Thursday, July 22, 2004
Quote of the Day
See if you can guess where this comes from:
Politically, Wallace was left of FDR (and was dropped from the ticket in the '44 campaign), ran for president on the fading Progressive Party ticket in 1948, and was later accused of being a communist, so his views weren't precisely in the mainstream of 1944. And they still aren't. Fewer accusations are more inflammatory than the accusation that Bush and the Republicans are fascists. Comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini bring down instant condemnation, weighted down as they are with much of the emotional baggage of the 20th century. Nevertheless fascism, as Wallace described it, looks an awful lot like the philosophy espoused by the modern Republican party. Calling it something else, or refusing to call it anything at all, doesn't change its nature, or the threat it represents. Thom Hartmann elaborates.
If You Hated This Post, You Will Also Dislike: My quick post on Best of the Blogs yesterday, about the latest tin-eared Bush initiative to help the homeless, and the latest post at The Hits Just Keep On Comin' about the Greatest Love Song Ever Written.
See if you can guess where this comes from:
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.Something from Counterpunch, maybe? Something Dennis Kucinich said over coffee? A line from the draft of John Kerry's acceptance speech? Nope. That bit at the end about keeping the common man in eternal subjection marks the quote as something from an earlier time. The words are those of Vice President Henry Wallace, writing in 1944 about the likelihood that the fascism that had taken hold in Germany and Italy could do so here.
Politically, Wallace was left of FDR (and was dropped from the ticket in the '44 campaign), ran for president on the fading Progressive Party ticket in 1948, and was later accused of being a communist, so his views weren't precisely in the mainstream of 1944. And they still aren't. Fewer accusations are more inflammatory than the accusation that Bush and the Republicans are fascists. Comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini bring down instant condemnation, weighted down as they are with much of the emotional baggage of the 20th century. Nevertheless fascism, as Wallace described it, looks an awful lot like the philosophy espoused by the modern Republican party. Calling it something else, or refusing to call it anything at all, doesn't change its nature, or the threat it represents. Thom Hartmann elaborates.
If You Hated This Post, You Will Also Dislike: My quick post on Best of the Blogs yesterday, about the latest tin-eared Bush initiative to help the homeless, and the latest post at The Hits Just Keep On Comin' about the Greatest Love Song Ever Written.
