Kristol, Lieberman, and Will Unmask Obama's Secret Marxist Agenda

Before me is a New York Times essay, ominously titled "The mask slips," in which William Kristol deconstructs Barack Obama's garbled remarks at a California fundraiser. As Kristol paraphrases Obama's analysis of religion:

"It is the opium of the people." Or more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better, "Die Religion - ist das Opium des Volkes."

Wow -- that's much more succinct.

Actually, Barack wanted to deliver the entire speech in German, to capture the nuance of the Hegelian dialectic. I suggested that he should do most of it in English. "Harold," he replied, "I might as well give it in German. If I say that Pennsylvanians are bitter after decades of economic decline and no effective help from Washington, some Republican will still translate my speech into German. He'll do this to portray me as a faintly un-American Eurosnob while simultaneously showing off his own erudition to his old Harvard roommates."

Joe Lieberman chimed in that it's a fair question whether Obama is a Marxist. My morning Tribune includes an op-ed by George Will critiqued Obama's theories of false consciousness, and condemned the "liberalism of condescension." Coming from the aristocratic Will, author of The pursuit of virtue and other Tory notions, and The leveling wind: politics, the culture, and other news, this one hurts. Adding insult to scripted intended injury, Will adds:

The ironic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981.

That's an embarrassing stretch regarding Obama, but Hofstadter's supposed condescension certainly suffuses the columns of one George F. Will . A three-minute scan of my bookshelf yields:

It was, as historian Richard Hofstadter said, an age of intellectual rubbish....

Evincing what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the ruthlessness of the pure at heart..."

Historian Richard Hofstadter should be living at this hour to savor the new flavors of what he called "The paranoid style of American politics."

Who could disagree.

Based on these conservative pundits, I'm bummed to have missed that California fundraiser. As luck would have it, I myself attended Columbia University in 1981. I was nominally taking math and physics classes since my high school didn't have these AP courses.

My parents never knew that I spent most of that year hanging out in a now-defunct basement annex at City College of New York arguing the finer points of Marxism with a young Obama. We would spend hours arguing about whether Karl Kautsky or Ira Magaziner was the true embodiment of socialist revolution, how to apply Leon Trotsky's insights in health reform.

Friends would stop by. Then Sinbad would torment us with impossible trivia questions from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program. Relations between Barack and Hillary were cordial. Yet even then, we could see the strain. Between spiels about improving Kibbutz crop yields, Hillary would regale us with stories about storming the ramparts in Catalonia with Orwell, attending bullfights with a drunken Hemingway in Madrid. One day, James Carville stopped by. Emitting a gaseous belly laugh, he said, "Hill -- that Lincoln Brigade tale is the biggest bunch of horsecrap since the cleanup after the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Barack flashed Carville a light-hearted smile. Tight-lipped, Hillary glared at both of them. "I'm not bitter," she told me. "Anyway, he says I'm crazy."

OK I exaggerate, but my tall tale isn't much worse than the spectacle of pampered conservatives trashing Barack Obama for looking down on common folk.

It takes special chutzpah for neocons like Kristol to condemn elitism and snobbery, for that matter to comment on anyone else's bitterness. When I was 15, my Aunt Gwen got me a lifetime subscription to Commentary, neoconservatives' flagship journal of opinion. For a brief period a quarter-century ago, Commentary held surprising influence. It had some useful things to say, for example in Nathan Glazer's insightful essays on social policy.

But its anger really distinguished it. A surprising number of neocons were divorced Jewish atheists who were angry with other Jews who didn't attend synagogue. They were angry with others, too. They were angry with African-Americans because of affirmative action, welfare, crime, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan. They were angry with feminists for upsetting gender roles. They were angry with gays and lesbians because....well because. They were angry with college students who took gut courses, smoked pot, and made love rather than fighting the Vietnam war. They were angry with ordinary Americans, especially that small group referred to as "indulgent baby boomers," for not being more upset about these things. Allan Bloom's mega-seller, The closing of the American mind may be the frankest defense of snobbery ever to grace the best-seller list.

Above all, neocons resented liberals. This animating passion jumps from every page in Commentary and later the Weekly Standard. Neocons railed against "cultural elites"-- a category that strangely excluded themselves, not to mention other economic and politically privileged groups. Jeanne Kirkpatrick condemned the "San Francisco Democrats" years before Vice President Quayle condemned Murphy Brown. Commentary published countless articles that opposed affirmative action and championed the virtues of meritocracy -- right up to the moment they installed the distinguished, if obnoxious editor's rather less distinguished son as his de facto successor. If any prominent liberal wrote a book, produced a movie, sang a song, you could be sure that Commentary would savage it.

Commentary is barely read these days. The scowls got to be too much for most readers to bear. The magazine lost its influence after a succession of Republican presidents made many of its points moot. Its sectarian incivility, a vestige of its editors' factional old-left roots, still flourishes.

Yeah, they were bitter. Aunt Gwen certainly was, though like many Pennsylvanians she would not have cared for anyone describing her this way. In her youth, she was drawn to meetings of various New York left-wing causes. At one such meeting, she met a brilliant black man and married him. The marriage didn't last. Her commitment to left-wing causes didn't, either.

For years, my dad and his wife, my sister, and I would drive into the Bronx to visit her walk-up, in a union-built development down the street from Van Cortlandt Park. We would climb several flights of stairs to her apartment, where she would serve us a wonderful simple breakfast while cooking up pungent kidney treats for the succession of affectionate but eccentric felines with whom she kept company in the years I knew her.

Her politics changed for many reasons, not least being the atrocities and misfortunes inflicted under Communism. What embittered her was watching the Bronx crumble. She spent the last decades of her life afraid to go outside, horrified by the tragedies and social pathologies that unfolded virtually in front of her apartment window.

She would have respected and admired Barack Obama as a person. She might have seen in him the face of her own two children. And she never fully trusted Republicans. Yet I'm not sure the Senator could win her vote. From her perspective, the liberals who ran New York had no answers to the once-fine schools that failed to teach, the parents who failed to discipline and nurture their children, the legal and law enforcement systems that failed to keep elderly people safe when they walked to the grocery store.

Aunt Gwen was a lovely and generous woman. I very much disagreed -- still do -- with her neoconservative views, and with the increasingly tart social attitudes that sometimes accompanied them. Yet these views emerged from her own lived experience, from the very real way that urban crime and social pathology diminished her life.

Republicans will try to defeat Obama by running him through the right-wing freak show. He will be depicted to be, at once, a Chablis-sipping snob, an angry Black nationalist, a radical Marxist, an anti-American figure with shady Islamic and terrorist ties. Will these attacks work? No one can know. It's scary just now because Hillary Clinton is giving the Republicans too much help. People with experiences like my aunt's are one obvious audience.

Faux populist attacks on Obama certainly deserve ridicule. Yet the only way to close the right-wing freak show is to show that liberals have real answers that improve people's lives and reduce people's pain. There really is something the matter with Kansas, the Bronx, the south side of Chicago. It's not fair that the political burden is often placed on Democrats to fix these places. It's the way things are.

Comments

[marika]

Both of these babbling clowns, Kristol and Lieberman need masks; it would be a pleasant change after seeing one or the other slobbering over themselves every time the TV is on. The corporate masters of the waves and ondes choose these two war-mongers over and over. There is not a war they would not like to send other people's sons and daughters to die in while telling us how they see themselves like steely eyed heros out of a bad B western movie.

No sacrifice is too great - to demand of other people while they live in a world protected even from the consquences of their own drivel. These cheery fellows are the foot soldiers of a class-war the American people are losing.

[bigfated]

O! Dear God! Thank you. Thank you. It's almost over....and now the healing can begin. Kinda brings to mind a poem by Poe..."Thank heaven thedanger , the crisis is past..." Who can you imagine turning our government back on the right track? McCain? Please! Get serious. He's just one more Bush....tho perhaps not quite as stupid.
Hillary? She has shown herself to be far more concerned with her own personal agenda than with either country or party. Those comments praising McCain while trying---(unsuccessfully)--to beat down Sen. Obama should prove to every Democrat that the Repugnants may not be so wrong about her after all!! And that foul and disgusting answer she offered in response to a question as to whether Obama is a Muslim? From that moment forward my choice was made. She was showing that streak of Lee Atwater in her blood....and it is no more attractive on her than it was on him. Today millions of the faithful take some measure of comfort in the belief that Atwater reposes in a very hot hell. Enough of that type. Bush has shown for almost eight years that he is a worthless thgug and a bully. I hope to live to see at least a modicum of dignity restored to the most important post in the entire world. It will take a superlative thinker and leader to undo the mess the current "Liar-in-Chief" will leave in his slimy wake.

[Bluedog12]

Kristol or Liberman, hmmmm?. Which is the bigger condescending douche bag? I guess it’s just too close to call.

[simplecitizen]

We know now that the right wing neocons and support the war fanactics really fear an Obama victory in November. Joe Lieberman the turncoat and Bill lets go to war in Iran next Kristol are trying to derail a speeding train. Boys get out of the way or you'll be run over. And what did McCain promise Lieberman to get his support.? Wouln't it be wonderful to have him advise McCain on how to start the next conflict.

[marko77]

Lieberman attends "Rapture Ready"conferences and glad-hands fundies like Rick "I never met a Spanish Inquisitor I didn't like" Santorum and Philip "I got the hatred in me" Hagee. It's a shame the Isreal has to depend on "millions from fruitcakes" but, there it is.

[mariemburns]

I think Kristol is the ultimate ironist. Everything he says is tongue in cheek. He seems laughable because he means to be. He knows nobody gets it. How do I know? Because nobody as smart, as educated & as urbane as Kristol could possibly believe the crap he writes. Lieberman, on the other hand, is dumb enough to sincerely opine that Obama 'just might be a Marxist.' Both men are cowardly & selfish & unpatriotic & totally repugnant, but only one of them knows better.

[ApolloniaCreed]

Bless their hearts! They don't even realize how much the game has changed.

[LeeroyFDermit]

Obama is saying that those people in small town America cling to the Bill of Rights instead of government, and that they have antipathy toward any people who cling to government instead of the Bill of Rights.

Obama is right, but like any politician, he lacks the balls to directly say what he really thinks. What else can he do if he wants to get elected? Gosh darn it, even those oh-so-noble and enlightened people in San Francisco still kind of like the Bill of Rights.

Of course Obama is also way out of touch because he thinks Americans cling to the Bill of Rights because they no longer have faith that government will provide them with jobs – and all that is good. Obama intends to restore that faith.

http://www.LeeroyFDermit.com

[RussSanchez]

Damn it Barack, they're on to us. I'll quick call Boris and Natasha and tell them to lay low. We can't sneak anything by these people anymore. Fearless Leader is gonna be pissed!!!

[1849]

I really get a kick out of ELITES in the Belt Way bubble who think they know what is going on in America. Please!

[Jazz42]

Kristol,Lieberman, Will.
Are pathetic people.

[willo]

Those three creeps should be in prison. Instead some mystery power has given them a national forum, to pollute the national airwaves with their continously wrong drivel.

[Pquilson]

Why should they be in prison?
It is because their opinions differ from yours? If so, why then should you not be in prison for opinions differing from theirs.
Please explain.

[Lexie]

Because their narcissism and arrogance are responsible for the death of many hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people. Duh.

[PeaceThroughObedience]

pampered effete wealthy elitist conservatives who have been dead wrong on nearly every important issue of the last decade, and are still raking big money have no grounds to criticize anyone

Bill Kristol is a nauseating spectacle to behold, I can't believe he still has a pundits gig

[bobbybee]

Ha! I couldn't even get past "Hegelian dialectic"! Very nice ...

[noneIn2008]

Correct, he will be pummeled by the McNasty surrogates. But, don't blame Hillary or ABC for raising issues. They are tossing him softballs for practice. Unfortunately, he is whiffing on the soft pitches. Just wait until he faces the neocon machine. Wait until Patrick Kennedy starts dismantling the Chicago political corruption, via Rezko, and the neocons also try to link this to Obama. Wait until they start taking whack at his kids and Michelle's parents. Wait until they start ripping on Obama's parents. On and On.

Can he really stand up? Are you willing to risk the Presidency on running him when he is not proven to handle the real heat? Is it worth the risk? And, if you're wrong?

[who38]

Yes, Yes, Yes. Life is a risk; take it.

I think that "flag pins" was a "McCarthy moment. The "gotcha" game may be over. Sure hope so.

[nk007]

none!n2008
Well Clinton has used the kitchen sink and he is still standing. Just keep underestimating him. I think Obama has the capacity "to fly like butterfly, and sting like a bee." Clinton, McCain and all those spoilt neo-coservatives can throw all the mud but the may be the one to end smelling. People have woken up! They will not be fooled again with these idiotic non-issues. Personally I would rather bet on Obama than Clinton. She has too much baggage. If you don't believe me, check out her rising negatives a she engages in mudslinging. The majority of Americans have been fooled before, if we are fooled again, by these neo-con morons, and their Carl Rove tactics, then shame on us. We would deserve the president we get. I think the congressional elections of 2006 demonstrated that Karl Rove is a has been. So stop wetting you pants about what he and the neo-cons will do. we are on to their despicable games.

[aznurse]

Its not about Obama, its about us. He can only vote once. so can we. We'll decide who will be the next POTUS. The more negative junk they throw, the more I'm steadfast in my choice.

[turkeyfish]

I'm with you and I saw 40,000 in Philly who feel the same way.

I see the McSameOLD crowd still pitching to closed circuits and pay for play venues (today oil lobby in Denver). Its a positive sign, despire the huge number of republican operatives they have smoking and lurking on democratic websites.

Ironically, they can lurk here, because republican sites are so controled and filtered you can't see the kind of democracy and free wheeling, if rough and disrepectful debate you do on democratic sites. Republicans like to enter into trance like-states while they watch O'Reilly and Hanitty talk against a background of flashing lights. It only goes to show that its only the democratic party that believes in democracy and thus grows stronger by allowing ideas to be discussed. Republikan politicans have become more like the way things were done in the old Soviet Union.``

Just another sign republicans crave elitism and their empire is nearing an end.

Anoher positive aspect of this lurking behavior is that their IP addresses can be tracked and statistical information can be gleaned from statistical analysis of how they change their tactics in their attempt to defame, lie, and smear.