45 thoughts on “Listening To The President’s Speech”

  2. Ironic since Fascism is on full display with the ‘saving of the auto industry.’

    The choice is clear. Do we want government deciding what products are sold or do we want consumers making that decision?

    1. It’s the same guy who said the government should bail out “all the industries”. They didn’t defeat fascism, they became it.

  3. I can’t listen to this self-aggrandizing b&##*%@t [“bullshit”] artist with delusions of adequacy any more. Let me know what he says. Or don’t, it doesn’t matter…

    1. I’d rather have a root canal with a rusty paperclip and no painkillers than listen to Obama. If all goes well and he leaves office next Jan 20th, I’m going to sing out loud those famous words from Martin Luthur King’s “I Have A Dream” speech:

      “Free at last!
      Free at last!
      Thank God almighty
      We’re free at last!!”

      I suspect Obama will be an even worse ex-president than Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. At least he’ll be easier to ignore once he’s out of office and no longer able to do damage to the country.

  5. Think you meant “decade of high UN-employment and no real recovery.” Knew what you meant, but maybe, for the record, …

      1. Hey Rand, did you catch the news today. Not that only 96,000 jobs were added, or that they unemployment percentage dropped because over 368,000 people quit looking’; did you catch the part where the past 2 months job creation numbers were over estimated by 41,000 jobs?

        It seems job growth isn’t happening as fast as Jim claimed.

    1. Obama has embraced fascism – big time. “Crony capitalism” is fascism. It has no resemblance to capitalism – for sure. Perhaps a better name for it would be “crony fascism.”

  7. “We defeated fascism.” No mention of Communism.

    But by your revisionist, postmodern definitions these two things are equivalent terms, and both leftist.

    1. Those two political philosophies are indeed leftist, but that interpretation is neither revisionist (Fascism and Communism saw each other as rivals in socialism back in the day) nor postmodern (it’s a rational argument, not a tendentious and counterintuitive deliberate misreading of the facts, tarted up in pretentious obscurantist jargon), nor are the two terms presented as equivalent (other than morally), describing as they do distinctly different implementations of socialism.

    2. Both leftist, yes. Equivalent, no. Both revolve around economic class warfare, but fascism adds nationalistic class warfare to the mix. Fascism is content to leave capital in the hands of capitalists while taking vast control over what the capitalists produce; Communism demands both ownership and control over capital. Both are totalitarian.

      Fascism is right wing if it has more in common with the Heritage Foundation than it does with Engels and Marx. I’d like to see someone make that case.
      and both classify capitalists among and Social Democracy are both leftist, but they’re not the same thing.

        2. Fascism and communism are different sides of the same coin. Both call for the subordination of individual freedom to the power of the government. Both call for government intervention and sometimes ownership of industry.

          The idea that liberalism and fascism are related and leftist isn’t new. I remember reading an article back in 1978 that began like this:

          There’s a joke going around Washington DC that’s making people nervous. It goes:

          Q: What’s the biggest difference between a liberal and a fascist?
          A: Liberals don’t wear jackboots.

        4. Short version: Fascism comes from an old line of thought that was to the left of communism, anarcho-syndicalism. Mussolini had been a communist agitator/propagandist, then editor of a string of socialist (far-left Italian socialist) newspapers, and then he took power.

          We also didn’t really defeat fascism. We didn’t even bother to purge them from the Italian government. We just rolled north into Germany. The Fascists became a minor party and rebranded themselves several times, always voting on the left.

          The reason they were ever called “right wing” is because the leader of the Italian Socialist Party stiffed Mussolini out of the party’s leadership position, and in a huff he started sitting on the far right of the Italian parliament (the Socialist Party had always sat on the left side) to be as far away from them as possible.

          1. Mussolini was known for breaking up strikes with goons. That is about as far away from anarcho-syndicalism as you can go. In fact anarcho-syndicalists are anti-state.

          2. Nevertheless, Mussolini convinced a couple thousand members of the Italian Syndicalist Union to follow him during WW-I and support the war, and the Italian syndicalists in his movement emphasized the need for violence. Mussolini also said national syndicalism was what would unite the country and lead to growth. Italian national syndicalism, and anarch-syndicalist theorists, formed an important part of his thinking and philosophy.

        5. Class warfare that demonizes the simple act of operating a business makes them leftist. Because business owners are the enemy – literally – they must either be subjugated into dhimmitude or exterminated. Fascism settle for dhimmitude. Communism wants to exterminate.

          Social Democracy also demonizes businesses, albeit somewhat selectively. At the very least it doesn’t trust businesses to set their own pay policy.

          1. Yeah, Dave, I’m sure what when “Il Dufe” referred to the defeat of fascism, he including communism in that category. He’s probably a great fan of Goldberg’s LIBERAL FASCISM, since it helped knock the scales off his eyes regarding his one-time hero Alinsky. (If you know how to insert the sarcastic eye-roll emoticion here, feel free to do so!)

    3. Dave, do you respond to evidence?

      But by your revisionist, postmodern definitions these two things are equivalent terms, and both leftist.

      Comments above indicate it is not revisionist. Do you now agree?
      Comments above indicate it is not postmodern. Do you now agree?
      Comments above indicate they are not equivalent terms. Do you still agree?
      Left and right are somewhat arbitrary in meaning and caution should be used. Better to just realize that both Fascism and Communism are socialist ideologies. You don’t need to agree. Those are just the facts.

  8. a decade of high employment and no real recovery

    Thanks to the 22nd Amendment, Mr. Obama will have to wrap up the remaining six and a half years of his own such decade rather sooner.

  11. I heard it on the radio.. the announcer said something like “President Obama has asked the American people to help him leave the country…” woah? Really? I better turn that up! She meant “lead”, not “leave”. Damn.

  12. Well, I’d have to say that after thinking about it for a while I think the distinction between leftist and rightist in fascism doesn’t really make that much sense. For example, during the Second World War, a lot of collaborators with Nazism both in Germany and elsewhere were rightist.

    The core ideology might have been very leftist, but it’s opposition to Communism led to a number of alliances with rightist entities such as the German military or Vichy France. I think the relative ease with which such alliances were made indicate a great deal of ideological flexibility in Naziism.

    That sort of hypocrisy seems common to many totalitarian governments. They have a firm ideology, except where that conflicts with their desire to gather more power. Then it is easily abandoned.

    So for me, a more natural division for things such as Communism and Naziism, is the authoritarian nature of the governments rather than their left or right leanings. I was going to say the seeking of and adulation for power, but it’d be a rare person who wouldn’t succumb to temptation if presented with the power than such governments had.

    I’m aware that there is claimed here a correlation between leftist ideology and authoritarianism, and there is some truth to that. But I don’t see rightist thought as being naturally anti-authoritarian. Both can be anti-authoritarian, leading to such as anarchists on the left and libertarians on the right.

    1. Left/Right might have been a useful shorthand when the French came up with it 200 years ago, but trying to measure two variables (political freedom and economic freedom) on a single axis only works if there is a 100% linear correlation between those variables. The political compass is more useful, as there are two axes for the two variables.

  13. The differences between totalitarian regimes are cultural and cosmetic, all of which could probably be characterized as Left since the point is to redistribute wealth away from the natural accumulators. You can prove this with a simple thought experiment — the ultimate right-wing society would be authoritarian: a monarch with ultimate power whose only genuine function is to fill the power vacuum and destroy all usurpers to his crown. Politics would be forbidden – folks would need to peacefully go about their business in a purely voluntary and transactional manner.

    That would be pretty much the complete opposite of totalitarianism where everything is politicized. (The culture and politics of Italy are vastly different than those of Russia, so you’d expect the implementation of total politics to feature different boilerplates and brandings. Any freshman marketting student could tell you that much…)

    1. Mussolini had been an ardent communist, (his parents were communists), but Marx’s workers revolution and overthrowing the owners doesn’t work in a country where almost everyone works in a family business. *Zoink!*

      The class struggle had to be rewritten as a struggle between working-class nations and capitalist exploiter nations, which is exactly what he did.

      1. Exactly. “Kill your parents and take-over the business you were going to inheret anyway in 10 years!” is hardly inspiring.


    3. “all of which could probably be characterized as Left since the point is to redistribute wealth away from the natural accumulators”

      Natural accumulators. It is interesting to find people deluding themselves with trains of thought like these. Do you honestly think a State exists for anything else but protecting the few against the many? The truth is the few fear the so called mob rule of real democracy. Unfortunately people always forget that in time and then there are spasms until the whole system reaches equilibrium again.

      1. You seem to be implying that in a democratic republic the state is protecting the rich from the working class but I view it as protecting everyone from the mob.

        Except that now we have a government that drives the mob and uses the tools of government to punish their opponents, who happen to not always be rich people.

        1. Godzilla deludes himself into believing that the State is his best friend. Lots of Leftist loons have believed that. They were often the first ones to be liquidated when the do-gooders were supplanted by the jackbooted.

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