Same stuff, different generation...

OddsOn · Aug 14, 2009

The same socialist shell game has been played for the last 100 years, only the names have changed but not the goal or the deception....

Here is a speech from almost 50 years ago by Ronald Reagan speaking out against socialized health care...

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Southern Select · Aug 14, 2009

And Here is Some Vintage Pro-Inflation Propaganda

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SamFisher · Aug 14, 2009

^ Gail Collins nailed it yesterday with this passage regarding the helath care mobs:

“A firearm is a defensive tool,” said Kostric, in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt, and he told Matthews that if everybody in the crowd waiting for Obama to arrive had been armed, things would have been much safer. Beyond an air of mild surprise, he seemed like your average hard-core Ron Paul voter — male, smug and obsessed with the money supply. (“Where did we go wrong? I’d start with the Federal Reserve Bank.”)
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Rashmon · Aug 14, 2009

Wow, will y'all be breaking out the Animal Farm references next?

rhester · Aug 14, 2009

SamFisher said:

^ Gail Collins nailed it yesterday with this passage regarding the helath care mobs...Beyond an air of mild surprise, he seemed like your average hard-core Ron Paul voter — male, smug and obsessed with the money supply. (“Where did we go wrong? I’d start with the Federal Reserve Bank.”)
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I always vote for Ron Paul when he runs for congress.

It's nice to be stereotyped.

I think republicans and democrats are all smug and obsessed with things they can't change. That's my stereotype for the day.

Dairy Ashford · Aug 14, 2009

And conservatives have been mislabeling any kind of social progress: child labor laws, womens rights, civil rights, or healthcare - as "socialism" or "communism" for the same amount of time.

CometsWin · Aug 15, 2009

OddsOn said:

The same socialist shell game has been played for the last 100 years, only the names have changed but not the goal or the deception....

Here is a speech from almost 50 years ago by Ronald Reagan speaking out against socialized health care...
Click to expand...

Oh Ronnie...

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Landlord Landry · Aug 15, 2009

OddsOn said:

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HOLY SH** YOU CAN GET A 52" TV @ BESTBUY.COM FOR $10!!!!!!!!!

Refman · Aug 15, 2009

pouhe said:

And conservatives have been mislabeling any kind of social progress: child labor laws, womens rights, civil rights, or healthcare - as "socialism" or "communism" for the same amount of time.
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Labeling all conservatives as being against any type of social progress is about as smart and accurate as labeling all liberals as pot smoking hippies that won't get a job and hate America.

In other words, it's just dumb.

rimrocker · Aug 15, 2009

Sorry I didn't get into this thread earlier, but, man, I just woke up in a drug-induced haze after attending the Hate America Rave last night, which I paid for by cashing my unemployment and blood bank checks.

Dan B. · Aug 15, 2009

Same stuff, different generation...
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I couldn't agree more. Rick Perlstein (author of the phenomenal "Nixonland") thinks so too :

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)
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The real failing has not been the decline in discourse. Public debate has always been inane in this country. It is the decline in journalistic standards that is to blame:

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.
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Dairy Ashford · Aug 15, 2009

Refman said:

Labeling all conservatives as being against any type of social progress is about as smart and accurate as labeling all liberals as pot smoking hippies that won't get a job and hate America.

In other words, it's just dumb.
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But with respect to the four issues I mentioned: civil rights, womens rights, labor rights and healthcare; with my assertion that conservatives unfairly painted them as communist for the same "100 years" that OP alleged, it's completely accurate.

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Same stuff, different generation...

OddsOn Member

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Rashmon Member

rhester Member

Dairy Ashford Member

CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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