Clarity

Democrats’ Hybrid Pickup Trucks
by Ann Coulter (more by this author)
Posted 05/14/2008 ET

On the very day of a special election to fill a vacated congressional seat this week in Mississippi, The New York Times accused the Republican candidate of running racist ads against his Democratic opponent.

Talk about dirty tricks! By The New York Times, that is.

The Republican thus accused of racism narrowly lost the election the night the Times article appeared, so I guess the Times can proclaim: "Mission Accomplished."

The ad in question, on behalf of Republican Greg Davis, pointed out that Barack Obama had endorsed Davis' opponent, Travis Childers -- another in a long line of fake-American goobers claiming to be "conservative Democrats," but who get to Congress and promptly vote to ban guns, surrender in Iraq and fund full-term abortions.

These days, I guess you can call yourself a "conservative Democrat" if you refrain from being sworn into Congress with your hand on a Quran.

The ad showed a clip of Obama's pastor g-damning America and mentioned Obama's recent remarks ridiculing rural folks for clinging to guns. It then concluded that Childers "took Obama's endorsement over our conservative values."

The Republicans had also run ads connecting Childers with other Washington liberals, such as Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry. (Times editors are still looking for the racist angle to those ads.)

To call that ad racist is a monstrous libel. Greg Davis and the Mississippi Republicans should bring a defamation action against The New York Times -- although such an action might be perceived as "racist" because some black people work at the Times.

Republicans are constantly linking the local hayseed Democrat to national liberals like John Kerry. The technique goes back at least to Michael Dukakis in 1988.

It is beyond outrageous for liberals to complain about the practice of linking Democrats to the national party when their calculated strategy in race after race in the red states has been to run Democratic candidates who appear to be Americans. They're not Americans. They're liberals! I don't care how much hay is sticking out of their straw hats.

In the 2006 midterm elections, Sen. Chuck Schumer and erstwhile ballerina Rep. Rahm Emanuel (now there's a couple of raw-boned Americans for you!) famously rounded up yokels from the local square dance contests to run as "macho Dems" -- as the Times admiringly called them. Schumer and the ballerina were hailed for their brilliant strategy to fool the hayseeds.

The phony blue-collar Democrats won their elections by driving around in pickup trucks and shooting guns, then moved to Washington and began voting against war in Iraq and in favor of taxpayer-funded abortions.

One of the Democrats' paragons of regular guy-ness that year was Jon Tester of Montana, who wore cowboy boots and had a buzz cut. The crew cut absolutely transfixed liberals in places like Manhattan. Search "Jon Tester and crew cut" on Google, and you'll get more than 200,000 hits. Even this tonsorial affectation was a liberal fake-out, inasmuch as Tester has no military service.

After campaigning throughout Montana in a pickup truck, Tester got to Washington and compiled a voting record more liberal than Chuck Schumer's, according to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (Tester: 95 percent; Schumer: 90 percent). Tester also has a 100 percent rating from the pro-abortion group NARAL. There's your truck driving, gun-totin' Democrat.

Sen. Bob Casey Jr. was another consumer fraud perpetrated on voters in 2006 by the Democrats. Casey ran for office on the strength of his father's name and his alleged pro-life position. It was the pro-life position of his father -- the popular Democratic governor of Pennsylvania -- that disqualified Casey Sr. from speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1992.

Despite rumors that Schumer had assured Hillary Clinton that Casey was not really pro-life, the good people of Pennsylvania made him their senator, throwing out Rick Santorum, the kind of pro-lifer who actually opposes abortion.

In Casey's first year in office, he voted in favor of an amendment to a foreign appropriations bill introduced by the fanatically pro-abortion Barbara Boxer that overturned U.S. policy against providing taxpayer money to groups that perform abortions overseas. It also granted overseas abortion providers taxpayer money. There's a "pro-life Democrat" for you.

In elections in the patriotic parts of the country, Democrats keep producing candidates that look like they're out of a Norman Rockwell painting but vote like Karl Marx -- which is to say, they vote like the typical member of the Democratic Party. Naturally, Republicans respond to this tactic by linking the local phonies to the national party.

As soon as the Democrats stop running these mountebanks, Republicans will stop exposing them as lickspittles for their liberal masters in Washington.

Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26534

Telling the Soviet story
May 22nd 2008
From Economist.com

A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

BEING burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow by nationalist hoodlums must count as a kind of Oscar if you are a Latvian filmmaker whose aim is to expose modern Russia's blindness to the criminal history of the Soviet Union. The ire of Young Russia's protest outside the Latvian embassy this week was directed at Edvins Snore, whose film “Soviet Story” is the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past.

The film is gripping, audacious and uncompromising. Though it starts by telling the story of the murder of 7m Ukrainians in 1933, it is no mere catalogue of atrocities. The main aim of the film is to show the close connections—philosophical, political and organisational—between the Nazi and Soviet systems.

Hot new filmmakerAs Françoise Thom (one of many anti-communist luminaries appearing in the film) puts it: “Nazism was based on false biology; Marxism was based on false sociology”. The Marxist dream of the “new man”, for example, mirrored the Nazi idea of racial superiority. The Nazis murdered chiefly on racial grounds, while the Soviets concentrated on class. But mass murder is mass murder.

Those who keep a soft spot for Marxism may flinch to hear that the sage of Highgate referred to backward societies as Völkerabfälle (racial trash) who must “perish in the revolutionary holocaust”. Or that the Nazi party in its early days idolised Lenin (Josef Goebbels said he was second only to Adolf Hitler in greatness).

Perhaps the best sequence in the film shows pairs of posters using almost identical designs: muscular workers strike heroic attitudes in support of the party and the state, blonde little girls beam, fists smash enemies, hammers break chains. Without the swastika and hammer and sickle as clues, it would be hard to know which is which.

The illustration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is compelling: Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the “Jewish question” in occupied Poland.

Cooperation was based on a written agreement—complete with the signature of Lavrenty Beria, head of the notorious NKVD—which is shown in the film. “The NKVD will propose to the Soviet Government a programme to reduce the participation of Jews in state bodies and to prohibit Jews and Jewish offspring of mixed marriages from the areas of culture and education”, reads a final, chilling sentence. Russia says the document is a fake.

Powerful archival footage shows Red Army officers drinking toasts with their counterparts from the SS in Berlin in December 1939. In 1940, the Soviet Union had become a huge supplier of grain and oil to the Nazi war machine, while it encouraged the Communist parties of western Europe to sabotage the anti-Nazi resistance.

“It is comforting to see Parisian workers talking to German soldiers as friends”, a French communist publication gloated in July 1940. Vyacheslav Molotov, who was then the Soviet Union's foreign minister, called fighting Nazism a “crime”. Along with similar pronouncements, that was published in every Soviet newspaper; such pages were hurriedly removed after Hitler's treachery.

Something pretty similar happened in the West. Nazi war criminals are reviled; their Soviet counterparts are honoured veterans to this day. Any attempt to bring them to justice prompts angry protests from Russia. “Hands Off Our Granddads”, was the slogan chanted by the protestors from Young Russia. A better question might be, “What exactly happened?”

Mr Snore and his sponsors in the European Parliament have produced a sharply provocative work. Its tone, technique and composition may be open to criticism. But those who want to ban it should try refuting it first.

http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/europeview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11401983&fsrc=nwl