As we see in this over the top interview where Chris Matthews surely felt the tingling up his leg (an oh-so-gross word picture that never fails to give me the heebie jeebies) as he was declaring "Yeah!", a new comparison was made to ‘the one’ - this time comparing him to God and to President Reagan, all in a 37 second time slot. In this grandstanding, Thomas says "that in 1984 America was ‘still the good guy’, Reagan’s message was different, it was all about America. Obama has a different task", he says, now we are the "bad guys" and he needs to make people love us again, to bring all sorts of people together, to be above America and above the world…"as sort of a god".
Oh man, Evan did you have to spoil my week that way? I might add, I'm not sure that the despots (who aren't Obama) in the world are liking that analogy much either!
Let’s break this down politically first, bit by bit to find out where all the ideas in this little world you imagine come from, Mr. Thomas.
President Reagan came into his own starting back in the late 40’s where the real threat to the Republic was the infiltration of the various forms of totalitarianism. A time when the Socialist, Communist, Progressive, Trotskyist, Labor, and Bolshevik Parties inserted themselves into the Celebrity crowd. Ronald Reagan was on the board of the Screen Actors Guild at the time. It was established as a union for Actors meant to protect them against abuse of the movie houses prior to the start of WWII. It has since turned into a platform for far left leaning socialism - at best - ever seeking the promised Utopia where they are assured of continuing status in the public eye and on the political scene regardless of how dead their career might now be (think Janeane Garafolo here).
Then Reagan, a Reservist from the US Calvary, was called to duty after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He developed (as Second Lieutenant on stateside duty) a new and important method of preparing the bombardiers and pilots for their mission by recreating the Tokyo and Japanese coastlines on a soundstage. By using a camera on a derrick, his team would film what the crew of the plane would see.
Additionally, there were classified films that were made by the troops on the frontlines for the Generals; these were “on location” films of our troops overtaking death camps. Ronald Reagan was one of the first people in the US (through his role as filmmaker) to view these early death camp films. It was through these films that he first experienced the visual and visceral horror of the death camps and it was that experience that horrified and haunted him, no end, until the end of his days. He never forgot those scenes, the sole arm reaching out in death throes from a sea of dead bodies, and it was that remembrance that drove much of what he did after the war. In fact, he kept that particular film and brought it out to show anyone who ever approached him with revisionist history concerning the death camps, giving them lessons on reality. A lesson from which you yourself might benefit, Mr. Thomas.
His movie career was diminished immediately after the war, but public policy and politics had taken root in his heart because of the films he witnessed. He was still a Democrat at that time, but an old school Democrat. He hated Fascism in all its forms because of the very thing he saw that it caused, which led soon to his hating other "isms" in all of their forms just as deeply. He joined many different groups in Hollywood and he became a speaker. His did so out of a deeply held conviction, not for fame or fortune, for surely it hurt his career as an actor.
In a speech to one of the groups, he spoke eloquently against fascism to roaring applause, then as he ended his speech, he said,
“There is another ‘ism’ and if I ever find evidence that communism represents a threat to all we believe in and stand for, I’ll speak out just as harshly against communism as I have fascism.”
He was met with utter silence as he exited the stage. Soon after that moment was when he realized that communism was deeply entrenched into the heart and soul of Hollywood. He began then resigning many groups which he had joined, started his own crusade against those party lines along with several other big screen names. Eventually his passion helped him become our President, one of the greatest President’s in modern history.
Reagan believed in freedom and in liberty. He believed everyone should join in to declare freedom and liberty including anarchist, monarchists, Wobblies, and whomever. He despised Secretism in all its forms, believing that if you refuse to come forward publicly with your ideals and your goals, then you are pursuing power by guile and deception, silently overtaking institutions, companies, and organizations to move for power through force. In his mind, that is what Nazi Germany did and that is what Fascists and those who support Dictators do. It was simply un-American! He was not anti-union, he was anti-fascism, anti-socialism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, and anti anything that takes away life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He came out hard against organized labor because he saw that secretism take away the will of the people in many ways, including the electoral process through strong-arm tactics.
In the early days after the war, as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he was asked as a part of a group to research the strikes to ensure they were really about wage or working conditions abuse. He and others in this group found that they were not at all about abuse, they were about who actually was hired to do the work. This led to not honoring the strikes and it placed Reagan roundly in the crosshairs of fascism, literally and figuratively. It was found that Moscow had in fact orchestrated the unrest and this began the Reagan Revolution that was nearly another 30 years in the making. I say all this out of historical fact, not out of a sense of deification of the man Ronald Reagan. He was a great man, a far sight better orator than Obama (he didn't require the POTUS II Teleprompter in order not to um and ah)and he made our country strong and proud again in spite of mistakes. That is all we the people really require from a President, to keep us strong and safe and to use the Constitution as it stands, as he swore to uphold, as his guideline.
Enter Norman Thomas
Although the differing far left parties were weakened by FDR’s policies of the New Deal, they were regrouping under the tutelage of none other than Norman Thomas, six times Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate loser, and the one who declared,
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without ever knowing how it happened."
Norman Thomas was the ipso facto leader of the new Socialist Party of America. His leadership goal in this new party was to attempt to bring all these various labor and fascist groups together under one set of common platforms. He quit running for President after the new deal, and rumor says that he stated it was because he no longer needed to run for office as the Democratic Party was carrying forward his agenda just fine.
Norman Thomas studied under Woodrow Wilson at Princeton before Wilson was President. He continued schooling at Union Theological Seminary after a stint traveling and he became a Presbyterian Minister. He was Editor of the “The World Tomorrow” publication, the leading voice in the Christian Socialist movement, he was also a member of the Marxist Party, the Assistant Editor of “The Nation” magazine, and was Grandfather to none other than Evan Thomas of Newsweek fame - the comparer of Obama to God and the rewriter of 1984 history, not to mention quite possibly the book! Are we really surprised?
Remember, Reagan began to get his footing as a political leader in those same days. He saw the likes of Norman Thomas, he watched these groups get funding from Leninist's and Stalinist's. He watched as they gained footing in the youth movement to gobble up our youth in great gulps, promising dreams of a utopia where there would be no war, only equality and fraternity with State-owned everything, freely handing it out like candy. He supported birth control, saying essentially that to not would be to support the white man's way of populating the earth with little mini-me's. Reagan listened to radio addresses by Thomas where he talked about things like; the Socialist Party has the desirability of unions, not to live with a rigid creed, but like good Marxists.
Was that simply to encourage the youth to join? This promise of, even though we know the State owns everything, we promise to provide you equality in your personhood, in all your material desires and a fraternity in all your whims and beliefs without creed? As if to make them believe that absolute power does not corrupt absolutely and Freedom from Want is all they need?
Ronald Reagan spoke out against all of that and Norman Thomas personally as it relates to another issue that is bigger today than it was even then, and that is the issue of socialized medicine.
Thomas stated in a 1958 radio address in Chicago,
“I think that the socialism of the future has to be increasingly a socialism that is based on the common interest of all of us as consumers. The common interest of all of us in liberty, equality, fraternity and a decent material life, a common interest of all of us in owning the diminishing supply of natural resources. Now this isn’t to deny the existence of class conflicts and this isn’t to deny the tremendous importance of the organized workers, but it is to affirm that the socialism that is going to win in an age in which increasingly the job has to think in consumer’s terms. It has to think in terms well, as the abundance of housing and the equality of what women and men are made of. Of course I am for the largest possible unity of democratic socialists and not on a sectarian basis, but very frankly, I do not think we would accomplish very much, we democratic socialists, in unity unless we get a whole lot more with us pretty soon. They are terms of meeting our problems now in the language of press. They are terms of dialogue to use a now popular term “a dialogue with the realities of the press”. This is what concerns us and we shall, I think, have to work out partly because of our political institutions being presidential rather than parliamentary. We shall have to work out difficult techniques because we can’t get as far as we used to by nominating candidates for almost all offices. You younger people, of whom I am glad to see so many, will have to work this out with vigor, with imagination and with determination.”
Right there in that 1958 Radio address, Norman Thomas got it all started. A mixture of State owned everything except certain services left open for competition, but as he also stated in that very same speech,
“an ability to control everything through taxation and labor legislation”.
Here in the America I know: Reagan saw this movement was afoot, a movement to socialism in the extreme, just as it is today. We had just come off the Carter years when Reagan came to power and by 1984 he had begun the great turnaround in this nation, a turnaround that lasted nearly 30 years. A turnaround that caused the socialists to slink back to whatever rock they crawled out from under, after another failed attempt at socialism.
Americans ushered in a man who got it, who understood that free markets and low taxes were what brought the people liberty, that the right to choose for them even included the right not to work, but it meant they would then remain poor. He understood that the Constitutional Culture is one of strong independence and personal accountability, not one of Freedom from Want. He screamed it from the rooftops, “If you want it, go get it, I'll even help you. But don’t you dare take mine without asking me first!” He was not parochial, he was not provincial, and he was certainly not chauvinistic, nor are we Americans. Is that really what you believe being a true Constitutionalist means, Evan?
Norman Thomas' ideas, with the persistent help of his grandson no doubt, has become the true direction of the progressive party we see today, from land grabs at the federal level, to UN initiatives like Agenda 21, the Global Warming mantra, to total control of the masses through taxation and labor in a planned not very Utopian utopia, to the very recent ownership by the Union majority shareholders of Chrysler and soon GM.
You are digging being "openly socialist" like your grandfather taught you, aren't you Evan? Those tingles are just rocking and rolling up your legs as you see your 'sort of god' using our taxes and our wealth to control us. To steal entire century old companies right out from under the true public's nose - you know, the true 'we the people' who have worked and saved and bought our shares as an investment - and which is now entirely worthless through the nationalization of these businesses? Are you quite happy to see these companies just handed over to organized labor after your 'sort of god' traded in all the preferred for common stock so that it could be done. I'll bet that just makes those tingles roll for you, doesn't it?
Obama apparently studied the message well, which is why Thomas Jr. is so happily sharing the tinglies with Matthews. They think they are winning this long awaited battle, and they are - for now - but once the people see that the utopia will never materialize, their pocketbooks are shrinking and the job market dries up, look out Mr. Apologist in Chief, because you will be kicked to the curb. But hey, while you are on your way out, would you do us one favor please? Would you take Mr. We Are All Socialists Now and Mr. Tingly Jeans with you?
To you Mr. Evan Thomas, grandson of the great social engineer Norman Thomas, that is exactly the reason that President Ronald Reagan spoke mainly about America. That is exactly why he gave back our tax dollars, put the world on notice, sought out panels for small business and local government to advice him, brought our country out of a near miss with 1930’s history, and made us “the shining city on the hill” again. Your revisionist history, while slightly entertaining, is not quite so true. Or do you so soon forget the difficulties Reagan faced with Iran kidnapping American hostages, Hezbollah, the Achille Lauro, the Sandinista, the Libyans, the West Berlin disco, and the Soviets to name a few?
You say Reagan’s was a time when America was well liked among the nations?
Hardly, sir!
Was it a time when we were well respected for our strength?
You bet your bottom dollar, sir!
Now today we have a man who has been dubbed “sort of like god” going on these perpetual self-aggrandizing campaign tours where he is obviously campaigning for Leader of the world, and who is systematically tearing down every special relationship and ally we have on this planet to do what exactly? Apologize? For WHAT?! Is it really for the thrill of quarter dipping before the King in Saudi Arabia? Or maybe Obama was just gauging his popularity with the King, you know, checking to see if he got the leg tingles too....
This president with a little p is out making nice with the people who drive planes into our building, who behead people at whim (as he weakly compares our women rights issues with theirs), and who are, as I write, busy building nuclear weapons. He supports a nation that has 1500 centrifuges churning this stuff out and who have declared their wish for the annihilation of Israel! We have European nations leaning considerably to the right in this past weekend’s election cycle, signally something quite loudly to the inexperienced one we now call our president with a little p. That should make you nervous all in itself, there, little mini-Norm.
And you dare to compare him to God?!
I find I can't even make an argument to this statement for that would be lending it the credence it does not deserve. But I will say this, thank God Obama is not "sort of like a god". The real God has it all over him every day of the week.
I'll bet that's what your grandaddy taught you starting “a dialogue with the realities of the press” meant, huh?
Well, Mr. Grandson of Socialism, I would be keeping an eye on the sky if I were you and I might be considering donning something myself for a while - like a rubber suit complete with booties? Otherwise those tinglies you share with Chris Matthews might just intensify for you with that big lightning strike that is heading your way from the real God, ya know? Yow! Wouldn't want to be you!
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