Shame on Lewis Diuguid

Barack Obama is a socialist, plain and simple. He believes in a planned economy, an extremely progressive tax code, and he wants to allow the central government to intrude in almost every facet of our lives. (except if a doctor wants to kill a newborn, government's not allowed to intervene there) Obama has said this himself with his words and political platform. Socialism is socialism.

Unless that is, you're on the left and "socialist" is one of those nasty labels (like "liberal" last election) that reveals a leftist identity that you've been trying to hide from the public. So the world must be removed from public discussion. It must be twisted to mean something very foreign from its actual definition. How can we do that? Lewis Diuguid of the Kansas City Star knows how. Not satisfied with his last name merely being a palindrome, he has decided to make it synonymous with the slow death of intellectual freedom:

"The 'socialist' label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality."

I know how you feel, I had a stroke the first time I read this as well. So now we on the bigoted, race baiting, right aren't allowed to call advocates of wealth redistribution "socialists" if they happen to be half black. Diuguid goes on:

"Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. . ."

Anyone familiar with my blog will know that I believe Barack Obama will be the the most socialist President we've had since the Great Society. In other words, he'll be on par with LBJ and FDR -- two white guys. Unfortunately, socialism doesn't discriminate. Its been advocated by every race on planet Earth and as an ideology, its responsible for the deaths of Europeans, Africans, Asians, South Americans, Arabs, and just about any other race you can think of.

Now, if you want a term that actually has come to be associated with black people, you have one in "civil rights". The NAACP is not the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. As a commenter points out, the National Rifle Association outdates it. The NAACP was founded in 1905. The NRA was founded in 1871.

As for the NAACP, it was cofounded by Mary White Ovington, a member of the Socialist Party. I criticize the NAACP not because it is a black organization, but because it promotes socialism like other leftist organizations such as the ACLU, and NOW. If a black person or organization is socialist, its not racist to call them such.

"McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.

Shame on McCain and Palin."

Now its time to take a journey to cliche land. This tactic is Orwellian in its suppression of free discussion. In newspeak, the term "free" couldn't describe political freedom because the concept no longer existed. You could freely use the word because half its meaning had been torn away. The previous sentence would be impossible. Unfortunately the concept of socialism does still exist, but the word will lose its meaning if people like Diugiud have their way. The easiest way to stifle discussion is to literally take away words. "Liberal" no longer means liberal, "socialism" no longer means socialism, "marxism" no longer means marxism. If one is no longer allowed to use terms to describe someone's ideology, one is extremely handicapped when trying to defeat that person in the marketplace of ideas.

Shame on Lewis Diuguid. Barack Obama is a socialist.