Posted on October 28th, 2008 by D. Aristophanes
Eat your heart out, Eugene Debs, and break out the vodka rations,* comrades! Because Barack Obama’s Communist agenda has been caught on tape! So says the wingnutosphere, and they are never wrong!
How wonderful will life be under Comrade Obama? Here are the apparatchiks at On Freedom’s Wings describing the first Five Year Plan:
What an Obama presidency will change those words to is: The economy becomes redistribution of wealth, wars become Marshall Law here in America with boots on our streets and terrorists able to destroy us and abortion becomes Eugenics where only the best get to live.
[Gavin adds: 1) You can see how they’d be threatened by that. 2) {awesome guitar chord} Alriiight! {smokin’ guitar riff} It’s Marshall La-a-a-a-aw!]
A Workers’ Paradise! But it gets better, says Lindy Borer:
Obama wishes to scrap the limits placed on government powers because they get in the way of his redistributive schemes. What powers are we talking about? Private property rights for one. Since property is distributed ‘unequally’ in Obama’s world, policies must be shaped and laws passed to deal with that situation. While he’s at it, Obama would like to trash the Bill of Rights by tossing the 9th and 10th Amendments which specifically limit the government’s powers vis a vis the people and the several states.
Ed Morrissey gets to the nub of it:
Barack Obama complains that the Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties”. That’s because the Constitution was intended as a limiting document, to curtail the power of the federal government vis-a-vis the states and the individual. The founders intended at the time to limit the reach of the federal government, and built the Constitution accordingly.
Barack Obama wants to reverse that entirely. And that’s radical change you’d better believe in, or else.
Ahh, but now we must beg your indulgence, fellow revolutionaries. We know that you wish to hear these words from the lips of soon-to-be Dear Leader himself, but you must be patient! Alas, we do not yet have the full audio of Obama’s glorious plan to ‘sever all ties to the Constitution’.
What we do have is the first half of the dialogue, a rather mundane explanation of Constitutional limits on judicial authority to establish positive rights in the context of historic social struggle:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
Such elegant didactics! We can’t wait until Ed & Co. release the second part of the audio, wherein Comrade Obama turns the above on its head and reveals his plot to overthrow our Capitalist overlords!
*Redeemable vodka ration chits now to be making available at People’s Distillery Nos. 1-8 and 10 in your Soviet. Distillery No. 9 chit will to proceed glorious manufacure pending announcement of Central Revolutionary Worker’s Committee.
Update: OMFG, it gets waaaay better, courtesy of Crystal Clear Conservative. Earlier in the audio, from a radio interview in Chicago, Obama discusses ‘an enormous blind spot,’ a ‘fundamental flaw’ in the Constitution. It’s perfectly clear that he’s talking about the legitimization of chattel slavery in the three-fifths clause:
I think [the Constitution is] a remarkable document…
The original Constitution as well as the Civil War Amendments … but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.
African-Americans were not — first of all they weren’t African-Americans — the Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers. I think that as Richard said it was a ‘nagging problem’ in the same way that these days we might think of environmental issues, or some other problem where you have to balance cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.
And in that sense, I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.
The sentence, ‘Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers’, may be about the most polite and banal description of legalized fucking slavery(!) ever uttered by one of its opponents. But not to the tender ears of Crystal Clear Conservative, for whom ‘Obama demagogues race’:
To illustrate what he perceives as the Country and its Constitution’s flaw, Obama demagogues race. It is ironic that someone who claims to be a great unifier is so obsessed with our divisions. Here it is race, which can be taken alongside gender and class demagoguery. For a person basing his campaign on change we need to unite the United States, how does he propose to do this while dividing us on race, class and gender? What exactly is this so-called fundamental flaw of the United States that is reflected by the Constitution?
What indeed? Just a wild guess, but perhaps it’s Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Crystal Clear Conservative does not agree, positing — stunningly — that Obama’s disdain for the original, since amended, Constitutional right to own human beings as personal property precludes him from assuming the presidency … because that would mean he’s unwilling to uphold the Constitution!
While the founders crafted a Consitution which enshrined personal property rights, Obama perceives a flaw that may be corrected by removing this protection in order to bring about redistributive change. This is contrary to the founding the United States and given this, Barack Obama does not intend to uphold the Consitution of the United States, and is therefore unfit to take the Oath of Office of the Presidency of the United States.
Again, I am simply stunned. And to put it into broader perspective, I heard radio slug Laura Ingraham railing on this ‘fundamental flaw’ quote earlier this evening, totally out of context. At the time, I guessed that Obama was probably referring to the three-fifths clause, but Ingraham didn’t provide the full quote.
This is just beyond stupid, beyond mockery, beyond sanity even. That, in the 21st century, saying in the most tepid and academic terms that you are against human slavery could be considered in any way ‘controversial’ by anyone, let alone a significant section of our population, is just … gah.
