Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington's May 1 column is a sequel to last week's column in which he bashed Franklin Roosevelt for, among other things, "turn[ing] legalized thievery into art form under the Marxist guise of 'redistribution of wealth,' fair-share egalitarianism and social justice. It's not surprising to see that Washington ups the crazy quotient by going far beyond labeling FDR a Marxist.
Washington begins by ranting that Americans must "Obama's fascist policies, which are designed to become FDR's welfare state, part 2." He goes on to list "the extremist ideas created or exploited by the progressive movement to create this welfare state":
1. The creation of racism offenses. (Jim Crow discrimination; President Woodrow Wilson used the State Department to purge all black people from federal government; NAACP, Al Sharpton, La Raza)
2. Continual change to create confusion. (Trotsky's "Perpetual Revolution"; Alinsky, Ayers, Obama's "Change We Can Believe In")
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children. (Freud; Alfred Kinsey; the 1960s Sexual Revolution; The Stonewall Riots of 1969)
4. The undermining of schools' and teachers' authority. ("Separation of church and state")
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity. (GWB's amnesty policies of 2006; Obama's desire to give amnesty to 30 million illegal aliens)
6. The promotion of excessive drinking. (FDR's repeal of Prohibition)
7. Emptying of churches. (Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses"; LBJ's 501(c)3 churches)
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime. (About 1900 Positive Law replaced Natural Law jurisprudence; Incorporation Doctrine; Living Constitution; "social justice" replaces "equal justice")
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits. (FDR's New Deal; LBJ's Great Society)
10. Control and dumbing down of education and media. (Progressives' creation of the public schools; advent of the state-controlled media)
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family. (Progressivism, feminism, communism, no-fault divorce, countercultural revolution, gangs, drugs, abortion, pornography, pathology, etc.)
This is such a muddled mess we're not even sure where to begin. Regarding the first item: Is Washington saying that racism is progressive, or that laws against racism are? The examples he cites, of Jim Crow and the NAACP, are competely contradictory.
Identifying "Huge immigration to destroy identity" as a progressive concept is also contradictory, since the severe limits on immigration enacted in the 1920s -- which essentially barred immigration to the U.S. from anywhere but northern Europe -- was motivated in no small part by eugenics, which has also been described as a "progressive" idea.
"The promotion of excessive drinking," as exemplified by "FDR's repeal of Prohibition," is completely bizarre -- so much so we'll have more on this in a future post.
"Emptying of churches" is similarly bizarre, since nobody's forcibly blocking anyone from going to church, something neither Marx's calling religion "the opiate of the masses" or a federal law that costs churches their tax-exempt status for making political endorsements from the pulpit (which is what Washington's reference to "LBJ's 501(c)3 churches" is referring to) does.
Washington's illogic, however, doesn't keep him from engaging in the de rigeur wild smear of Obama:
Obama's mentor and likely author of his memoirs, the terrorist Bill Ayers, to this day brags about destroying America by any means necessary. As predicted, President Obama is quickly codifying Ayers' terrorism megalomania into public policy, which even many liberals are beginning to see is unsustainable on every level.
If "Continual change to create confusion" is a bad thing, then we can take comfort that Washington is reliably crazy, hateful and wrong.
