fact were judged as pro-party or anti party. People were told not to be selfish and to choose between “your truth and the party’s truth.” Events were evaluated as good for the party or bad for the party hence “The worse it is, the better it is.” Most of all, the party demanded absolute obedience — a Leninist level of discipline.
I don’t think I need to discuss specific episodes to make it clear that I think the Leninist party in the USA calls itself The Republican Party.
The same acts … :
The party’s position is that to send predators to kill people without warning is, now, a law enforcement approach to terrorism. Reading Reid his rights after 5 minutes is fine, but reading Abdulmutalab his rights after 9 hours is unacceptable.
Claims of fact …:
global warming is a hoax, Reagan showed how to cut taxes without adding to the debt, the health care bill is a government takeover. The individual mandate is uncontroversially needed no it’s a violation of the constitution etc.
The view that the worse it is the better it is the only explanation of why Republicans filibustered a bill which they cosponsored.
The American Lenin.
OK the American Lenin is Dick Cheney, but McConnell is, at least, the American Zinoviev.
‘leninism’ may be ‘ bit’ more complex than suggested,,,probably should not be posed in such static fashion, et cet.
aside from that –
figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO) indicate that the impact of the stimulus on employment is uneven. In its January 2010 update, the ILO estimates global unemployment at 212 million in 2009, or around 34 million above its 2007 level, with most of the increase having occurred during 2009. In sum, the impact of the fiscal stimuli delivered by many governments does not seem to be, as yet, adequate to stall, let alone reverse the employment decline resulting from the crisis.
http://triplecrisis.com/employment-in-the-recovery/#more-228
Solidarity Forever,,,Pete Seeger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYiKdJoSsb8
I wish we could see a bit more of this definitional approach, it might help people think.
However, I don’t know if this “the party is all and all else is nothing” approach counts exactly as Leninism — for instance, is Leninism still Leninism if it loses Lenin? Does the group generate a new Lenin to replace him, like beehives raise a new queen?
No, to me this policy is just “we win, nobody else wins.” Where do you always see this as the prime directive? In children, that’s where. Specifically small children, maybe age 5 or so, when they want to play simple card games. When they win a hand they crow with victory. When they lose a hand, “It’s not fair!” and “Those rules are stupid!” or they throw down their cards and stomp away. Sound familiar?
This is normal in small children, but abnormal and destructive in adults, made much worse by adults’ cleverness and ability to lie and rationalize. It is the same childish approach whether a toddler uses it, or a grown man with a doctorate and a cushy job with a think tank.
“First let me define Leninism.”
Shouldn’t Leninism be defined by, you know, Lenin? 😉 I’m just sayin’.
“To me the key feature of Leninism is that Lenin declared the party to be the highest good.”
This point might well be an item of common knowledge, but I personally am not clear on its source. Would it be possible to point us to Lenin’s writings establishing this point?
Robert,
It looks like you intentionally omitted the word communist from the phrase “communist party”. Also. I see you’re telling the Reid lie again. You know I already explained the difference on another thread by highlighting that Reid was caught in December 2001 and that we only started sending people to Gitmo in 2002. Reid was a beligerent ball carrier for Al Quida and we should have done whatever it took to extract whatever information he was aware of. The procedures were not in place to do this until the Bush administration put them in place. There were in place for the Christmas bomber but were not fully utilized because this administration did not initially understand the seriousness of what had happened and only changed their tune because of political pressure.
Mitch McConnell is a great senator and a great American. I wish he would come to Massachusetts and run against Kerry. It would be pretty cool to have Scott Brown and Mitch McConnell as my senators.
One last point, given that you’re sitting over there in Italy why do you think you have any standing to make these sort of comments.
Definition: The Richard Reid lie is when anyone compares how Richard Reid was handled in civilian courts but does aknowledge that his case happened before Gitmo was up and running and it also was a basis for having terrorists tried in military courts.
And Here is what Marx wanted to do:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Not everthing is bad on this list. I agree with public education and the abolution of child labor. That might be it though. The rest is heavy handed over the top government meddling in the private economy.
Liberals, democrats, and many Italians support a only slightly watered down version of this list. So I think this makes the democrat “party” closer to the communist “party”, and I would say the republican “party” is not at all like the communist “party”.
Noni,
Geez, another woman that think’s her mommy experience makes her a philosopher.
At least in Lenin’s day the Party did not take positions on matters of science. Comrades could debate issues current in fields of science as was done concerning the legitimacy of psychoanalysis in the early 1920’s. But the Party then did not take votes on facts. Scientific evidence was used to support a political analysis or advance a position but these two things should not be confused.
When Stalin came along all this rigour disappeared and thereafter the Communist Party took positions on questions of scientific fact. McConnel stands in the Stalinist tradition. Lenin’s good name should not be sullied by association with this GOP degenerate.
Cantab,
Your snark is unwelcome in this form.
Cantab’s comment has got to be a joke, right? Right?
Cantab–I had no idea that I advocate or would welcome the abolition of property/inheritance rights, state ownership of the means of production, state control of access to capital, and so on. That property confiscation stuff sounds unfamiliar too. We didn’t talk about that stuff in Liberal class. So, beats me where you got your notion of liberalism.
The Republican party, whatever it now is, ain’t what it used to be. Don’t you see something odd in wanting to run for government office when the government is the problem? Lincoln thought the US government should free the slaves and save the Union. Pretty liberal, wouldn’t you say, that slave stuff? Today’s republicans apparently think that Ayn Rand was a philosopher. Who? Oh, well, never mind.
As usual, you show your disdain for the rule of law and the constition. It must really nag you that Saint Ronnie signed the convention against torture. It gives light to your cowardice to be so afraid of someone without even a functioning weapon that you would give up basic human decency. Not exactly a military man are you?
Toture doesn’t work as a intelligence gathering method. This is well known in .. the intelligence gathering circles and well documented. Pragmatically, its a waste of effort, but I suppose your goal isn’t to be pragmatic, but some child like response to lash out at powerless people because you are angry and they are in fact powerless and can’t retaliate.
I must admit, I chuckle every time I hear these pro torture arguements. I imagine you hiding under your bed not fearful of big bad men with automatic machine guns and rocket launchers, but children with rocks and middle aged disenfrachised men that wouldn’t even know what to do with a gun if they managed to get one on the plane or even start a fire for goodness sakes. lol. What information will you torture from them, their third grade teacher? The price of rice at the super market? I wonder what the Founders would think of you…
It’s unfortunate that communism, socialism, fascism etc have been dragged into this discussion. What Robert described as Leninism is merely “we-winism,” the focus being mobilization of wealth and power to the players, at the expense of nearly any other interest.
Do any of us doubt that the big money and power behind the Republicans would not transfer almost immediately to another front organization if they thought it would serve them better? The Party is not supreme — merely useful.
Noni
~unsurprised by Cantab’s insult to moms everywhere~
Rdan,
Noni want’s insult people that she disagrees with politically by calling them children. There is nothing mature or wise in doing this.
It is somewhere in the ballpark of your development
My baby doctor was T. Berry Brazelton, so I had the best, and I know it.
“Stalling” and “working” are not the same thing. What the ILO seems not to have evaluated is what the trajectory in job loss would have been absent fiscal stimulus.
It is possible, by assuming that the trajectory of job loss would not have worsened absent fiscal stimulus, to conclude that fiscal stimulus didn’t work, but that’s a pretty big assumption. We’d need to see substance behind the assumption in order to take it seriously.
It is also notable that the ILO jumbled a bunch of stimulus efforts, which started at different times, together. If one holds the timing of the arrival of US stimulus against the pattern of US job loss, one sees a distinct change in trajector as the size of the stimulus grows. In the US case, one needs to ignore the broad range of developments in the job market and focus on old forecasts or the failure of the labor market to add net new jobs in order to argue that the stimulus package hasn’t worked. That is, in fact, what partisan critics of the stimulus have done.
Oh, when I wrote in the second paragraph that it is possible to conclude, blah, blah, blah…I mean across the universe of fiscal stimulus efforts included in the ILO study, in aggregate. The US result is better than the ILO recognizes in its assessment across countries. The US result is a change in trajectory. The US effort not only seems to have worked, but it “stalled” job losses – there has been an obvious change in trajectory.
Noni,
If you don’t think that you’re into “we-winism” then you are not self aware.
Apparently, Cantab thinks that only men are allowed to extrapolate from experience, to generalize observations from one setting to another.
If a comparison is apt, and also happens to be insulting, it is still apt. The person being characterized may feel bad, but I have to say, I haven’t noticed Cantab being delicate about the feelings of those he criticizes. In fact, there is a nasty little irony in the present example, with Cantab resorting to an unfounded insult to a particular individual, while complaining about what may be a well-founded observation about a group.
Also interesting – back to sexual discrimination on Cantab’s part here – that the initial post from Robert alleges Leninism and gives a catalog of examples, and Noni alleges childishness, generalizing from those examples, but it is Noni that Cantab attacks. The attack is based on Noni’s sex, rather than her argument. I guess Noni’s sex does not suit her for duty in this particular trench.
“Oh, Look” says the mom, “that amphibian is able to beath under water. I have observed that fish are also able to breath under water.”
“How could you possibly tell?” says Cantab “You’ve had babies.”
Mustn’t allow those mommies to generalize or make inferences from their own observations.
The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin
“Everyone knows that big disagreements sometimes grow out of minute differences, which may at first appear to be altogether insignificant. A slight cut or scratch, of the kind everyone has had scores of in the course of his life, may become very dangerous and even fatal if it festers and if blood poisoning sets in. This may happen in any kind of conflict, even a purely personal one. This also happens in politics.
Any difference, even an insignificant one, may become politically dangerous if it has a chance to grow into a split, and I mean the kind of split that will shake and destroy the whole political edifice, or lead, to use Comrade Bukharin’s simile, to a crash.”
One could explore other writings of Lenin at Marxist.org. Lenin was always very contingent and pragmatic. “Theory” was what was relevant to the specific circumstances of the Bolsheviks in exile and then the demands of revolution in Russia.
It is more complicated than the post describes because Lenin, at least in theory wasn’t a Vanguardist. Theoretically there was no gap between the workers and the leadership and Party discipline was supposed to be a simple matter of following the popular will and avoiding public conflict and factionalism among the “public voices” of the Party.
I do think even this interpretation, which could be wrong I am no expert, could be applied to the Republican Party, which I think is controlled by its base more than Democrats. Republicans can hold conflicting and opposite positions on bank regulation for instance, not because the leadership is duplicitous, but because the base doublethinks. As in the Soviet Union, the rhetoric can look irrational and dishonest only because outsiders try to universalize what is a method built on contingency.
Personally, I’d have Chenny playing Levrenty Beria.
Kharris,
Apparently, Cantab thinks that only men are allowed to extrapolate from experience, to generalize observations from one setting to another.
That must be it. Any man that’s played monopoly, hide and seek, or ran a lemonaid stand are respectively qualified to run an investment bank, the FBI, or Pepsico.
It is also important to remember that to the Bolsheviks “rules” and “rights” were bourgeois artifacts, means of control for lawyers and elites.. This doesn’t necessarily mean a top-down dictatorship;the idea was a bottom-up dictatorship, i.e, true democracy without the bourgeois Robert’s rules of order or majoritarianism or filibusters. Idealistic and impractical maybe.
Of course Stalin had different ideas.
Robert could have said that Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney are like out founding fathers since they certainly more like them then any of the democrats.
Republicanism is the value system of governance that has been a major part of American civic thought since the American Revolution. It stresses liberty and rights as central values, makes the people as a whole sovereign, rejects inherited political power, expects citizens to be independent in their performance of civic duties, and vilifies corruption. American republicanism was founded and first practiced by the Founding Fathers in the 18th century.
So what you have is Robert sitting in a Cafe in Rome with his beatnik communist friends calling the closest we have today to our founding fathers a couple of Lenins. Talk about projection.
Kharris,
Our current Secretary of State spent a minimal amount of time raising her one child and her predecessor had none. They both seem up to this point to have done an adequate job in their position. Do you really think that a mother of 5 screaming kids could have done better?
If we are to take Noni’s foolishness to the extreme they why don’t we recruit the next Secretary of state from among Kindergarten teachers or someone running a day care center.
Surely this is parody. You’re not making an actual earnest talking point that can be shot down by pointing out that the republicanism in your paragraph uses a lowercase “R” are you?
Morbo,
I think Robert with his communist friends in Rome calling republican senators Lenin is the parody. Ask him if he sits around in a Cafe with young men with beards talking about socialism. Somewhere along the line he fell into a Fellini movie.
Nancy,
Read more carefully. I said the democrat/liberal position was a watered down version of socialism.
So do you think that a family ought to have the right to hand down property to the next generation without the government coming in and seizing a large part of it. It not that you fit my description. What do you think about government ownership and control in the credit market. Do you say hands off?
Go down Marx’s list and if you don’t find youself saying hell no to all items except #10 then maybe you’re a little more of a Marxist then you think you are.
Human beings of all ages use various strategies to get what they want.
Quite a lot of these strategies are tried in childhood, and discarded or at least discredited by adults.
One of these strategies is to refuse to respect rules of the game in situations where those rules work against the interests of the strategist. (“I-winism.”)
Most adults give up this strategy when they realize that when they use it, others won’t play with them, and will avoid them and hold them in contempt. But some seek out situations where avoidance isn’t an option (governing a country, for instance) and ignore the contempt of the obligate players (voters, opposing parties) while insisting that the others must adhere to the rules.
What I have seen in the Republican Party, having achieved a context where they cannot be avoided or shamed, is that they have reverted ever more deeply into those strategies which occur in earliest childhood. They dress these strategies in fine words and enact them with furrowed brows and serious-looking faces, but the strategies are the same.
The word “no,” as all mommies and some daddies know, shows up at age two. Some people never seem to give it up.
Many thanks, Bob! I’ve read a bit of Lenin, and your understanding mirrors mine. I suspect that Robert might be overstating the case against Lenin, but the people who post her are pretty serious scholars. I’d like to check out the source material for myself, and at your recommendation I’ve started with Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin. Direction to any other primary material that would helpful in evaluating Robert’s definition of Leninism would most helpful.
Funny that is the argument the Right uses to say that Palin has the executive experience to be President of the United States. Because running a small town in Alaska and spending a few months in the governor’s mansion clearly is enough to qualify her to be the leader of the free world.
What Bob said.
Also, I think the aspect of Leninism Robert is referring to is the one summed up in the phrase “Heighten the Contradictions”. You don’t openly seek to increase misery (key word ‘openly’) but welcome it when it happens because it serves to hasten the inevitable. That is while History will takes its course, there is no harm in shoving it a little farther down the road.
I and many others spent much of the Bush Administration pointing out the Trotskyite roots of the Bushevik neocons and how that was influencing the Administration and neocon ideology in general, which, like Trotskyism, called for export of ideology at gunpoint to nations which did not embrace the founding ideology of the Bushevik Revolution. While the Big Dick is one of the signers of the PNAC “Statement of Principles” that served as one of the founding documents of the neocon movement, I think it is probably a strong word to call him its “leader”. The BIg Dick embraced neocon ideology because it fulfilled his general goals, he followed the ideology, he neither created nor led it though as Vice President he implemented or influenced the implementation of major portions of the ideology.
I might add that Lenin’s emphasis upon loyalty to the Party beyond all is common to many totalitarian dictatorships, not just to Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariate”. Totalitarian dictatorships which develop a cult of Party tend to be more stable than those which adhere to a cult of personality, which often fail once the Dear Leader dies. This is true even if the Party’s ideology undergoes major changes over time — see, for example, the Chinese Communist Party, whose current ideology resembles Communism in much the same way that cheddar cheese resembles the Empire State Building. In the end, a comparison of neocon ideology with Leninism is probably not all that useful, except insofar as identifying a totalitarian strain in today’s Republican Party is concerned — a totalitarian strain which is common to many totalitarian (or wannabe-totalitarian) regimes, and we need not confine ourselves to a single divisive historical figure to arrive at that conclusion.
Funny that is the argument the Right uses to say that Palin has the executive experience to be President of the United States.
Palin was mayor and governor, the agrument from the right was that this was more executive experience that the guy who finally won. Not only that but she could see Russia from her house. Did it ever occur to you Obama might not be up to the job because of his lack of significant relevant previous experience?
Reading between the lines what I see is a group of zealots who are disappointed in their leaders’ ability to … well … lead.
Super majorities sure ain’t what they used to be. (The phrasing is for the elitists reading here.)
Cantab. The Estate Tax is simply a one time Capital Gains tax. Heirs get the new assets at their stepped up value. If the Estate Tax didn’t exist then each generation would have to retain records of each piece of capital property to determine what the tax should be when the gain was ultimately realized. Properly conceived it is a method of tax simplification and not an abolition of inheritence rights, it is not like various Kennedys, Fords, and Rockefellers are begging in the streets.
And our government like most governments around the world already controls the credit market via the Federal Reserve and various reserve requirements.
It’s nice that you are familiar with the contents of the Manifesto, which is more than 99% of your fellow roaders can say, but you do your logic slicing with a sledgehammer. Liberalism and communism draw on some common roots, notably on some ideas expressed by Thomas Paine. But this makes neither the American or French Revolutions explicitly Communistic.
This is the kind of blatant stupidity that marked McCarthyism. Since Communists supported women’s rights and civil rights for Blacks therefore both the suffrage and civil rights movements were communist. Because some unions had open participation by communists and communists sought to infiltrate and influence all unions therefore unionism is identical to communism.
Did you know that the Nazis had public schools? and Public Water Supplies? and put a Premium on outdoor exercise? Which by your logic makes every school and utility board plus the Sierra Club Nazi fronts.
Ricky did some cleanup for you.
Canny, Poor Laddie,
I appreciate that, when you were in less elevated intellectual circles, this sort of misdirection may have worked. Mis-stating your own argument to make it sound better won’t do.
Noni offered a view that some adult behavior is like the behavior of 5-year olds. She did not claim that view was based on or legitimized by her own motherhood. Your answer was that she was claiming to be a philosopher as a result of motherhood. Now, I’m not aware that one needs to put on the mantle of philosoph in order to observe and generalize, but that is the essense of your assertion. It was also not necessary to her observation that she be a mother, or base her observation only on her experience as a a mother. I’m not a mother, but I have observed both small children and adult Republicans, so could also have made the observation that Noni made.
You imposed motherhood as the source of Noni’s observation. You imposed the “philosoper” sneer.
Now, you offer non-sequitors. There is nothing in what Noni said that implies that mothers, either more or less active in the raising of their children, make better cabinet secretaries. She didn’t actually mention cabinet secretaries. You did. Nothing that Noni said has anything to do with motherhood as a qualification. Again, Noni didn’t bring up motherhood. You did, so attempting to impose anything of the motherhood argument on others is dishonest in the extreme.
All the “foolishness” that you attribute to Noni has come from you, not anywhere else. Imposing any part of this red herring on anyone but you is dishonest.
And, by the way, why is it 5 kids? Why are the screaming? Have you had a rough time being around children? Cause when mine were 5, they were more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and I never had much trouble calming them when they were upset. But I digress. The real issue here is why you are pretending that your strawman argument came from anybody but you.
***Robert could have said that Mitch McConnell and Dick Cheney are like out founding fathers since they certainly more like them then any of the democrats. *** Cantab
Well, the founders — being dead and all — are unlikely to sue you for libel, but I think that Franklin and Thomas Paine at least would take a very dim view of that pair of buffoons. I can’t imagine Washington or Jefferson much liking them either. And of course Hamilton (who, unlike they and you had mastered addition and subtraction) would be appalled at their fiscal practices. Hell, I doubt Benedict Arnold would care for them either. Arnold had his flaws but tolerating jerks and psychopaths was not one of them.
No, I’ve thought it over, and I can’t see much possibility of support for Cheney and McConnell among the founders …. I think perhaps you’d do better looking for support amongst the royalists.
Wow, I step away for a few minutes, and Cantab has run amok. Just to make the point again, in terms that seem within bounds now that poor small-minded Cannedham has stooped to name calling. This idiot Cantab is trying to pretend, again, that there is anything in this discussion which makes location germane. If were were out measuring snowfall in US neighborhoods, then the fact that Robert is in Rome (or that Cannedham imagines it so) might be relevant. In this discussion, it is just a diversion. I could be setting in Beijing or Uagadougou and make perfectly legitimate contributions to this increasingly noxious discussion. As can Roman (?) Robert. Most of what CanCan has written today is diversion, which I take to mean he feels incapable of standing his ground in a reasoned discusssion. Nothing new there.
Communism? Rome? Hold on. Apparently Can’tAdd didn’t get the memo. Ever since Cheney manipulated us into war so his puppet could feel like he had a chance to be a “great president”, propagandists and name-callers on the right has moved on to things like “traitor” and “French.” “Communist” is passe’. Get with the name-calling program…you moron.
I was with you till now. All mommies and some daddies? Don’t even try it.
Cantab. The Republican Party has made it abundently clear that they are willing to embrace a strategy of Heighten the Contradictions. They have presented no positive agenda, both their stimulus and health care plans being devoid of any useful proposals and were scored as such by CBO, certain of their leadership have gone on record as hoping to come to power on the back of an Obama fail.
This is straight out of the Leninist playbook, something Republicans have openly acknowledged in the past. Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis in 1983 called their plan to undermine support of Social Security the “Leninist Strategy” not just between themselves but in print.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj3n2/cj3n2-11.pdf
“Lenin also believed that capitalism was doomed by its inherent contradictions, and would inevitably collapse. But just to be on the safe side, he sought to mobilize the working class, in alliance with other key elements in political society, both to hasten the collapse and to ensimre that the result conformed with his interpretation of the proletarian state. Unlike many other socialists at the time, Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement’s ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents.
As we contemplate basic […]
Bruce,
Again, you seem to be mixing up fighting politically to remain fee with fighting to take away freedom. I support the former and you support the latter. So you and the other lefties are Lenin.
Kharris,
You’re babbling.
Noni
The word “no,” as all mommies and some daddies know, shows up at age two. Some people never seem to give it up.
Since the republicans are the party of no doesn’t that leave you in the corner with your Gerber and a spoon.
CoRev, there was a lot of us Democrats in the primaries who pointed out that HopeyChangey didn’t know enough about Washington to be effective there. We, unfortunately, lost. Also unfortunately, the Republicans ran a senile panderer and an idiot as their candidates rather than someone who would have been a reasonable centrist leader, so we ended up voting for HopeyChangey in the final election because at least he wasn’t senile or an idiot, but the quality of his leadership has met my expectations — i.e., not very high.
It appears to be the state of American politics today where the only people who can get elected are those who are not experienced enough to govern well, because once you have sufficient experience to govern well, you also have a sufficient track record to be spun out of context and used to destroy you by the demolition derby of screeching poop-slinging howler monkeys that is our current political discourse. And where are the needs of America and Americans in all this? Nowhere, apparently.
VtCodger,
No, I’ve thought it over, and I can’t see much possibility of support for Cheney and McConnell among the founders…
Look harder.
CoRev,
That the same thing I got from all this. A lot of sour grapes over the ‘leadership’ vacuum in the Dem party. Didn’t Bush get just about everything he wanted (except, thankfully a SS ‘fix’) without a supermajority???
Oh that’s right everything he passed was popular and smart enough to generate huge bi-partisan support – see Afghanistan, Iraq, NCLB, Patriot Act, etc etc. Has Obama repealed even one thing Bush did? Especially the stuff all here screamed bloody murder over?
Yet with Obama in the White House and holding both the Congress and Senate since Nov 2006 they can’t pass the big lefty stuff? I will note the passes numerous other bills continueing Bush’s bi-partisanly popular policys…Iraq, Afghanistan, WoT in general, Patriot Act, Telecon Immunity (forgot the name), plus trying to repeat Bush’s victorious surge in Iraq in Afghanistan and promoting those Generals that led our victories.
How about starting with something simple – rooting out the $500 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicare program that was promised in the HCR bills. Should be easily withing the Dems power to do that and I bet would be greeted with bi-partisan support!!!
Yep, sour grapes all right.
Islam will change
CoRev,
Oh and I forgot. Two huge tax cuts…all with big bi-partisan support. Now with Dems in leadership they can’t even get their own party to vote for this crap without blatant bribes….
Islam will change
Bruce,
Cantab may be a sock-puppet (I’m starting to wonder…) but he is right about Palin had more executive experiance than Obama. And she wasn’t even at the top of the ticket. The fact that her experience was miniscule just highlights the total lack thereof of Obama.
Where are the Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Reagan’s or FDR’s these days. Reguardless of what you felt about their policies they could at least lead! And LBJ would have gotten a HCR bill on his desk, that he liked, even if their was 67 Reps in the Senate…
Islam will change
/snark on/ Buff, I think you are correct on the easy $500B fix. Lessee if there’s any comment in the future re saving this money.
I also suspect we are seeing them discussing their heroes. I havent closely read all the comments has anyone referenced Che at this point? That would be the dead give away. /off/
Cantab,
I already explained the difference on another thread by highlighting that Reid was caught in December 2001 and that we only started sending people to Gitmo in 2002.
And I already explained to you that most of the first wave of Gitmo detainees were caught before Richard Reid was arrested and they were physically in Gitmo before Reid was indicted. Up until the time Reid was indicted in a civilian court there was no reason that the Bush Administration could not have sent him to Gitmo. The fact that the procedures for conducting military tribunals were not ready until March 2002 did not stop the Administration from sending prisoners to Gitmo in January, so how why should it have stopped Reid from going to Gitmo. Face it, your argument is in tatters. You basically hijacked a crappy and ill thought out argument that Charles Krauthammer has been trying to peddle. It won’t wash.
I would also say that the Republican leadership knows as much about economics as Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And like the Bolsheviks, the Republicans even play fast and loose with language, so just as a minority faction in the Communist Party calls itself the majority, so too do fringe wingnuts like to think of themselves as speaking for the mainstream. And legislation to pollute the air is called a “clean sky” initiative. And worst of all is the GOP’s constant reference to the “Homeland.” Kinda creepy.
buffpilot,
Has Obama repealed even one thing Bush did? Especially the stuff all here screamed bloody murder over?
Yes. He’s repealed most of the tax cuts. And he’s repealed a lot of Bush’s executive orders.
Mitch McConnell couldn’t dust Lenin’s beret.
The key Leninist contribution to the idea of socialist revolution was the concept of cadre, or professional revolutionaries (What is To Be Done) who could be counted on to pursue the goals of the revolution despite the distraction of bureacractic obstacles (Better Fewer, But Better), the issue of the Ultra Left (Ultra Leftism – An Infantile Disorder), and the not-infrequent necessity of compromise.
None of this characterizes the Right at any level right now – which has no real beef with bureaucracy (especially the most costly bureaucratic expenses in defense), is fearful of its “Ultra Wing” and has no angle by which to make gains by way of strategic compromise.
Until further notice, when it comes to the GOP, I’m sticking with the fascist analogies.
slugs,
I would also say that the Republican leadership knows as much about economics as Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Pelosi and Reid are the democrat leadership, you statement makes it unclear that you know this.
Buff,
Cantab may be a sock-puppet (I’m starting to wonder…)
Your personal character and integrity are inconsistent. That I’m sure of. And making little quips like this one to gain you favor makes you look weak.
Slugs,
Income taxes are where they were, he’s in Iraq, and Afghanistan. The bank bailout worked, his stimulus failed, he’s lost effective control of the Senate, and he lost healthcare.
It was a terrible year for Obama, have another one and he’s the Bupkis president
Sorry, kh.
Kharris,
Noni said her enemies were like children which is a childish remark and it might be that’s she’s gone native after hanging around with children for too long.
Cantab,
The question wasn’t whether or not Obama had repealed everything Bush did, buffpilot’s question was to ask if “even one thing” that Bush did had been repealed. I named a couple. The tax cut was not renewed, which is to say it was repealed. Lots of executive orders were repealed.
Yes, we’re still in Iraq, but the pace of withdrawal has REALLY accelerated over the last few weeks. He hasn’t lost effective control of the Senate because he never had it to begin with. You can’t lose what you didn’t have. But you’re right about healthcare. Of course, that really means taxpayers have lost too because killing healthcare reform just signed the bankruptcy note for this this country. But isn’t that exactlly the kind of thing that Lenin would have done? Destroy the country in order to gain political advantage?
Cantab,
Pelosi and Reid don’t pretend to understand economics. That’s why they have actual economists on their side to do the analysis for them. But Eric Cantor, Mike “dumb as a bag of hammers” Pence, Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell all flatter themselves as economic geniuses. I shudder to think what would happen if Sarah Palin won in 2012…we’d probably watch the Fox News People’s Daily with live coverage of Fearless Leader Palin swimming the Potomac in world record breaking time.
Slugs,
And I already explained to you that most of the first wave of Gitmo detainees were caught before Richard Reid was arrested and they were physically in Gitmo before Reid was indicted.
You explained nothing, rather you went on your bicyle and you did not back up anything you said with a quote or reference. I on the other hand posted a statement from a former U.S. Attorney general that said it was the way I said it. So the point mine and anyone that uses the Richard Reid lie is a liar.
Lenin,
Mitch McConnell couldn’t dust Lenin’s beret.
If you lefties want first dibs at Lenin’s beret its all yours — you can even trim Hitler’s moustache as a bonus.
More evidence that slugs is making things up again.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/guantanamo/timeline/
January 11, 2002: First group of 20 detainees arrives at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, where they are housed in open-air cages with concrete floors. The International Committee of the Red Cross makes its first visit six days later.
So it established that Richard Reid was processed before Gitmo was accepting terrorist suspect. He was processed according to the legal procedures and usual procedures at the time. So those using equating Reid to the Christmas day attempted bomber are committing the Richard Reid lie.
sure the process is uneven and combined but the folks at ‘triplecrisis’ are specifically looking at the global level rather than taking more anachronistic unit of analysis such as any particular nation.
‘the trajectory’ of global growth _and_ weakening global employment began prior to the current so-called recession,,,ilo has an. i believe, 2008, report on this as well.
cantab: ‘The rest is heavy handed over the top government meddling in the private economy.”
depends on what ‘government’ is and who controls ‘it’. read the immediately preceding paragraphs in the manifesto.
Ricky,
Toture doesn’t work as a intelligence gathering method.
You must have some background in military interrogation to be so arrogant about this.
I’m not into ineffective torture, nor is Cantab. So ixnay the high horse. Only a true sicko is into torture for no reason, and I don’t think that’s what the CIA or FBI are about. So either the CIA and FBI are just time-wasting sickos, or “enhanced interrogation” has some value.
However, given your obvious experience, should we immediately Mirandize a captured terrorist, respecting “the rule of law and the constitution?” If not, what level of duress is allowable or effective? If torture [def?] “doesn’t work”, what methods would you recommend?
Note that once again cantab has been successful in that he has distracted the conversation. I would not ascribe his behavior to the possible stunting of his social development. Nor would I question the relationship that Noni is pointing out, but I would not focus on the child like aspect of the behavior. It is egocentric. The child is such and unfortunately so too are a great many adults. I would not ascribe the adult display of such egocentrism to stunted social development, but rather to the fact that adult social/behavioral development results in a distribution of the characteristic of egocentrism. It is a relatively common phenomenon. Don’t judge by your own small circle of friends in whom you may not observe such a degree of egocentric (selfish) behavior.
The egotist does not see his behavior as selfish, but instead assumes the right to advance and acquire at the cost to others. A kind of, “Your loss may be my gain,” view of the world and what is acceptable behavior. The loss or gain may not be financial, but the phenomenon is still the same. The world has an aggregate value. The egocentric personality sees him/her self as being entitled to as much of a share of that value as is desired and at as little cost as is possible. How that personal need effects others is irrelevant to such an individual. The view of life is myopic. The analogy to child like behavior is inappropriate and actually a reversal of the actual process. We anthropomorphize the adult egocenrism onto the child because the child is blatant in its display. The adult behavior is generally more subtle and has many socially acceptable excuses in spite of being despised and recognised as socially destructive. It is not the adult acting like a child. It is the child displaying adult like behavior that it is not yet entitled to use.
Cantab,
Richard Reid was indicted on January 16th. By my calendar that was five days after the first batch of detainees arrived at Gitmo. That’s what I said. You lose.
Oh, but it is an adult acting like a child. A child doesn’t know any better, and doesn’t have a large reperatoire of behaviors to choose from. In other words, a child doesn’t know any better. Most children eventually grow out of this, and learn other behaviors, known to most adults, and become adults.
Basically, I’m saying that adults come from children, not the other way around, as you seem to be implying.
It’s not a childish remark to say that Repubs are like children – it’s a clinical observation. Both children and the Repubs put themselves before everything else.
Buff I don’t know what you are arguing. Note that Johnson had 0 executive experience when elected (believe me he didn’t get any as Vice President — Kennedy was not Bush Jr). You seem to equate leading with getting things through congress. Yet Truman is on your list. Uhm he didn’t get all that much through congress. In fact, Congress got things through him over riding his veto of Taft Hartley.
As to LBJ, he did indeed get a health care bill on his desk that he liked. It was called the Medicare plus medicaid. If you think that Johnson could win the health care battle, then you must think he did (he was President and not with 67 Reps in the Senate either).
So by your logic, Obama is no good, because he is messing with a system which was perfected by Johnson.
The fact is that, while Reagan and Eisenhower didn’t want health care reform, Truman and Johnson did and they got less than the current Senate bill.
Also what the hell did Eisenhower ever do except accept N Korea’s proposed peace deal ?(which any Democrat would have been assassinated for accepting, and I mean that literally).
What exactly are Regan’s accomplishments ? A tax cut and a defense build up and being in office when the USSR collapsed. Deficit spending is easy and the collapse was due to the sharp decline in the price of oil (as Gorbachev he was there).
Well maybe Lenin defined Leninism, but to wander off topic, Marx sure didn’t define Marxism. In fact he said (and I think I’m quoting)
“Surtout je ne suis pas un Marxiste (sp?)
or “after all I am not a Marxist.” I have no idea why the hell 2 Germans who lived in England chose to communicate in French (I’d guess a particular dislike of French Marxists).
A bit further afield. Oh and only Christ can write about Christianity ? He never asserted that he was divine (read the gospels). Is it an error to define Christianity as being based on the idea that Jesus Christ is God ?
The word Leninism has an agreed meaning whether or not it applies to the historical Lenin.
The following example is long and boring
Or how about Darwinism ? The word is mostly used by creationists but it has an agreed meaning. One of the tenets of Darwinism is that Lamark was dead wrong and life experience has no heritable effects. According to this perfectly standard definition, Darwin was not a Darwinist. He thought LaMarck had missed the main point but also wrote (in a later edition of “The Origin of Species” that LaMarck was right in that stress leads to mutations (what lead him astray was the fact that the variance of a binary ip this 1-p that s greater if p is closer to 0.5 *and* that the fraction of organisms with a recessive phenotype is the square of the fraction of genes with the recessive allele. I mean in other words he didn’t anticipate Mendel and it was only by combining their work that the modern neoDarwinian synthesis was developed by Weissman).
Cantab
You claim that information was more effectively extracted from Reidn then from Abdulmutalab. You present no evidence. I have never read any hint that any useful information was obtained from Reid.
I have also read (and this should have been kept secret) that Abdulmutalab is cooperating and has provided useful information.
I think the evidence supports the claim that more useful information has been obtained from Abdulmutalab than from Reid. This provides a little bit of evidence that the techniques used on Abdulmutalab are more effective than the techniques used on Reid (just a bit not much evidence in 2 cases of course). Your confident assertion to the contrary seems to me to be based on faith not evidence. In any case you present no evicdence.
Oh the 2 cases provide little evidence on the effectiveness of different techniques (maybe Abdulmutalab knows more than Reid). However, there is massive evidence on this issue, much of it obtained recently. Google “Ali Soufan” to find his claims which were made publically and have not been contradicted by anyone with direct experience of the events.
http://tinyurl.com/ygcqc6c
I don’t sit around in cafés. Italians don’t talk about socialism any more. I haven’t met an Italian who has a strong preference for public ownership of the means of production. They’ve tried that and they didn’t like it.
I know lots of ex-communists and some people who insist that they are still communists. One Italian ex communist (who I haven’t met) is the Prime minister who was most enthusiastic about privatizing state owned firms.
Believe me, socialism as defined by Marx is dead in Italy. Been there, done that, didn’t like it.
This applies to the people who insist they are still communists too. They also insist that communism doesn’t mean public ownership of the means of production (people do make the strangest arguments when they find themselves on the ash heap of history).
Look Cantab, you can support Bush’s approach to detention and interrogation or you can claim you are “fighting politically to remain free” but you can’t do both. I’d say your conception of freedom is medieval except that I consider the Magna Carta medievel and you clearly reject it as not related to freedom.
I live in Rome but I was born and bred in the USA in the suburbs of Washington and in, you guessed it, Cambridge MA.
On snowfall, I do comment often and vehemently on the East coast blizzard (which is evidence in support of standard climate models which predict catastrophic anthropogenic global warming). Also it snowed here. Amazing. And Romans really really really don’t know how to drive in the snow (I thought Washingtonians were incompetent at it).
Robert Waldman: “Marx sure didn’t define Marxism. In fact he said… ‘after all I am not a Marxist.'”
If you’re going to show off by trying to quote the French, you should probably also get the quotation in context. Marx said “if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist.” [emphasis added] The conditional completely changes the meaning.
“Oh and only Christ can write about Christianity ?”
It’s helpful if you don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that only Lenin should write about Leninism, I said that his own position should define the concept, since we are, after all, attaching his name to it. I hope you do understand the elementary difference between definition and commentary.
The following example is long and boring
And incorrect.
“Or how about Darwinism ?”
Biological scientists do not typically self-identify as Darwinists, precisely because it would an authority and conformance to Darwin’s actual views that scientists do not in fact grant him. The whole point of the cretinists using Darwinism is precisely to paint scientists as dogmatic, inflexible and ideologically rigid.
“The word Leninism has an agreed meaning whether or not it applies to the historical Lenin.”
If it does have an agreed meaning, then why is it necessary for Robert (you?) to define it in the OP?
And even if it were to have an agreed meaning, we’re not talking about an ordinary word: we’re attaching the name of a real historical person to some concept. If the concept is both pejorative and unsupported by the actual facts then we are actually slandering the historical person.
This is my fundamental point: If the characterization does not accurately reflects Lenin’s position, either in detail or in spirit, it is slander. At best it is agreed-upon slander.
Bruce Webb: “I think the aspect of Leninism Robert is referring to is the one summed up in the phrase ‘Heighten the Contradictions’.”
Perhaps; I cannot read minds, only words. “Heighten the Contradictions” seems like a completely different concept than “the party [is] the highest good.”
Sorry: “…precisely because it would suggest an authority and conformance…”
Thank you, i seem to be suffering from a firewall problem.
What evidence do you have that the FBI tortures? They pulled their interrogation unit off of Zubaydah because it was being used. Something about war crimes i guess…
You don’t need a background in military intelligence, all you need to do is follow the news or a 15 min google search. You won’t find any actual intelligence officers braying about how effective torture is.
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=20647
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-09/new-study-finds-torture-negatively-affects-memory
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/05/14/torture/
…theres only about 2 million hits out there
what is a captured terrorist? most of those people at gitmo have been released, scarred for life, because they were innocent. also well documented. Are you that ignorant? Can neither you nor cantab be bothered to spend a minimum amount of time learning about the world you live in. Are any of your opinions based on some sort of rationality or higher thought?
If you can’t justify the various thoughts floating through your head with at least a little background research maybe you should just not share them with the rest of us? I just don’t have much patience for people who are intellectually lazy or cowards. Yes, you should always respect the rule of law and the constitution. To not do so you might as well take a trip to Arlington and take a dump on the graves there. Its no less disrespectfull to those who have given thier lives to make this country a better place.
“…much the same way that cheddar cheese resembles the Empire State Building…”
My giggle for the day. Thanks, Tux.
Robert Waldman: “The word Leninism has an agreed meaning whether or not it applies to the historical Lenin.”
Be that as it may, the OP contains a bare statement of fact: “… Lenin declared the party to be the highest good.” Is this statement an accurate representation of Lenin’s views? Is the quotation taken out of context? Is the interpretation of this statement in the OP supported by facts?
Facts are facts and the truth is the truth. I want to know what the truth is.
Ricky,
So you googled “Torture Ineffective” and now you are some kind of an expert on interrogation? Try googling “Elvis Alive” and see what the links say.
It seems like you are on some kind of grandstanding mission to show how magnanimous you are, something that those charged with anti-terrorism usually don’t have the luxury of. But don’t you realize that all of your gratuitous name calling greatly detracts from your “magnaminity?”
Robert,
Do you know anyone in Italy that thinks Dick Cheney is a communist? Yet you and you’re ex-communist friends that fell out of a Fellini movie would call Cheney Lenin. I think you are projecting.
alyosha,
Yes, the socially maturing adult comes from the child and leaves behind the inability to see beyond his own interests at the exclusion of all others. We often cite that as child-like behavior, but if one recognizes the prevalence of such behavior in the adult population you begin to understand the egocentrism is characteristic of most people. It is more likely the exception to such egocentrism that is out of the ordinary. In that manner the child is behaving like the typically selfish adult, but in so blatant a manner that it is more readily recognized as asocial and in need of correction. Sorrounding the child with more socially astute forms of behavior allow that child to mature into a socially concious adult.