over the cliff, onto the rocks.: Dear Mssrs Lieberman and Kristol:

Monday, April 14, 2008

Dear Mssrs Lieberman and Kristol:

Yes, it's a good question and No, Obama is not a Marxist. He's s nice, sometimes-left-leaning centrist. You'll like him, I promise.

Signed,
A Real Lefty

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: As someone who has fallen asleep reading Das Kapital in English, Russian, and German trying to figure out what all the hoopla was about, I can state definitely that Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller were both to the left of Barack Obama. Truth be told, so was Richard Nixon on domestic issues.; Tuesday, April 15, 2008 6:36:00 PM
hipparchia said...: english, russian, and german?! i'm not sure if you should be awarded a gold star for perseverance or a dunce cap for wasting that much time. although, if you were deliberately using it a s soporific, i suppose you get points for that.

i waded through enough of it in english to not flunk the test in high school civics class. i tackled small parts of it in german in college, but only over beer and popcorn at the rathskellar.

nixon = epa in my head, when he's not associated with watergate, and thus is responsible for the fact that i don't actually dislike republicans. it's the party that has been taken over by the radicals that i hate. all the sane republicans then became democrats though, thus hijacking my party.; Tuesday, April 15, 2008 10:18:00 PM
Anonymous said...: When you are an intelligence analyst targeting a country that is supposedly Communist, you have to read the sources to try to understand why they think the way they do. You have to "get into their heads", so you can predict how they will react to a given set of circumstances.

The answers were not to be found in Das Kapital. I went to the German because the English and Russian versions were at odds in several areas. The German was no help, as the standard English version and approved Soviet version are both valid translations of the German, but don't have exactly the same meaning.; Wednesday, April 16, 2008 10:40:00 AM
hipparchia said...: fun with translation. ok, a gold star for perseverance then.

i didn't get very far into reading marx before wondering why we were calling the soviets communists.; Thursday, April 17, 2008 9:13:00 PM
Anonymous said...: Well, communism was the eventual goal, according to the approved narrative, but it was necessary to do some other things first.

Few people understand that most of the better known dissidents, like the Medvedev brothers and Solzhinitsyn, were communist true believers who didn't like the West, and were dissenting against the lack of progress towards real communism.; Friday, April 18, 2008 6:48:00 PM