03 February 2013 | Where the Commies Are

You know who keeps lists of enemies? Communists.

You know who makes people sign and swear to political pledges that puts party above the people it represents? Communists.

And you know who acts like the worst Communists? The ones accusing someone else of acting like a Communist. And those people are the Republican Party.

We have heard an unending list of grievances leveled against Barack Obama since he took the oath of office in 2009: he's a Communist, a socialist, a Marxist, an apologist, an Islamist, etc., etc. Conservatives have been whipped up into a maddening, frightening mob of frenzied citizens who find dark intentions behind everything he does, some nefarious plot that's designed to bring about the destruction of the American way of life.

But as communist tyrants go, Obama is the worst. You see, real tyrants shut up the opposition right out of the gate. He's not done that. Freedom of speech is the first to go: he's not done that. Fox News is still on the air, protests with gun-carrying rubes are still carried out and no one has been "disappeared" at all. They're all still out there, insisting that Obama is taking away all of our freedoms. But no one can exactly spell out which freedoms.

Oh, there are the clerics who want to talk about contraception and their religious freedom to deny it to women as part of health care coverage. It's unclear if in the history of the church, the availability of contraception ranks up there with Neroesque persecution, but you might confuse the two with the level of hysteria cranked up by clerics. You also might think these same clerics were being rounded up or harassed beyond the pale by federal agents, but no. None of that has happened. But what has happened is that clerics have been directing their congregants (by varying degrees) to vote in certain ways that seem to be in conflict with their status as tax-exempt institutions. A true dictator would have pushed the church into an agreement or threatened it otherwise: none of that has happened.

You know who also tells members how to vote, and threatens them if they don't do it the way they're instructed? Communists.

The right wing wants to believe its saving the country from the biggest Communist in history, but it's the one that is positively red. They're the ones who threatened their own employees with termination if Obama won the presidential election. They're the ones who want to skirt around the rules in order to deny their own employees healthcare by making their workforce part-time. Now, in theory, communism is supposed to be about collective ownership and controlling the means of production and method of distribution. But in practice, we know that it's all about consolidating power into the arms of an elite and punishing those who do not pledge loyalty to the party. And in this respect, all those right-wingers braying about Obama being a communist or a socialist are just accusing themselves because they are the ones who seek out party pledges, party loyalty, and punish wrongdoers. How many Republican incumbents lost their positions because they weren't deemed conservative enough? We call this a party purge, but conservatives wanted to act as if they were "taking their freedoms back." Again, these are the same people who barely blinked an eye with the passage of the Patriot Act, renditions to black sites across the world or warrantless wiretapping. And all this was authorized under George W. Bush! But according to these ideologues, it all began in January 2009 by a man who allegedly violates the Constitution at every turn.

The GOP is like the Communist Party because it controls the thought-processes of its adherents with a steady stream of propaganda. It actually is Big Brother, warning the populace against the evils of Emmanuel Goldstein (Barack Obama) 24 hours a day. It promotes its own version of Hate Week that lets comfortable displays of Obama paired up with Hitler, or an Idaho state senator to compare Obamacare to the Holocaust. It is nonstop vilification endorsed and promoted by a corrupt, powerful elite that wants to control the thought-processes of its followers. The Party's biggest coup has been fooling its followers into thinking this is all grass-roots opposition to "our stolen freedoms." This is, of course, the Big Lie, but you would hard pressed to think otherwise. The appearance of the Tea Party is not a homegrown reaction, but an instrument of Party policy: funded, directed and controlled by the apparatus that seeks to entrench power for itself under the guise of a populist uprising.

Take the recent controversy over rigging the Electoral College appropriation of future votes: you know who does stuff like that? Communists. The Party removes power from people to concentrate it in the hands of the political elite, claiming that all the while, it's really about freedom. Another day, another lie. No matter what side of the political spectrum you reside, you are supposed to be opposed to any vote rigging, to any denial of this basic right as fundamentally unfair to American values. But it's gotten to the point where these attempts are done in public. There's nothing you can do about because we are the Party. How does that square up with claims of lost freedoms and social engineering?

THE “THEY DO IT, TOO” DEFENSE
Of course, this is absolutely no defense at all. Conservatives claim to be morally superior to liberals on all fronts, but when you confront them with these communist tactics of vote-rigging and voter suppression, that's the limp-wristed response: Liberals do it, too. This is supposed to be impressive? This is supposed to be a party that possess a keener moral center, as opposed to the godlessness of the Left? You cannot vilify your opponents and claim they are stuff that nightmares are made of because of their predisposition to morality or situational ethics, but when caught doing such reprehensible things, finger point like children.

If you want to know where the commies are, where the real threats to American freedom are, you need look no further than the GOP.