As a firmly anti-communist Democrat (I’ve been to Cuba and do not wish that form of government on anyone, least of all the Cuban people), I am fucking sick and tired of hearing the teabagger community bleat about liberals being commies. So let’s take a look at an actual history book, instead of whatever the fuck Michelle Malkin’s word vomit is this week;

It was a liberal, Woodrow Wilson, who deployed American forces to Russia in support of the White Russian Army to fight the nascent Bolshevik state, while the Republican Party was busy whining about war expenditures that had just saved Europe from becoming the Kaiser’s back yard.

It was a liberal, Harry S. Truman, who was the originator of the containment doctrine, NATO and the Marshall Plan and who was in charge of the original confrontations with communism in Berlin and Korea, while the GOP was still in a bitter civil war over isolation vs. intervention (“Hmm, do we hate Reds more than we love the tax money it’ll take to pay for this?”)

It was a liberal, John F. Kennedy, who faced the Soviet Union during the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War and managed to force them to back down without firing a shot, while conservatives had nothing to say other than “Bu- bu- but you should have gone to WAR with the nuclear power that has enough nukes to blow us to hell five times over!”

It was a liberal, Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War while Ronald Reagan was making his debut by calling him a commie and an pacifist. You can draw all kinds of conclusion from the Vietnam War; that LBJ and the Democrats had sympathy for communism is not one of them.

It was a liberal, James Earl Carter, who dialed the Cold War back in after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; this was after he’d already started running weapons to the Afghan resistance against the Moscow-backed regime, which would eventually contribute so greatly to the collapse of the “evil empire.”

And if you want to stretch it into the post-Berlin Wall universe, it was a liberal, Bill Clinton, who led the fight against an ex-communist mass murderer in the Balkans while Gingrich and the GOP were bleating “This ain’t our problem, Clinton’s doing too much overseas” (after 9/11 they quickly changed tunes and pretended nothing had happened).

The Democrats have a long and distinguished record in the fight against communism – much more long and distinguished than the Republican record in the fight against fascism, I might add; also more long and arguably more distinguished than even the Republican record of fighting communism. The record is pretty clear, whether it’s the world wars, the Cold War or the war on terror today. Democrats identify the threat to America and fight it as best they can. Republicans stay at home playing politics and trying to piggyback their own private projects onto whatever the war is (whether it’s Iranian oil in the 1950s, Latin American cheap labor since the dawn of time, or using the Iraq War to win reelection and look like you’re doing something in this day and age). It’s no accident that all the veterans in government are either Democrats (Kerry, Gore, Cleland) or moderate Republicans (McCain, Powell, Armitage), while the conservative true believers are draft-dodging chickenshits like Bush, Cheney, Chambliss and various others.

Sung by Tommy James and the Fondles.

Go back and read their writing when they were ostensibly liberals, and it’s plain. They have both always been utterly worthless.

You so owe me a new flat panel monitor

But yes, I do hope that someone is following David Gergen around, confronting him with his bizarre description of “presidenting the MBA way”, and asking him “What do you think of your big-picture, control-and-command leader now?”

Incoherent slapstick halfwits with a history of cocaine addiction, alcoholism and failed business attempts are undisciplined, indecisive, incompetent and unreliable. Bush may be confrontational, but he’s never crisp.

Well said.

CommunismRight-wing conservatism…is a fanatical conspiracy, whose basic ideas are a set of paranoid illusions, and whose ‘opinions’ are strategems.

Fixed.

I’m sure he was that way all the way to bankruptcy, in each of his failed businesses.

Maybe. Maybe it is actually necessary. Maybe we have no choice but to admit that they hate us and act accordingly.

I would be very careful how we take that on, however. Right Wingers have been having success with their “Culture War” for years, but I think it has influenced them to become much more angry, bitter, and divorced from reality. More irrational than before.

Incoherent slapstick halfwits with a history of cocaine addiction, alcoholism and failed business attempts are undisciplined, indecisive, incompetent and unreliable. Bush may be confrontational, but he’s never crisp.

Kristol… was a writer who could…praise Victorian culture for its deference to womanhood.

Considering the demand for child prostitutes in late-Victorian culture, and the fuss about raising the age of consent from 12 to 13, I suspect that he was using “deference to womanhood” as a term of art.

Well said. We should take it as read that the era that gave us the adjective ‘Dickensian’ was not kind to women.

For bonus bonus ironification, here’s David Gergen from Harvard Business School extracting Lessons in Leadership:

Bush’s personal identification with the painting, which now hangs in the Oval Office, reveals a good deal about his sense of himself as a political leader — who he thinks he is, the role he plays…

HUME: The first thing I saw and others who were part of this team here saw when we came in, that guy looks like a Bush. Don’t you think?
BUSH: Yeah, kind of, I guess, you know.
HUME: He looks a little bit like your dad, and looks a little bit like you.