The Republican’s Dr. Strangelove Promotes Book By Nazi Sympathizer On Fox News

In the most recent polling of Republican voters, their top choices for president almost always include Dr. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon-turned-Fox News pundit who viscerally hates President Obama and advocates Christian supremacy in America.

Carson appeared on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program last night to warn that the United States is “going down the tubes” like the great empires of the past because we have “become enamored of sports and entertainment,” and have “lost our moral compass.” This downward spiral, Carson says, is an extremely dangerous situation that threatens to subject America to the same dreadful fate as previous historical dynasties like Greece, Rome, and Britain.

Ben Carson

The segment was mostly a paper thin discourse on vague apocalyptic generalities that provided scant insight into anything other than Carson’s embarrassingly poor grasp of history and government. His main points were cliched right-wing admonitions against progressivism and straying from Christian faith. And in the midst of this harangue, Carson made a note of the risks of divisiveness:

Kelly: To what extent do you feel divisiveness is playing a role in what we’re seeing right now?
Carson: It’s playing an extremely large role in what we are doing.

In what “WE” are doing? That was certainly a clumsy phrasing that Carson would probably like to retract. However, it is also ironically truthful. For the better part of the eight minute segment Carson was fiercely divisive, referring to his ideological foes as neo-Marxists, specifically aligning them with Marx, Lenin, and one of the right’s favorite bogeymen, Saul Alinsky. Which is why his unintended admission that divisiveness plays a large role in what “WE” are doing rings true.

Even Kelly observed that calling people neo-Marxists could cause others to view him as unpresidential and too extreme to ever be elected president. Carson’s response to that was to encourage viewers to do their own research. He then offered this as an example of the sort of troubling things they would find:

Carson: Number one rule of Saul Alinsky: You make the majority think that what they believe is no longer in vogue; that nobody with any intelligence thinks that way; and that the way you believe is the only way that intelligent people believe.

The only problem with that example is that it does not happen to be the number one rule of Saul Alinsky. Nor is it any other rule. It appears that Carson just made it up as it doesn’t even resemble any of the actual rules that Alinsky laid out in his book “Rules For Radicals”. Or, more likely, he adopted it from some disreputable source that he naively believed. [For reference I have included all of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals at the bottom of this post] But it wasn’t until Carson sought to buttress his criticism with additional girders of fringy philosophy that he went spinning off the rails entirely. And in the process he demonstrated how vulnerable he is to disreputable sources.

Carson: There was a guy who was a former CIA agent by the name of Cleon Skousen who wrote a book in 1958 called “The Naked Communist,” that laid out the whole agenda. You would think by reading it that it was written last year. Showing what they’re trying to do to American families, what they’re trying to do to our Judeo-Christian faith, what they’re doing to morality.

W. Cleon Skousen was a disgraced Mormon whackjob whom even the Mormon church repudiated. He was a rabid anti-communist who veered off into conspiracy theories and fabricated prophecy. His extreme views led him to support other contemporary opponents of communism, better known as Nazis. And for good measure, Carson shares his admiration of Skousen with another popular whackjob, Glenn Beck, who insisted that his followers read Skousen’s “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which Beck said was divinely inspired.

And so it has come to pass that Ben Carson is the darling of the Tea Party and other far-right dimwits. It is a strange love, so to speak, because despite having absolutely zero expertise in government, law, social sciences, public service, or any other study relevant to statecraft, the Republican base has embraced him and are striving mightily to persuade him to throw his hat in the ring for the presidency, a job for which he is profoundly unqualified.

Shameless self-promotion…
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But what is truly dumbfounding is that he isn’t much less qualified than many of the other prospective GOP candidates (Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio) or candidates past (Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin). Scary, isn’t it?

From Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals:

  • Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
  • Never go outside the expertise of your people.
  • Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
  • Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
  • Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
  • A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
  • A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
  • Keep the pressure on. Never let up.
  • The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
  • The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
  • If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
  • The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  • Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

D’Souza On Young Clinton And Obama: The Hippie And The Street Thug

The arch conservative author and filmmaker, Dinesh D’Souza, has a shameful reputation characterized by dishonesty and immorality. He was forced to resign as the dean of a Catholic university due to his marital infidelity. More recently, he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of election finance fraud. As a veteran of right-wing punditry, D’Souza is a frequent guest on Fox News and is the writer and producer of the acidly anti-Obama crocumentary, “2016: Obama’s America,” based on his own widely debunked book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

On the eve of the publication of his new book, “America – Imagine a World Without Her,” D’Souza is once again demonstrating his affinity for the scum stuck to the bottom of the barrels he is scraping. The Washington Examiner posted some choice excerpts from a pre-release copy. While pitching the tome as “a passionate and sharply reasoned defense of America,” D’Souza has actually produced another tunnel-blind screed attacking his political enemies as villains on a mission to “finish off” America.

Lacking utterly in originality, D’Souza seizes on the old canard famously hyped by Glenn Beck, that that all contemporary liberals were weaned on Saul Alinsky. And like Beck and his diseased spawn, D’Souza casts Alinsky as some sort of horned demon sent by from Hades to destroy mankind. Consequently, the picture D’Souza paints of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is slathered with absurd invective that says more about D’Souza than it does the targets of his animus.

Dinesh D'Souza

D’Souza: “If you see early pictures and video of Hillary, she looks and sounds like a former hippie. Overtime, however, Hillary started dressing like a respectable middle-class mother and speaking in a clipped, moderate sounding voice. Young Barack Obama, too, looked like a bit of a street thug — in his own words, he could have been Trayvon Martin. Over time, however, Obama started dressing impeccably and even practiced modulating his voice.”

It’s called growing up. Let’s set aside the repugnant and racist association of both Obama and Martin to thuggery. That’s standard rightist rhetoric. More revealing is that D’Souza is flabbergasted by the notion that American youths might conform to the fashion trends favored by their generation, but later mature and adapt to conventional styles more appropriate for business and public service. That evolution, in D’Souza’s mind, is not a natural part of growing up that millions of Americans experienced. He thinks it is an organized conspiracy to conceal subversive intentions beneath a veneer of respectability.

D’Souza: “Hillary and Obama both adopted Alinsky’s strategic counsel to sound mainstream, even when you aren’t. These are the ways in which our two Alinskyites make themselves palatable to the American middle class, which to this day has no idea how hostile Hillary and Obama are to middle-class values.”

So hidden under the pant suits and business attire are tie-dye, headbands, love beads and, of course, radical plans to replace the Constitution with the Communist Manifesto. And the fact that under Obama the economy has soared, Wall Street has hit new highs, corporations are earning record profits, and taxes are lower, the Tea Party contingent still believes that this administration is anti-capitalist.

The Hippie & The Street Thug

Shameless self-promotion…
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Finally, if anyone is hostile to middle-class values, it’s D’Souza and his confederacy of wingnuts who are opposed to universal health care, raising the minimum wage, unions, student debt relief, clean air and water, banking reforms, and virtually every other significant initiative that benefits average Americans.

Andrew Breitbart’s Vetting Of Barack Obama Begins With A Dud

The recently deceased Andrew Breitbart delivered a stem-winding speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last month. In it he dangled a tempting treat before the assembled disciples of rightism in the form of a promise to expose the radical, Marxist roots of the young Barack Obama. Breitbart announced that…

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernadine Dohrn, who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted.”

That’s pretty heady stuff. It got the CPAC crowd worked up and initiated a stream of anticipation throughout the conservative community. What does Breitbart have? Are there videos of Obama conspiring with fugitive members of the Black Panther Party? Does the future president show up on film plotting the overthrow of the government?

Not exactly. The first part in the presumably continuing series of slander is not a video at all, but consists entirely of a poster for a play about conservative bogeyman Saul Alinsky.

Breitbart-Alinsky Poster

The play “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky” was staged in 1998 in Chicago. Obama was a state senator at the time and, as a student of local history, had some knowledge of Alinsky and his work in the city. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Obama would participate in a post-play panel discussion about the author and community organizer. Nevertheless, Breitbart’s survivors at BigGovernment think they have unveiled the next Watergate via their crack investigation of the world of the theater.


Despite the dishonest headline that calls the play “Barack’s Love Song To Alinsky,” he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. This is another attempt to smear the President by association with a demon that the right invented. Alinsky was not the Marxist menace that Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, and Fox News make him out to be. In fact, he explicitly rejected the communists of his era saying…

“My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they’ll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it’s a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare.’ That’s where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that’s where I stay parted from them today.”

Alinsky was always, first and foremost, an advocate for the underclass in society that was abused and oppressed by the powerful. That’s a message that Tea Partiers could adopt if they weren’t such tools of powerful manipulators like the Koch brothers.

It is a sad and ironic tribute to Breitbart that his web site has published his last article and it is brimming with the sort of lies and distortions for which Breitbart was famous in life. If this is any indication of what Breitbart meant when he claimed to have explosive materials that would impact the President’s reelection, then the Democrats don’t have much to worry about. But I wouldn’t rest too easy because the Breitbart machine is still alive and it is probably working overtime to fabricate its next batch of propaganda.

Retch Against the Machine: Sarah Palin vs. Stalinist Cannibals

Now you’ve done it. Yeah you, you Republican presidential primary contenders. You’ve gone and made Sarah Palin mad. This is a day you will live to regret. After all, Palin is still the leader of a fearsome army of Facebook fanatics that worship her despite the fact that she hasn’t done a damn thing since she lost the campaign in 2008 and quit her job as governor half way through. That’s over three years as a professional slacker, leeching off of her PAC contributors and phoning in her insipid commentaries to Fox News.

Palin’s latest Facebook harangue is aimed squarely at her fellow Republicans vying for the GOP nomination. And she doesn’t like what she’s seeing. The tirade titled “Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left,” commences with a blistering assault on the lack of civility that she has always cherished:

“We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.”

Yes, the Rogue Warrior is not about to sit still for the Republican establishment, which embraced the Tea Party so tightly, and has elevated Reagan to sainthood, as they sink down to the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent. The woman who charged that her opponent was “pallin’ around with terrorists” would never behave so abysmally.

Palin invokes the sacred creed of Reagan’s “11th Commandment” which deemed that Republicans never speak ill of other Republicans. To sane outsiders that always seemed to be a call for self-censorship, but to GOP partisans it was simply an edict to coordinate their propaganda and speak with one robotically undifferentiated voice. While Palin says that she has “no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign,” she never explains how to tumble roughly in a campaign limited to reciprocal pleasantries.

Palin further asserts that she has never before seen the equivalent of this past week’s political brawl in a GOP primary race. For a woman who could not answer a question about what she reads, I suppose we can forgive her for not knowing about some famous incidents in the not-to-distant past. For instance when George H. W. Bush called Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics.” Or when his son George W. Bush spread rumors that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Or when McCain likened Mitt Romney’s position on waterboarding to Pol Pot’s. Palin even resorts to the sort of incivility about which she is complaining in this Facebook post:

“What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.”

Stalin-esque? Palin is comparing Republican criticisms of Gingrich to a brutal dictatorship that was responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people. And she wants to lecture others about the politics of personal destruction? Then she throws in an Alinsky reference for good measure even though there is nothing in her remarks that is associated with any “tactic” advocated by Alinsky. Right-wingers just like to say his name every few minutes. Following that they like to pretend that they are anti-establishment crusaders. Palin asserts that…

“…this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party.”

The poor pitiful Tea Party is being persecuted by the big, bad GOP establishment. You know, the one that created it, funded it, and pandered to it during the last election cycle. And it’s now up to Palin to defend the Tea Partiers who are nothing more than a widely disliked, far right faction of her own party. She expanded on that whining in an appearance on the Tea Party Network (aka Fox News) where she inexplicably connected herself to the leftist punk rock band Rage Against the Machine. And her manner of raging means “vote for Gingrich.” The former members of Rage are surely retching upon hearing this.

Fox Nation

But Mama Grizzly isn’t through yet…

“[T]rust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.”

There’s Alinsky again. But more to the point, Palin is at once advocating prolonging the primary contest so that Romney’s record can be picked apart by Republican rivals, while lambasting the party for “crucifying” Gingrich. She really needs to pick an argument and stick to it. But the best part of Palin’s Facebook frenzy comes at the close:

“We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008.”

If she didn’t see it 2008 it was because she was blinded by the right. Her campaign was amongst the harshest purveyors of attacks on Obama that ran the gamut of absurd allegations casting him as a communist, a Muslim, a Kenyan, and more. But now she questions whether the GOP establishment would ever employ such harsh tactics against Obama. Furthermore, she resorts to portraying Romney as the establishment’s favorite son and even uses the phrase “chosen one.” Hmm, where have we heard that before?

Finally, in this Facebook offensive Palin helpfully admits that Fox News is not the fair and balanced news enterprise it pretends to be. She reminisces wistfully about “a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News.” I wonder if her boss, Roger Ailes, minds that she is spilling her guts about the intentional bias of the network that employs her. And I wonder if he minds that she is bashing the party that the network was created to promote.

Fox News Adopts Newt Gingrich’s Alinsky Rhetoric

At today’s White House press briefing a question was asked that illustrates the press corps’ dedication to the news that America cares about most:

Fox Nation - Alinsky

The question that pushed this item to the top of Fox Nation was asked by none other than Fox News White House correspondent, Ed Henry. So what we have here is a Fox News reporter being featured on a Fox News web site for asking an ignorant question that nobody cares about. Here is the actual transcript:

Henry: I wonder if you could clear something up. Newt Gingrich keeps saying on the campaign trail that the President’s vision comes from Saul Alinsky, the community organizer. I haven’t heard you asked about that but I was wondering … Is there some kind of portrait of him in the White House that people look up to or is this BS?

Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary: Have I said how much fun I had as a reporter covering Congress from 1996 to 1998? There was a certain bombast to it at the time. A lot of colorful things to cover.

The President’s background as a community organizer is well documented in the President’s own books. His experience in that field obviously contributed to who he is today. But his experience is a broad-based one that includes a lot of other areas in his life. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Perhaps the reason that Henry has not heard Carney asked about an Alinsky portrait in the White House is that no one else would ask such a stupid question. This is an obvious attempt to legitimize the wing-nut rhetoric of Newt Gingrich (which he picked up from Glenn Beck). Gingrich has taken to disparaging President Obama as a European socialist and Alinsky radical in order to suck up to the Tea Party dimwits who are still suffering withdrawal symptoms since Beck was booted off of Fox News.

In fact, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between Gingrich and Beck. A couple of years ago Gingrich was pontificating on Obama as a “Kenyan anti-colonialist” who only became president as the result of “a wonderful con.” And he featured the same subject matter in his South Carolina victory speech. Not that Romney is any better. In a 2008 campaign ad he actually preceded Beck’s insane fear-mongering of an Islamic caliphate bent on taking over the world.

The GOP candidates are desperately trying to leapfrog each other to see who can spew the most ludicrous right-wingisms, and Fox News is valiantly stepping forward to prop up their lunatic pandering. Too bad Fox can’t even accomplish that act without misspelling the name of their designated demon (Alinksky?). And their transcript of the exchange between Henry and Carney erroneously quoted Carney as saying “[Obama]’s experiences abroad also included alot of other areas in his life.” What Carney actually said was that “[Obama]’s experience is a broad-based one that includes a lot of other areas in his life.” I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Fox’s mistaken version fits nicely into the Birther fantasy that Obama is a foreigner.

The more Fox News and their inbred candidates focus on irrelevancies like Alinsky, the more cheering can heard from the White House. Not because they have succeeded in concealing from the nation their secret plot to invoke Sharia law, but because they know that the American people are more concerned about jobs, income inequality, and the sort of real national security that brought about the demise of Osama Bin Laden and an end to the war in Iraq. Most Americans have no idea who Saul Alinsky is, nor could they define socialism (much less Kenyan anti-colonialism). So if these are the themes of the Republican campaign in 2012, the Democrats can rest easy as they cruise to a landslide victory in November.

Republicans Flub The Double Reverse Alinsky

For degree of difficulty, I’ll give them a ten, but Republicans are far too incompetent to have risked the political Jujitsu required by their recent exercise.

Saul Alinsky was an activist and author who has been called the founder of modern community organizing. He is said to have been an early influence on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. His book, Rules For Radicals, outlined a program for effecting social change by building organizations that restored the balance of power from the elite to the people.

Early in last year’s presidential campaign, Republicans sought to exploit Clinton and Obama’s connection to Alinsky, implying that there was something frightful about his advocacy of empowering the poor and middle classes. More recently, his name has begun to reappear in a new, seemingly coordinated assault on the President, the press, and any stray progressive activist that might saunter along. The problem is that these conservatives swing so wide of the mark that they only succeed in making asses of themselves. Their approach is so pedestrian that not only do they fail to make their point, the point they make is often antithetical to what they intended. For example…

Jim Geraghty wrote an article for the National Review, The Alinsky Administration, that seeks to associate Obama with the first of Alinsky’s rules: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. But Geraghty’s limited comprehension distills the concept down to nothing more than the allegation that Obama is a politician who seeks to attain power. Shocking, isn’t it?

Geraghty: “As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it.”

In addition to missing Alinsky’s point entirely, Geraghty also contradicts the vast conservative confederation that has been hammering away at Obama precisely because of his intransigent liberalism. So while everyone else on the right is trying to convince us that Obama is taking us down the road to Socialism, Geraghty contends that the ideology is expendable in the pursuit of power.

Then Geraghty turns up on the Hannity show and invokes his version of Alinsky’s fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. But in making his case, Geraghty has uncovered a heretofore unknown conspiracy that is under the direction of Obama:

Geraghty: “[H]e’s got everything from ‘The Daily Show’ to ‘The Colbert Report’ to, you know, liberal bloggers, entertainers, Bill Maher. He kind of outsources that aspect of the Alinsky operation.

It may come as a surprise to Jon Stewart et al, to learn that they are mere puppets of the White House Overlord. The administration’s army of comedians must keep a lot of Republicans up at night. And, Heaven knows, the President himself loves to laugh. Bill O’Reilly also picked up the ridicule angle and added NBC as an instrument of Obama’s plot:

O’Reilly: “Enter far-left philosopher Saul Alinsky […] Before he died, Alinsky wrote a book called ‘Rules for Radicals,’ and here is where the politics of ridicule was defined. According to Alinsky, in order to change America into a far-left bastion, traditional Americans must be marginalized.”

Of course, O’Reilly made up virtually all of that. Alinsky not only did not advocate for marginalizing “traditional Americans,” he was their biggest advocate. Then again, O’Reilly’s definition of a traditional American is a wealthy, white, Christian, corporatist, social Darwinian, who gets off on torture and loofahs. But my favorite part, personally, is where O’Reilly says, “Before he died, Alinsky wrote a book…” As opposed to the books he wrote after he died? Thanks for making that distinction, Bill.

If the Republicans are sensitive to being ridiculed, it is only because they make it so easy. However, their disingenuous sniveling is hard to take seriously when they are just as guilty of the practice as the left. O’Reilly has a daily feature on his show wherein he calls people pinheads. The RNC repeatedly cranked out campaign videos mocking Obama as a celebrity, a media darling, or “The One”. Glenn Beck has a recurring series on the “March to Socialism”. Rush Limbaugh devotes most of his daily three hour rant to nothing but ridiculing one Democrat or another. The Internet is awash with images of Obama as everything from a terrorist to a Messiah to Hitler.

The flood of references to Alinsky is threatening to drown out all other political discourse. It has been taken up by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Michelle Bachmann to Karl Rove. When you hear Republicans condemn Democrats for some breach of civility, you can lay odds that they are doing the very same thing. Their capacity for projection is legendary. This is no less true with regard to their allegations concerning Alinsky’s rules. But their execution is atrocious. They are so bad, in fact, that they are even contradicted by their own side. Last year, John J. Pitney Jr., also writing for the National Review, penned a column entitled, “The Alinsky Ticket,” wherein he exposed the real perpetrators of this pinko scheme:

Pitney: “Radical activist Saul Alinsky has had quite a season, especially for somebody who has been dead for 36 years. The two Democratic finalists had Alinsky links […] But the candidates who have most effectively applied Alinsky principles are John McCain and Sarah Palin.”

Well, now the cat’s out of the bag. Pitney dropped the dime on the GOP. How can they assail Obama and the Democrats for a strategy that they are employing themselves? Actually, they can do it very easily. In fact, it is rule number one in Karl Rove’s Rules For Reactionaries: Conduct a campaign of dirty tricks, but accuse your opponents of doing it first.

Rightists are now trying to adapt that rule to Alinsky’s teachings, and to disparage Obama and the Democrats. Unfortunately, their ineptitude is so advanced that they can’t execute a successful program. All they are accomplishing is a reaffirmation of their own desperation and lameness. Nothing illustrates this better than the recent proposal by the RNC to rebrand Democrats as the Democrat Socialist Party [shakes head and sighs].

Watch for more hilarity as Republicans continue in their quest to complete the perfect Double Reverse Alinsky – no matter how many times, or how miserably, they fail.