CommentsDisplaying Lloyd Drako's 10 most recent comments.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 8:46pm

  In reply to Sue Dohnim.

  (c)onservative.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 8:34pm

  In reply to Sue Dohnim.

  @Sue Dohnim:
  I’m not knocking the Tea Party;I’m simply pointing out that some of its sponsors–Dick Armey, for instance–very openly admitted that elements of its strategy derived from Alinsky.
  Alinsky was not a Marxist. He rejected any socialist and, especially, communist ties. Toward the end of his life, he began to say that even the middle classes were susceptible to organization and empowerment along the lines of his strategy and techniques.
  I remain unpersuaded that Obama is any sort of Marxist, unless by “Marxist” you mean someone who carelessly uses terms like “social justice.” His parents were squishy leftists of a sort, but not Marxists. I’m not sure who you mean by his “Marxist mentor”–perhaps Frank Marshall Davis? Very thin stuff on which to hang his entire career. As for Marxist professors, anyone who’s been to college has had a few of those! How easy it is to throw around terms like “narcissist” and “sociopath!” I admit Obama seems a bit smug and self-centered at times, but I would like to know why you call him a sociopath? Because he has behaved like a politician, often evasively and deceptively? Name me a politician who hasn’t done those things; they’re part of the job description.
  True conservatism does not advocate solely for the individual. True conservatism advocates for caution, tradition, and customary familial, social and community ties, things that the untrammeled free market destroys. Today’s GOP is neither socialist nor truly c

• SPLC Names New Black Panther Malik Zulu Shabazz to Its ‘Radical Right’ Activist List (Along With Frank Gaffney & David Barton!)

  May 25, 2012 at 3:41pm

  In reply to Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}.

  Shabazz is no more a leftist than he is a rightist, but he is a racist, that much is sure. Barton is a historian, though not a very good one. Gaffney is a conservative who has been warning of the dangers of radical Islam for years, even before 9/11. Neither one belongs on SPLC’s hit list. Pam Geller doesn’t either, though as the article points out, she is mostly a loudmouth opportunist who doesn‘t even rise to Spencer’s level of Islamophobia.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 3:35pm

  In reply to Sue Dohnim.

  all share equally and in which, magically, there are no elites.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 3:28pm

  In reply to Sue Dohnim.

  @Sue Dohnim: “Gramsci was critical of Marx and figured out that you must control individuals. .“reality” “perception” “culture” “history” “education” “thinking”..

  I think we’d both agree that Gramsci was right! Not to be too provocative here, because I see you really do want an argument and not just name-calling, but Gramsci stripped of his Marxism was advancing a strategy for the attainment of power. (Marxism, BTW, is an analysis of capitalist dynamics, not a political strategy as such.) The Gramscian strategy–of controlling perceptions, setting the terms of the debate, redefining the meaning of words (e.g., “liberal”), embarking on a “long march through the institutions,” is exactly what the right in America has been doing quite successfully for nearly 40 years. Similarly, a radical who was not a Marxist, namely the infamous Saul Alinsky, pioneered tactics and strategies that have been used successfully to mobilize such movements as the Tea Party, generating activism amng previously passive elements of society.

  I would not trust Obama or anyone else with total power, but nothing he has done or said suggests that that is what he wants, or that he is anywhere near attaining it. I completely disagree that most of the left is “utopian.” I think that the idea of total, absolute individual liberty with a government whose sole purpose is to protect a free market, is at least as utopian as the dream of a hopey-changey socialist order in which

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 1:43pm

  In reply to Individualism.

  Sue, there has not been a society since the stone age that has not had elites. That is as it should be.
  But your comment suggested that the purpose of people who call themselves socialists is to entrench, if not to augment, current elites in their existing wealth and power. That is not the case.

  Most socialists of whatever ilk–Christian, utopian, Marxist (whether Communist or not) in their hearts have believed they were fighting to empower the powerless, and to take wealth away from people who gained it unfairly.

  Of course, what socialists actually DO once in power is another matter. They in turn become an entrenched elite, and sometimes even contrive to perpetuate their elite status into successor capitalist or quasi-capitalist systems, as has happened in Russia and may be happening in China.

  Obama’s enemies often seem confused as to what exactly he stands for, except that they know they’re agin it. He talks about making the rich pay their fair share, whatever that means, but at the same time consorts with them and, as we’ve recently been reminded, takes money from Wall Street “fat cats.” So is he elite or anti-elite? An elitist anti-elitist?

  I think he is a calculating politician, of non-elite origins but with plenty of elite associations,and not at all the reincarnation of Lenin.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 12:56pm

  In reply to Sue Dohnim.

  Obama went to Occidental and Columbia in the late 1970s-early 1980s. He would have to have been brain-dead not to get some exposure to “Western” Marxism at such prestigious places at that time. Old-school Marxism with its fixation on the working classes was pretty much played out by then, and leftists everywhere were looking for surrogates–students, women, racial minorities–to fill the role. Obama with his desperate search for an identity settled on “black.” But it’s sheer fantasy to call him a “Gramscian” or anything of the sort. He neither talks the talk nor walks the walk.

• Did You Know? Obama Apparently Spoke at a 1996 Event Hosted by a Socialist Group

  May 25, 2012 at 12:31pm

  In reply to Individualism.

  Sue Dohnim:

  “The goal of imposing Socialism is really to entrench wealth and power with the political and economic elites and their cohorts.”

  Really? Members of the pre-1917 property-owning classes in Russia–if any are still alive–or the hundreds of thousands of landowners and business people who fled Cuba after 1959, would be surprised to learn this!

• 150+ Maine Churches to Launch Massive Anti-Gay Marriage Father’s Day Fundraising Campaign

  May 25, 2012 at 12:22pm

  In reply to encinom.

  Encinom & Locked:
  Preaching hate or not preaching hate, why should churches have tax exempt status in the first place?

• SPLC Names New Black Panther Malik Zulu Shabazz to Its ‘Radical Right’ Activist List (Along With Frank Gaffney & David Barton!)

  May 25, 2012 at 11:51am

  In reply to Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}.

  Malik Zulu Shabazz is clearly a racist. SPLC is an organization with a questionable past, but it does keep an eye on racists, from KKK to Nazis. Only a few weeks ago Blazers had their panties all in a wad because SPLC did NOT consider the NBPP a “hate group.” Now, correctly, they do. So your beef is . . . ?