A week ago, Fox News hosted a discussion, exploring whether market instability is the fault of Democrats. As the Republican network saw it, Wall Street is worried that a Dem will win the presidency in November, and as a result, investors are feel anxiety about the future. This anxiety leads to volatility, and before you know it, presto — Dems are to blame for the market.
Most notably, Fox News featured analysis from Jonathan Hoenig, who (I kid you not) represented CapitalistPig Asset Management, and told Fox News viewers:
“What worries me about the Democrats is that if you listen to them, their message is so explicitly socialist. I mean, at every opportunity they seem to have this contempt for capitalism, this relentless pursuit of collectivism and this total distrust for free markets. If you put all the politics aside, their goal is a national health care program. Their goal is environmentalism. They see bigger government in every element of public life. That has never been good for America and it has never been good for the market either.”
‘Explicitly socialist.” He was not, in case you were wondering, kidding. Jonathan Hoenig, whose work I am not familiar with, seriously argued that Clinton, Edwards, and Obama “seem” to have “contempt for capitalism.”
Don’t be surprised if this is part of a trend. Glenn Beck, resident clown at CNN’s Headline News, launched his own red scare on the air this week.
On the January 24 edition of his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck asserted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s desire “to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market … sounds like the Soviet Union,” and that “Comrade Clinton has railed against the excesses of the offensive executive pay packages and an out of whack tax code that favors the wealthy while holding down the middle class.” […]
Beck added that “promising to steal from the rich and give to the poor” only worked for former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin “because he killed 50 million people to force them to live that way.” He concluded that Clinton’s “fiscal ideas are plenty reason enough” not to vote for her, adding: “Unless you’re [Venezuelan President] Hugo Chavez.” Later in the program, Beck said of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: “Now, put a red star on his furry head. He’s a communist.”
Remember, CNN, home of the self-described “best political team on television,” pays this nut handsomely.
I’ve noticed that when all else fails, the red scare seems to be a Republican fall-back position. When the 110th Congress was taking office last year, RedState created a graphic that read, “Democrat-Socialists Take Back Congress.” There was a hammer and sickle in the middle, and the background image is of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy of Saigon.
In 2005, when some raised questions about the propriety of lawmakers attending retreats sponsored by corporate lobbyists, then-Rep. James Gibbons (R-Nev.) said, “Anybody who is against that obviously must be a communist.”
In 2004, then-Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called John Kerry “a French-speaking socialist,” Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) said Kerry “advocates all kinds of additional socialism.” Around the same time, Bill O’Reilly called Paul Krugman “a quasi-socialist,” and compared David Brock’s Media Matters to Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
I can appreciate the fact that Republicans probably get a little tired of calling someone a “liberal,” but that’s no reason to start manufacturing a red scare. I mean, really. There should be some political norms that conservatives still care about.
The right gets pretty worked up when the left starts throwing around the word “fascist.” Oddly enough, though, the ease with which they talk about communism appears effortless.
