Incompetence or Malevolence

Everybody in America should read this piece from Roger Kimball at PajamasMedia...the country that all of us want to live in is being ripped apart at a left that even Mr. Paranoid Michael could have conceived before the November election:

Yes, we agreed, it certainly looks like incompetence and, judged by its results, is effects, its consequences for this great country, it is incompetence on a breathtaking scale.

And yet, is it only incompetence? Remember, shortly before the election, Obama boasted to his mesmerized supporters that “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Is that not what he has set about doing–with a vengeance?

And here’s where we began talking about another possibility: that Team Obama was deliberately targeting the U.S. economy, deliberately impoverishing millions of Americans, deliberately angering our closest allies while coddling dictators like Putin and his puppet Medvedev and funneling millions to terrorist organizations like Hamas.

Maybe that young person the financial journalist Jim Cramer spoke to was right and “We’ve elected elected a Leninist” whose “agenda is destroying the life savings of millions of Americans”
[...]
Why would Obama inflict these destructive policies while the economy is collapsing? Simple. Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives.

And here we have the ’enry ’iggins moment: “By George, I think he’s got it!” “Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives.” That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do. In a cheery volume called State and Revolution, for example, Lenin explains how:

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

Lenin, too, wished to “spread the wealth around.” And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to “bring about redistributive change” in society.