Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 29

Time Magazine’s Joe Klein: The Latest Useful Idiot of the Mullahs in Iran

Joe Klein of Time magazine can be a knowledgeable and talented commentator on the American political scene. But when it comes to discussing the crisis in the Middle East, the situation in Iran, and Obama’s foreign policy, he is like his journalist colleague Roger Cohen at the New York Times — nothing but the mullahs’ useful idiot. Speaking on MSNBC’s today, Klein said the following (listen to his harsh tone of voice in the video, referring to Bibi Netanyahu’s statement yesterday that “those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel”):

I don’t think I’ve ever, in the 40 years I’ve been doing this, have heard of another example of an American ally trying to push us into war as blatantly and trying to influence an American election as blatantly as Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud party in Israel is doing right now. I think it’s absolutely outrageous and disgusting. It’s not a way that friends treat each other. It’s cynical and brazen.

It is not cynical or brazen for the president of the United States to use a flimsy excuse (that he won’t be in New York City at the time) to not meet with Netanyahu, but to Klein it is an outrage and provocation for Netanyahu to show concern about how close Iran is coming to becoming a nuclear power, despite the ineffective boycotts and pressure.  Klein went on to call those who favor any form of war with Iran people on a “fool’s errand,” and argued that to fight or bomb Iran would be “a ridiculous war.”

As Klein sees things, the Revolutionary Guards who control 30 to 40 percent of the economy are desperately hurting because of the sanctions and will soon not be able to buy weapons. As he continued to speak in a 12-minute segment of the program, Klein continued to make a fool of himself.  If Iran goes nuclear, he argued, containment would work. Why? Klein’s answer: “They don’t want to have their country destroyed by nuclear weapons.” Iran, after all, is a “real country.” As we all know, real countries are all rational, despite an irrational leadership. Klein has been to Iran twice, and that of course makes him an expert.  Iranians, he said, are proud of their ancient civilization, and its people are “natural allies” of the United States. Moreover, personal experience has taught him that the Iranian people “love us.”

So what about the mullahs? Klein has another easy answer. There is a “mismatch” between the people and the nation’s leadership. There is, however, a real danger. That, if you haven’t already guessed, is the election of Mitt Romney, who backs Bibi’s desire to have the U.S. “do his dirty work.” Klein sees only dangers if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear plants. Iran would soon reconstitute its nuclear program, and bombing would serve only to “empower them to unleash Hezbollah,” producing total chaos in the Middle East.

Romney is a danger because, according to Klein, he would farm out policy to Netanyahu and would be his “puppet.” Acknowledging that the Iranian president is a “fascist,” he proceeded to say that, nevertheless, Iran was run by “extremists, not crazy people.” Hence he knows — possibly because they told him so — that if Iran goes nuclear, “they’ll have a deterrent” against any attack by either the U.S. or Israel, and he is convinced that they would never use the bomb “unless they are provoked.” Get that? Iran can provoke the U.S. and Israel all it wants, but the danger is only from those evil neocons like Romney, who would be responsible if Iran used its weapons because the West forced them to do so!

Hence, Klein assured us that there is no crisis in the area, only one “blown up” or manufactured “by a small group of people in this country.” Klein’s view is reminiscent, one must say, of Charles Lindbergh’s famous speech to America First before the Second World War, in which he said that the threat of war came not from Nazi Germany, but from the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews.

Klein might find it profitable to read the recent blog post by The Atlantic magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a man who knows a great deal more than Klein about Israel and the Middle East. Goldberg is no conservative, and hardly a supporter of Bibi Netanyahu. Goldberg writes:

It is understandable, though, why Netanyahu feels anxiety about Obama; their relationship got off on the wrong foot over the Administration’s public demand for a settlement freeze, and the lack of a follow-up plan when the demand went more or less unmet (the current mayor of Chicago, who was Obama’s first chief of staff and the White House expert on Israel, didn’t help by nursing a grudge against Netanyahu that dated back to the Clinton presidency).

And Netanyahu’s specific anxiety is not unreasonable: The White House position is that the U.S. will keep Iran from possessing a nuclear bomb. It is fair to ask, as Bibi is asking: Does that mean you will let them have a warhead design, sufficient enriched uranium, and a missile system capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, so long as they don’t actually finish building the device and then mating it to a delivery system? In other words, what if Iran is only technically non-nuclear? What if it would only take Iran a month to put together a nuclear bomb from the moment the decision is made? What will you do then? And how will you know, for sure, that they are doing it? American officials have promised Israel and the Arab states that their intelligence is good enough that they will know when Iran is approaching the nuclear threshold. But obviously the record of the American intelligence community is not without its flaws (the same holds true, of course, for Israel, and the Europeans.)  (my emphasis)

Klein might also take a look at the informative article in the new issue of The New Yorker by David Makovsky about the decision-making process in Israel that led its leaders  to bomb Syria’s nuclear installation in 2007. Of course, Syria in 2007 is not Iran in 2012. But even during the Bush administration, Makovsky pointed out, the Israeli leadership (and Ehud Olmert, not Bibi, was PM) and the U.S. “agreed on the fundamental facts and risks,” but had “reached opposing policy conclusions.” Olmert hoped the U.S. would lead the attack, but George W. Bush refused.  Bush, however, unlike Obama, never “did suggest that the U.S. would block Israeli action.” There was no red light given to Israel by Bush.

The Case of Judith Butler: The Anti-Semitism that Defines Today’s Western Left

Tomorrow, September 11th,  the city of Frankfurt, Germany is going to give an American academic, Judith Butler, its Adorno Award, of $50,000 euros, or roughly $63,000 U.S. The award is given, according to the city, in honor of the late Theodore Adorno, a founder of the Frankfurt School in Weimar Germany. Adorno, who was Jewish and a defender of Israel, went into exile in the United States, where along with his friend Herbert Marcuse, he created the neo-Marxist school of cultural critique. Adorno, unlike Marcuse, was a critic  of the New Left . The award has been presented by the city every three years since 1977, on the date of Adorno’s birthday.

Butler may not be a well-known name to most readers of this column, but her position in academia reflects not only on the corruption of the academy and the decline of real liberal arts in the university, (so well critiqued in the current Weekly Standard by Joseph Epstein) but the shocking growth of opposition to Israel as the main cause of today’s global Left.

At a 2006 teach-in at UC Berkeley (an event which in itself is a throwback to the Vietnam era and the birth of the New Left) she stated in response to a question- which you can view in this video-that “understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive and that are on the left, that are part of the global left is extremely important.”  As the video went viral, Butler later tried to explain her statement. The explanation she offered only succeeded only in further revealing her animus and hatred for Israel. As Butler explained, writing in the vitriolic anti-Israeli website Mondoweiss:

I do not endorse practices of violent resistance and neither do I endorse state violence, cannot, and never have. This view makes me perhaps more naïve than dangerous, but it is my view. So it has always seemed absurd to me that my comments were taken to mean that I support or endorse Hamas and Hezbollah! I have never taken a stand on either organization, just as I have never supported every organization that is arguably part of the global left – I am not unconditionally supportive of all groups that currently constitute the global left. To say that those organizations belong to the left is not to say that they should belong, or that I endorse or support them in any way.

I do support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in a very specific way. I reject some versions and accept others. For me, BDS means that I oppose investments in companies that make military equipment whose sole purpose is to demolish homes. It means as well that I do not speak at Israeli institutions unless they take a strong stand against the occupation. I do not accept any version of BDS that discriminates against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship, and I maintain strong collaborative relationships with many Israeli scholars. One reason I can endorse BDS and not endorse Hamas and Hezbollah is that BDS is the largest non-violent civic political movement seeking to establish equality and the rights of self-determination for Palestinians. My own view is that the peoples of those lands, Jewish and Palestinian, must find a way to live together on the condition of equality.

In other words, Butler claims not to be anti-Semitic or a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, but only a critic of Israel who works and writes in the Jewish tradition. Her explanation is standard left-wing boilerplate, in which enemies of Israel claim to be its real friends, and who spend their entire time condemning Israel for the “occupation” and never attacking its serious foes that are devoting themselves to its destruction. Moreover, as Dovid Efune writes,  her words at the Berkley event were “by no means descriptive but strongly prescriptive.” Moreover, it is telling that by calling Hamas and Hezbollah anti-imperialist, she in fact uses that to point out that it is accurate- as indeed it is- to see them as part of the global left that Butler identifies with. The truth is, as Efune and many others have pointed out time and time again, these organizations are proxies of Iran, and in fact themselves are aggressive and violent opponents of Israel that regularly use terror and violence in their campaign to bring down the Jewish State.

It is no wonder that throughout Europe and Israel, the announcement of the Adorno Award for Butler has produced major opposition. The Jerusalem Post began to circulate a petition opposed to giving her the award. Adorno, it pointed out, “himself was a victim of the monstrous Nazi race laws, not only was forced to save his life by going into exile; he was deprived of academic teaching because he was considered Jewish. His insight that Jewish statehood may be the only means to protect Jews from persecution arose his concern for Israel’s ever present endangered existence. More than 20 years after the Shoah he wrote: ‘We are in extreme worry about Israel… One can only hope the Israelis will be superior enough to the Arabs militarily for the time being to uphold the situation.’”

Yet as the petition pointed out,  both Hamas and Hezbollah “are terror organizations whose declared goal is Israel’s annihilation as well as the murder and expulsion of the Jews from the Middle East and the establishment of an Islamist theocracy founded on terror and murder. In a perfidious twist of reality Butler not only belittles these Anti-Semitic gang of killers with their aspiration to establish theocratic-fascist dictatorships but also to equate the only democracy in the Middle East – Israel – with Apartheid South Africa and the War on Terror after 9/11 with the actions of the Nazis against the Jews.”

Writing an open letter to Butler in The Times of Israel, Richard Landes, an historian at Boston University who considers himself part of the left, asked Butler, whose sincerity he does not question, to consider other things. First, Landes noted that since she sees the two terrorist groups as part of the left, he asked her whether  she has “no particularly strong objections about their pervasive misogyny, their blatant homophobia, their cult of death, their genocidal discourse? They are the antithesis of everything we on the global left stand for: the dignity of voluntary human interaction.” How, he asked her, “can you not denounce loudly the shocking notion that a group that pervaded with such violently regressive attitudes be even thought of as “social movements that are progressive.” What about them is progressive?”

Landes writes:

Honestly, do you really believe that the people who join these groups share the anti-hierarchical, anti-domineering values of the civic culture you, we all, thrive in? The signs everywhere say “no.” To every one of your espoused concerns, they are violently hostile. Indeed, even as we carry on this conversation, violent imperial Islamists drive Christians and Jews from lands they’ve inhabited for millennia, while moderate Muslims are cowed into submission.

How on earth can you make a mistake as huge as to suggest that if they say they’re anti-imperialist, that makes them “arguably” on the progressive, global left? Who are so uninformed on these matters that they’d even make so foolish an argument, and why on earth do you cede to them? This is not serious scholarship; it is “academic” only if that word has become a synonym for principled gullibility.

I admire Landes’ desire to go on the offensive against Butler, and to expose her own gullibility and hypocrisy. I would, however, ask Landes the following question: Why is it that so few on the left- either in the United States or especially in Europe- do not take your position? As the British writer and left-wing intellectual Norman Geras asked at the YIVO conference on Jews and the Left,  the left in his own Britain  made opposition to Israel its main focus and concern, and has willingly joined hands with anti-Semites?  Geras writes:

At the same time, that affinity has now been compromised by the existence of a new climate of anti-Semitic opinion within the left. This climate of opinion affects a section of the left only, and not the whole of it. But it is a substantial section. Its convenient alibi is the state of Israel – by which I mean that Israel is standardly invoked to deflect the charge that there is anything of anti-Semitism at work. Israel, so the story goes, is a delinquent state and, for many of those who regard it so, a non-legitimate one – colonialist, imperialist, vehicle of oppression and what have you. Similarly, diaspora Jews who defend Israel within their home countries are not seen as the conduit of Jewish interests and/or opinion in the normal way of any other democratic articulation; they are treated, rather, as a dubious force – the notorious ‘Jewish lobby’ – as if their organized existence were somehow improper.

Speaking about the British newspaper The Guardian, Geras writes that “This once great paper of British liberalism now provides space on its opinion pages for the spokesmen of Hamas, the contents of its programmatic charter notwithstanding; provides space on its letters page for philosophers justifying the murder of Jews; and provides space on its website for people who deploy well-known anti-Semitic themes even while professing that they have nothing whatever against Jews.” His point speaks directly as well to Judith  Butler, whose support of Hamas is justified by her in precisely the terms that Geras notes the British leftists use as rationale for their anti-Semitism.

Geras concluded his remarks by saying that “We now know, as well, that should a new calamity ever befall the Jewish people, there will be, again, not only the direct architects and executants but also those who collaborate, who collude, who look away and find the words to go with doing so. Some of these, dismayingly, shamefully, will be of the left.”

Judith Butler is one of those Americans who now has helped, despite her own so-called explanations, to join in the campaign to delegitimize Israel.  But in contrast to Professor Landes, I would argue that this new anti-Semitism defines the left today. Landes writes that Butler’s entire audience is on the left; as he tells her, “that’s where you get your kudos.” That is  precisely the point. And that is because the new anti-Semitism- masquerading as anti-Zionism-is the mantra of today’s left. The few social-democrats who support Israel, like Michael Walzer, Norm Geras and Richard Landes, are few and far between. They are virtually a voice crying in the wilderness, and have not succeeded in mitigating the anti-Semitism coming from today’s left.

As Daniel Pipes has written, “The burgeoning alliance of Western leftists and Islamists ranks as one of today’s most disturbing political developments, one that impedes the West’s efforts to protect itself. When Stalin and Hitler made their infamous pact in 1939, the Red-Brown alliance posed a mortal danger to the West and, indeed, to civilization itself. Less dramatically but no less certainly, the coalition today poses the same threat. As seven decades ago, this one must be exposed, rejected, resisted, and defeated.”

Perhaps Judith Butler tomorrow will address the pleas of her fellow critics on the left, especially Richard Landes. But judging from Landes’ op-ed in today’s European edition of The Wall Street Journal, Butler has ignored his passionate open letter to her. As he and Benjamin Weinthal write, “For Ms. Butler, anything that opposes Western power can be defended. It does not seem to concern her that in so doing, she betrays every constituency she claims to celebrate—lesbians, gays, women, Jews and other diasporic minorities. Their problems, it seems, are always the fault of oppressive ‘colonial’ powers.”

That is the mindset of today’s left, which is why so many of us who once inhabited its precincts have departed from its ranks. The logic of the left is the same logic its ancestors used to defend Stalinism in its heyday—the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the enemy of the left is Western democracy, as it exists in both the United States and Israel. Butler’s anti-Americanism and anti-Israel posturing defines the left. Isn’t it time for good men like Landes and Geras to face reality, and stop trying to get the left to change its tune? The fight to defend Israel must henceforth include the effort to fight the left, whose agenda, as it always has been the case, leads to horrendous ends.

 

It’s Not Your Father’s Democratic Party: How the Party has Changed for the Worse since Clinton’s era

On the eve of the Democratic convention, one thing is clear. It’s not your father’s Democratic Party any longer. Readers of Jay Cost’s important new book, Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, already know this. Cost gives us the analysis and the argument that shows the slow but unmistakable transformation of the once broad-based political party to a machine operation controlled by the new elites and the public sector unions, beholden not to the American public, but to the narrow interests that dominate its machinery. As the publisher’s description of the book says, “No longer able to govern for the vast majority of the country, the Democratic party simply taxes Middle America to pay off its clients while hiding its true nature behind a smoke screen of idealistic rhetoric. Thus, the Obama health care, stimulus, and auto bailout health care bill were created not to help all Americans but to secure contributions and votes. Average Americans need to see that whatever the Democratic party claims it is doing for the country, it is in fact governing simply for its base.”

Use that description as the guide when you watch the convention the next three days. Cost making this argument is one thing. After all, he writes for The Weekly Standard,  and some will thus write him off as a conservative, and simply ignore what he has to say. But Newsweek making the same argument is another thing. Following Niall Ferguson’s much discussed cover story of two weeks ago, Tina Brown has done it again. This week features an analysis of Bill Clinton’s apparent reconciliation with Barack Obama, and the meaning of his featured prime-time speech at the DNC Convention.

Written by Peter J. Boyer, the article is not really about Clinton, but rather, a sharp analysis of how the Democrats have changed since the era of Clinton’s presidency. Clinton may have accepted the difficult task of trying to save the Obama presidency and speaking on the President’s behalf to satisfy his large ego, but everyone knows the truth. Obama and Clinton have had what Boyer calls an “uneasy” relationship since 2008, and a bitter primary fight with his wife that “inflicted real wounds” that in fact have not healed.

More to the point is that the party and the politics Bill Clinton represents are far removed from our current President’s lurch to the left. After Republicans gained strength and Clinton saw the handwriting on the wall, he moved to the center, reflecting his own origins as head of the moderate and centrist so-called New Democrats, who were aligned with the now defunct Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to reflect the concerns of blue-dog Democrats, centrists, and the business community. When Clinton won re-election, he worked with Republicans to pass NAFTA, institute real welfare reform, and abandon his ill-conceived experiment in universal health care.

So while Clinton will speak in Charlotte, as Boyer writes, “that brand of centrist New Democrat politics that helped make him the first president of his party to win reelection since FDR-will be mostly missing. Conservative and centrist Democrats, so critical to Clinton’s efforts to reform welfare, balance the budget, and erase the image of the party as being reflexively anti-business, have nearly vanished.”

Today’s Democratic Party is an institution beholden to its public-sector union clients, academics, Eastern elites and the crony capitalists who give it funding and benefit from the White House’s largesse when it gives them contracts, such as those for the  failed energy companies like Solyndra.

Its base is the anti-business and anti-war Left, symbolized by the likely to fail campaign for Senate in Massachusetts waged by Elizabeth Warren. Hers, like that of the President, is that of a party that has taken “an ever-more-stridently leftward turn.” Gone is the emphasis of the DLC for private-sector growth, government efficiency, personal responsibility and what Boyer writes are “an affirmation of mainstream values.” And one should add gone is a tough foreign policy against very real enemies, replaced by Obama’s “leading from behind” strategy, which has the left the U.S. without influence to stop the slaughter in Syria, defend Israel from ever growing attacks, and most importantly, to force Iran to stop preparing the enrichment of uranium and to foil its plans to develop atomic weapons.

 Boyer highlights the very real differences:

Obama’s presidency has seemed, in key regards, a repudiation of the New Democrat idea. Clinton Democrats embraced business; Obama attacked private equity. A New Democrat would have championed the Keystone XL Pipeline; Obama, yielding to environmentalists, has resisted it. Although Obama campaigned in coal country in 2008 as a friend of the industry (and of all those blue-collar jobs associated with it), his Environmental Protection Agency has established regulations so severe that one administration official admitted, “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.” Many of the workers affected by such policies are swing-state voters, who are also keenly sensitive to values issues. Obama’s health-care mandates on contraception may help him with single women and urban voters, but it might hurt him among Catholics in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act; Obama stopped enforcing it, and then declared himself a supporter of gay marriage—the day after North Carolinians voted a traditional definition of marriage into the state’s constitution.

Clinton’s 1992 convention. Pollster Doug Schoen says Obama has “substituted class warfare for Clintonism.”

“I think the New Democrat movement can be saved,” says Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council. “We do go through cycles. But it would have been a lot better if we had had a second New Democrat president to cement it.”

From, speaking to Boyer, ties the change to those he calls the “cultural liberals,” reflected in the press, academia, New York’s Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and of course, most of the film academy and big Hollywood boosters of Obama like George Clooney. The rest of the party’s base are composed of those who get government checks, and those in the business community who get what From calls “corporate welfare.” In other words, the party has become “the party of elites and dependents.”

Given this reality, it is not a surprise that during the Republican convention, as I said in my previous column, the media did not highlight the speech by Jane Edmonds, or even let mostpeople know of the defection to the Republican side of the former Alabama Congressmen Arthur Davis, the man who seconded Obama’s nomination at the 2008 Democratic convention. Davis is an African-America, who must have taken great pride in the symbolic importance of a black man receiving the nomination of one of America’s major political  parties. But now, Davis found that Obama had taken a different path than that which allowed Democrats in the South to gain electoral victories. Rather than trying to get those who had voted for Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan to vote for him, Obama, Davis points out, “was figuring out how to rally the Democratic base around him,” and he never “had to do what Clinton had to do…which was to figure out how to construct some kind of other political case that appealed to conservative-leaning voters.”

The other point made by Boyer, who favorably cites Democratic pollster and analyst Doug Schoen, is that Obama has “substituted class-based politics- resentment of the rich, taxing the rich-for fiscal discipline, and prudence.” That was most validated when the nation saw Obama simply ignore any of the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson commission. Or as Davis tellingly say, the Democratic Party is “slipping in the direction of becoming a self-conscious vehicle of the left, that is more concerned about developing a righteous leftist platform than one that has a particular project to govern.”

And yes, Ed Rendell is right in his observation that one of the problems is that while Newt Gingrich could bring along his base and get them to accept compromises and work with Clinton to implement them, the current Congressional Republican leadership is stymied because many of the new Tea Party elected officials owe no loyalty to them, and can’t be budged to accept any suggestions the Boehner-Cantor leadership might suggest that they disapprove of. But, one should note, when Obama had a majority in both houses of Congress, he still could not get his own Democrats to move one inch and accept any compromise with Republicans. Nancy Pelosi and her followers ran the show, rather than the White House.

So will Clinton turn the day, making those independent and moderate swing voters see him on the stage, and now decide to vote for Obama? Doug Schoen tells Boyer that he doubts it, and sees Clinton’s coming speech as mere “political artifice.” It is meant, Schoen thinks, to “achieve a short-term political result,” and not a “change in philosophy.”

So the reasons Ronald Reagan asserted as to why he became a Republican still stands. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan said. “It left me.” Now, many Clinton Democrats, reflecting on the four years of Barack Obama and the party he represents, will join Artur Davis and others in making that same statement. The time and moment for the Democrats to change their philosophy has long passed.

For Democrats who really want to move forward, they too have to abandon a leftism and liberalism that has become both obsolete and reactionary, and join conservatives, libertarians and moderates in voting this November for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

 

 

 

The RNC Convention Speech You May Have Missed …

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are to win the White House, they have to succeed in getting the votes of the still-undecided swing voters. With the Democrats in an all-out war based on painting the Republican nominees as the devil incarnate who hope to destroy the well-being of the poor, the dispossessed, women, and all minority groups, the effort to destroy the Democratic and left-wing narrative should be front and center for the Republican Party and its supporters.

Hence, the speech that should have been seen by most TV viewers of the RNC 2012 convention — but which most of the viewers at home did not see — was the little-noticed yet important testimony of Jane Edmonds,  Mitt Romney’s secretary of Workforce when he was governor of Massachusetts. Coming before the speeches of Clint Eastwood, Marco Rubio, and Romney himself, it is not surprising that it was missed. But if you flipped channels, most networks — regrettably, even including Fox News — decided instead to give viewers the wisdom of their panel of pundits.

Edmonds, viewers at home would have found, is an African-American woman who proudly called herself a “liberal Democrat.” In a strong and firm voice, Edmonds told the delegates and those who did watch her speech that the Romney she got to know well when he was governor was a supporter of women, appointing them to high positions in his administration.  Moreover, she noted that Romney was a bold, strong administrator who worked hard on behalf of the people he represented.

“The late Stephen Covey,” Edmonds said, “writes about 2 kinds of people: one type is all about themselves and their success. The other type works as hard as they can — and certainly succeeds, but their success is motivated by doing good for others. That’s how I see Governor Romney. He is authentic.”

Her very presence indicated that even a self-proclaimed liberal who is also an African-American and a woman can unashamedly and publicly give her support to Romney’s campaign. This undercuts the Democratic narrative in one fell swoop. It is not surprising that a network like MSNBC would choose not to broadcast her short moment in the program, but that most including Fox News did the same is inexcusable.

Destroying the left-wing narrative is particularly important in our current time, when, as Joel Kotkin points out in a very important analysis, there is an “unseen class war” raging in our land, of a type that most commentators have ignored. Kotkin notes that Democrats will base their campaign on trying to convince most Americans that “rich business folks” are responsible for the economic troubles facing the middle class, who feel worse off than they ever have in decades.

The RNC Convention Speech You May Have Missed, and Why It Is so Important for Americans to Hear

If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are to win the White House, they have to succeed in getting the votes of the still-undecided swing voters. With the Democrats in an all-out war based on painting the Republican nominees as the devil incarnate who hope to destroy the well-being of the poor, the dispossessed, women, and all minority groups, the effort to destroy the Democratic and left-wing narrative should be front and center for the Republican Party and its supporters.

Hence, the speech that should have been seen by most TV viewers of the RNC 2012 convention — but which most of the viewers at home did not see — was the little-noticed yet important testimony of Jane Edmonds,  Mitt Romney’s secretary of Workforce when he was governor of Massachusetts. Coming before the speeches of Clint Eastwood, Marco Rubio, and Romney himself, it is not surprising that it was missed. But if you flipped channels, most networks — regrettably, even including Fox News — decided instead to give viewers the wisdom of their panel of pundits.

Edmonds, viewers at home would have found, is an African-American woman who proudly called herself a “liberal Democrat.” In a strong and firm voice, Edmonds told the delegates and those who did watch her speech that the Romney she got to know well when he was governor was a supporter of women, appointing them to high positions in his administration.  Moreover, she noted that Romney was a bold, strong administrator who worked hard on behalf of the people he represented.

“The late Stephen Covey,” Edmonds said, “writes about 2 kinds of people: one type is all about themselves and their success. The other type works as hard as they can — and certainly succeeds, but their success is motivated by doing good for others. That’s how I see Governor Romney. He is authentic.”

Her very presence indicated that even a self-proclaimed liberal who is also an African-American and a woman can unashamedly and publicly give her support to Romney’s campaign. This undercuts the Democratic narrative in one fell swoop. It is not surprising that a network like MSNBC would choose not to broadcast her short moment in the program, but that most including Fox News did the same is inexcusable.

Destroying the left-wing narrative is particularly important in our current time, when, as Joel Kotkin points out in a very important analysis, there is an “unseen class war” raging in our land, of a type that most commentators have ignored. Kotkin notes that Democrats will base their campaign on trying to convince most Americans that “rich business folks” are responsible for the economic troubles facing the middle class, who feel worse off than they ever have in decades.

Woody Guthrie at 100: The New York Times Tells us to Feel Guilty Because We’re No Longer good Leftists

Woody Guthrie would have been 100 years old this year and celebrations and tribute concerts have been held not only in the United States but all through Europe. You can get the various details here.

But the New York Times ran the most left-wing, guilt-tripping contribution on his legacy in its Weekend section last Sunday. The piece, written by Lawrence Downes, begins by noting that to attend the gala final concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., one has to buy tickets that range from $80-175. For a singer who in a good year may have earned $70 in one month — when he was employed by CBS to do a radio program — such a price for people to listen to his songs would have infuriated him.

The publicity for the concert reads: “Through his unique music, words and style, Guthrie was able to bring attention and understanding to the critical issues of his day.” To which I would say, sometimes. He came to attention by what is most likely his most outstanding work, Dust Bowl Ballads, in which Guthrie chronicled the impact of the dust storms throughout the Southwest that drove thousands of poor farmers from Oklahoma and elsewhere to flee however they could to California and the Salinas Valley, where they could eke out a living picking crops.

No one who listens to these can doubt his talent, his humor, and his concern for those he knew well. “Talking’ Dust Bowl Blues” is filled with humor and irreverence, and although imitated by scores who wrote their own talking blues for years thereafter, nothing comes close to Woody’s originals.

But Mr. Downes’ concern is that there has been a “sentimental softening and warping of Woody’s reputation,” because the truth was that the “saintly folk hero” was really an “angry vigilante — a fascist-hating, Communist-sympathizing rabble-rouser.” He complains that his most well-known song, “This Land is Your Land,” has been “truncated and misinterpreted” because the “pan is off the flame.”

Mr. Downes is obviously referring to the last two verses, which Guthrie himself never sang — and which now both Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen regularly include — about how he saw a sign that said “Private property, no trespassing, but on the other side it said nothing, that side was made for you and me.”

Just don’t try to trespass on any of Bruce’s million-dollar properties — unless you want the police arriving and throwing you in the hoosegow, which Woody himself knew quite a lot about.

A Graduate of my ‘Commie’ High School Goes to Cuba and Sees Paradise, or How One’s Education Can Warp You for Life

I recently finished reading Paul Kengor’s important new book The Communist: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, which I’m reviewing for a forthcoming issue of National Review. One of the points that Kengor raises is the question of how important a mentor is for any young person, especially when his relation to the individual he is mentoring takes place during the impressionable high school and early college years. Kengor argues that contrary to what mainstream journalists have claimed, Davis was a most influential figure in Obama’s life and a man who obviously led Obama to the very left-wing stance he took when he entered college.

Did Obama ever have a real conversion experience, and consciously move away from the type of politics that Davis espoused? The truth is that we don’t know, since our president has never been upfront about it at all. Many people, of course, have moved from communism to either social democracy, liberalism, or conservatism. The late Irving Howe departed from Trotskyism to become a social-democrat; Whittaker Chambers moved from communism to a deep religious conservatism; in our own time, my friend David Horowitz moved from the ranks of the communist left to become a major conservative intellectual and activist.

Readers of my own memoir, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, know that over many years, I too began a long move away from the left-wing milieu in which I grew up. One of the chapters in my book is about what I somewhat facetiously call “the Commie high school” that I attended from 1949-1955, the “progressive” Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Begun by Irwin, a disciple of the educational philosophy of John Dewey, the school became a virtual who’s who of the emerging Old and New Left from the 1930s through the 1970s. Its graduates include the Weather Underground’s Kathy Boudin; the Communist African-American leader Angela Davis; the late folksinger Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary; the former publisher and editor of The Nation, Victor Navasky; the wives of both Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger; and the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Michael and Robert Meeropol. The elementary school is named the Little Red Schoolhouse, and many of us called it “the little Red schoolhouse for little Reds.”

Recently, I was interviewed by a writer who is working on an official history of the institution. He asked me to take a guess as to how many of those who taught at the school when I attended were actually members of the CPUSA. I told him that all the teachers were either sympathizers or fellow travelers, but I could only say for certain that I knew two or three who were definitely members. I was shocked when he told me that, in fact, almost everyone teaching when I was there was an actual CP member, and that even the school’s principal was a communist (I thought of him as simply a left-leaning civil libertarian).

So the questions arise. What paths did the graduates of that era take? Have any of them changed and broken out of the left-wing box in which they were educated? Aside from myself, I know of only two others, Abby Thernstrom and Elliot Abrams. At the last class reunion I attended, almost all my classmates had the same views they held when they attended EI.

The Ideology of the Left: Gnostics of Our Time

The “revolutionary mysticism” of the Left takes its toll.

Paul Ryan: From Behind the Beltway Curtain to National Scene

Opponents will be blaming Ryan for the actions of the Republican caucus as a whole, but the GOP could use the spotlight to showcase their efforts on the Hill.

The Biggest D.C. Spy Scandal You Haven’t Heard About (Part One)

Why has the story of a 20-year illegal infiltration of D.C. on behalf of Pakistani intelligence gone unnoticed?