Tag: politics

Another one by Salim Mansur, via Glenn:

As Martin Walker, then the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, reported in August 1992, Arbatov said to him: “We are going to do the worst thing we possibly can to America — we are going to take away their enemy.” Arbatov, you might recall, was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, responsible for keeping track of Soviet-American relations.


Arbatov — now looking back nearly twenty years later in deconstructing his words — seemed to possess a piercing understanding, as student of history, of the American scene, and how it could likely unfold over time in the post-Soviet and post-Communist era. His words to Walker were more insightful than any offered by just about all the left-leaning talking heads and commentators, in the U.S., Canada, and Europe put together. Arbatov understood, given his experience sitting in the privileged seat of the party in Moscow during the Brezhnev period, how the existence of Communist Russia checked the forces of the left in the West, keeping them from gaining influence and power. Now, as Arbatov reflected, since the Soviet Union as a military superpower had collapsed and the threat of Soviet Communism was discarded in the so-called dustbin of history, the spoiled children and beneficiaries of the West’s longest and strongest economic expansion and technological achievements, unparalleled in history, would set forth to do what the Soviet Union could not do — to advance the aim of Communism to wreck liberal capitalism from the inside.

RTWT

From American Thinker, The Stealthy Spread of Socialism in the U.S.

The biggest challenge facing Republicans in the 112^th Congress is not Barack Obama. It is not Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate. It isn’t high unemployment, repealing ObamaCare, the threat of Islamism and sharia in America, the deficit, or the looming insolvency of several (mostly blue) states. These, broadly speaking, are symptoms. The disease is socialism — or at the very least, a pervasive socialistic mindset.

According to a February 2010 Gallup poll, “61% of liberals say their image of socialism is positive” and “53% of Democrats have a positive image of socialism.” Overall, 36% of Americans view socialism favorably.

Winston Churchill aptly described socialism as “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue [being] the equal sharing of misery.” As economist Thomas Sowell put it, “[s]ocialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

“It’ll work if the right people are in charge!!“

Found at Dr. Sanity.  Read the whole post, and her links.  

One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.

Found here. I am convinced that the nation’s current path began with the “Progressive” movement that brought us the 16th and 17th Amendments, and for that matter, the 18th.