The Deepwater Horizon disaster has generated almost unprecedented hysteria in the mass media. Not to minimize the seriousness of this disaster – 11 men died and a large amount of oil has poured into the Gulf of Mexico, some of the most important fishing grounds in the U.S. — but to claim that it spells the end of a way of life to many Gulf residents is questionable at best. Surely the Gulf coast economic outlook is not good for the near future, especially with the current recession, but oil spill disasters of equal or greater magnitude have occurred over the past century with little or no long-term consequences.

According to the most recent flow-rate estimates of this spill, it has exceeded the Exxon Valdez, which released 259,000 barrels of oil within the first week. It is interesting to note that, according to the Coast Guard, Hurricane Katrina caused approximately 167,000 barrels of oil to be released from broken pipelines, storage tanks and industrial plants. There was not much environmental damage reported from these leaks, which presumably would have affected the same waters.

These incidents, however, are dwarfed by the 1979 Gulf of Mexico Pemex/Ixtoc I Oil blowout, that, until now, was the largest accidental spill in history. Lasting almost 10 months, that spill released between 10,000 and 30,000 barrels per day (BPD); in total approximately 3.3 million barrels was released into the Gulf.

Using the current upper end estimate of 60,000 BPD, the Deepwater Horizon spill has surpassed the Pemex spill, but it still is dwarfed by Saddam Hussein’s deliberate release of somewhere between 5.7 and 11 million barrels from tankers 10 miles off the Kuwaiti coast.

While the Pemex spill affected 162 miles of coastline in Texas and Mexico, the long-term environmental consequences were negligible. As one marine biologist put it, “… considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades … within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100% normal again.”
The worst spills came in the opening months of WWII, when German U-boats off the north Atlantic coast sank 452 oil tankers carrying approximately 29.4 million barrels. Those spills had no serious long-term environmental impacts that we know of. For the Gulf blowout equal this, it would have to spew 60,000 BPD for 490 days.

I am no oil expert, and am not trying to downplay the severity of the Gulf spill, but the experts I have talked with agree: this oil leak will cause damage in the near term, but is not likely to cause the kind of cataclysmic long-term damage projected by the news media.

This hysteria and crisis has been hyped to provide Obama with the pretext he needs to cynically promote “Cap and Trade” — legislation certain to wreak havoc on our tottering economy while working against satisfying our energy needs. And, never one to overlook an opportunity to milk the private sector, he also used it to put his jackboot on yet another industry. Yes, his demand for a $20 billion “aid” fund was a shakedown. Where in the Constitution does the President have such despotic authority?

While he bludgeons the oil industry with fines, promises of stringent regulations and attempts a shutdown of all offshore drilling operations — actions only guaranteed to prolong the suffering of Gulf residents — Obama has refused to waive the Jones Act and other restrictions which would allow foreign companies, particularly the Dutch, to offer their cutting-edge equipment in containing the spill.

Additionally, other bureaucratic roadblocks have hampered efforts, roadblocks that Obama could easily lift if he ever decided to use his executive authority properly, including missed opportunities to burn off more of the oil because of overblown air pollution concerns; holdups in the use of dispersants; permit delays in allowing the state of Louisiana to create artificial barriers against the encroaching oil slick, and failure to approve barges and booms in time to block oil from reaching Alabama’s Magnolia River.

Meanwhile, Obama does nothing to stop his benefactor, George Soros, from moving forward with his Brazilian offshore drilling project, funded with $10 billion in U.S. tax dollars courtesy of Obama. Not a squeak about this from the media of course. Despicable hypocrites!

Putting it as politely as possible, the reckless corruption and ineptitude of this administration knows no bounds. There is nothing to be said for this carnival of clowns except that they must be voted out of office as soon as possible, followed immediately by a nationwide RICO investigation into their extensive, willfully destructive, corrupt activities. It seems apparent that nothing will stop these people short of jail.

Editor’s note: Businessman and Examiner.com columnist Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. You may read more of his articles on his blog, Truth & Consequences at http://truthandcons.blogspot.com

Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal’s and BP’s defenestration tell us about the President of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the President most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

In late June, Senator George Lemieux (FL) attempted to rouse the President to jump-start America’s overpaid, over-manned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the President unengaged, and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the Senator.

He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post in mid-June. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia… The President seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass. After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human rights record” or “continued repression in Russia”, Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch — and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the President “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game — to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing — Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dimestore opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semi-surge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it.

Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi “quagmire”, was there ever any talk of hardcore Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Wasn’t he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That’s why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democrat Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama’s war would be run by Bush’s Defense Secretary and Bush’s general? Hey, never mind: Moveon.org have quietly disappeared their celebrated “General Betray-us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be. It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and in the end they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged President. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier — and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

General Stanley McChrystal wasn’t actually insubordinate. But the reporting of the Rolling Stone article that sparked this controversy gave the impression he was.

It had to hurt a man with an ego as large as Mr. Obama’s to read this description of their first one on one meeting:

“‘It was a ten minute photo op,’ said an adviser to McChrystal. ‘Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his (expletive) war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.’”

Few doubt this characterization of Mr. Obama’s detachment is true.

But it was an unnamed adviser, not Gen. McChrystal, who made the remark to reporter Michael Hastings. And the shots taken in the article at Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Special Representative Richard Holbrooke and “the wimps in the White House” all were attributed to aides and advisers, not to the general himself.

Still, this was Gen. McChrystal’s second flirtation with insubordination. And Mr. Obama already appeared vacillating and weak in his conduct of foreign policy and in his response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The thoughts expressed are not rare in the U.S. military, but they are not supposed to be expressed publicly. It was appallingly poor judgment for Gen. McChrystal’s aides to be so frank with a Rolling Stone reporter, and for Gen. McChrystal to have granted him such access.

“If an officer cannot figure out Rolling Stone, how can he understand the Taliban?” wondered military historian Victor Davis Hanson.

The judgment was so appallingly poor some suspect it was deliberate. Among them is the author of the Rolling Stone article.

“I think they were frustrated with how the policy was going, and I think there was an intent on their part to get a message out about that frustration,” Mr. Hastings told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Losing a war causes frustration.

Gen. McChrystal and his aides are frustrated because the deadline for beginning withdrawing troops that Mr. Obama set for next July deprives them of realistic hope of victory.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), told Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard about a conversation he had when he visited Afghanistan earlier this year.

“This Afghan leader told Barrasso that within hours of Obama’s speech word spread that the Americans would be leaving in 2011,” Mr. Hayes wrote. “Almost immediately local and national leaders began a mad scramble to ally themselves with anyone with lots of guns and some popular support, entities that would be around when the Americans left — the Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Pakistani military and, yes, Iran.”

And Gen. McChrystal’s soldiers are frustrated by bizarrely restrictive rules of engagement which make it easier for the enemy to kill them; harder for them to kill the enemy.

Barack Obama has not been a wartime leader in the mold of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Since appointing him, his only other face-to-face meeting with Gen. McChrystal was to chew him out for criticizing a nutty plan floated by Mr. Biden. Perhaps the only way Gen. McChrystal could have gotten Mr. Obama interested in Afghanistan is if he’d built a golf course there.

But Gen. McChrystal hasn’t been a Grant or MacArthur, either. Laurence Peter famously said people in the corporate world tend to be promoted to a level beyond their competence. This happens in the military, too. A superb special operator, Gen. McChrystal seemed out of his depth on the larger stage.

Gen. McChrystal is more responsible than is the president for the restrictive rules of engagement, and he turned a blind eye to the massive corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

President Obama has replaced Gen. McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus, the hero of Iraq. This is the first decision he’s made in the war of which I approve. But it will mean nothing unless the deadline for troop withdrawal is dropped; the rules of engagement rewritten, and a better strategic partner than Hamid Karzai found.

Editor’s note: Jack Kelly is a former Marine, Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan Administration.

Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn’t be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves.

When you stop and think about it, there is no obvious reason why issues like gun control should be ideological issues in the first place. It is ultimately an empirical question whether allowing ordinary citizens to have firearms will increase or decrease the amount of violence.

Many people who are opposed to gun laws which place severe restrictions on ordinary citizens owning firearms have based themselves on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. But, while the Supreme Court must make the Second Amendment the basis of its rulings on gun control laws, there is no reason why the Second Amendment should be the last word for the voting public.

If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.

There is no point arguing, as many people do, that it is difficult to amend the Constitution. The fact that it doesn’t happen very often doesn’t mean that it is difficult. The people may not want it to happen, even if the intelligentsia are itching to change it.

When the people wanted it to happen, the Constitution was amended four times in eight years, from 1913 through 1920.

What all this means is that judges and the voting public have different roles. There is no reason why judges should “consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance,” as Justice Stephen Breyer said in his dissent against the Supreme Court’s gun control decision.

But, as the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, his job was “to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.”

If the public doesn’t like the rules, or the consequences to which the rules lead, then the public can change the rules via the ballot box. But that is very different from judges changing the rules by verbal sleight of hand, or by talking about “weighing of the constitutional right to bear arms” against other considerations, as Justice Breyer puts it. That’s not his job. Not if “we the people” are to govern ourselves, as the Constitution says.

As for the merits or demerits of gun control laws themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase — not a decrease — in gun crimes, including murder.

Conversely, there have been places and times where an increase in gun ownership has been followed by a reduction in crimes in general and murder in particular.

Unfortunately, the media intelligentsia tend to favor gun control laws, so a lot of hard facts about the futility, or the counterproductive consequences of such laws, never reach the public through the media.

We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia and Brazil.

The media, like Justice Breyer, might do well to reflect on what is their job and what is the voting public’s job. The media’s job should be to give us the information to make up our own minds, not slant and filter the news to fit the media’s vision.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA, and served in the USMC.

Petraeus takes command in the midst of an increasingly difficult and bloody campaign. U.S. and NATO casualties topped 100 in June, the most in one month since the war began in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 on U.S. soil. The 46-nation “grand coalition” he now heads under a United Nations mandate is rife with dozens of conflicting “national caveats” that limit how troops from various countries can be deployed and employed. Placating our “allies” in this fight is a full-time task in itself.

The “surge” of 30,000 additional U.S. troops, which Obama famously announced in a surreal speech at the U.S. Military Academy on 1 Dec 09, is not yet complete. Logistics support for deploying additional forces to a country suffering from “infrastructure-deficit disorder” continues to be hampered by the need to move personnel, equipment and supplies into Afghanistan by air or overland through lovely places such as Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. All of these routes depend on the good will of their governments — and exorbitant fees for fuel, bases, security and “transit rights.”

Meanwhile, factions in both Iran and Pakistan are doing their best to confound any possibility of “success” — the word Obama uses instead of “victory” — for what we’re trying to achieve in Afghanistan. Recent intelligence reports do not bode well.

Taliban-inspired terror attacks have become nearly a daily occurrence in Pakistan’s major cities. Despite hundreds of civilian casualties and the inherent risks to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal, Islamabad’s infamous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence continues to provide safe harbor, training and materiel support to Afghan Taliban-affiliated networks at war with the government in Kabul. Though Hellfire missiles delivered by U.S. remotely piloted aircraft have proved effective in eliminating high-value Taliban and al-Qaida targets in the mountainous Af-Pak border region, nearly all the targeting data for these attacks have to be acquired at great risk by small teams of human intelligence collectors.

Along Afghanistan’s western border, the ayatollahs running Iran are playing a dangerous game of their own. On 24 June, Congress passed a new set of sanctions designed to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The next day, I was shown new information about how the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is delivering new long-range rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, machine-made explosively formed penetrators and batteries for surface-to-air missiles to Afghan insurgents.

The IRGC is known to have provided weapons, training and safe harbor to Shiite militias in Iraq since 2004. Opium from Afghanistan has been running through IRGC-protected “ratlines” for at least as many years. But until now, there had been scant evidence that Tehran’s agents were supplying advanced munitions and support to the Afghan insurgency. This support threatens to make the difficult fight in Afghanistan even more perilous in the months ahead.

As if these challenges for the new International Security Assistance Force commander were not enough, the Karzai government in Kabul is creating even more. Charges of rampant corruption, opium dealing and outright theft of U.S. and European aid were heightened at the end of June when The Wall Street Journal revealed that billions of dollars in cash has been flown out of the country over the past three years — a practice that continues to this day.

Though significant, these problems are not insurmountable if Gen. Petraeus is given sufficient time and resources and essential political support from Washington. And that may prove to be his greatest challenge. The foolhardy July 2011 “deadline” Obama has imposed for commencing U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has emboldened our adversaries and disheartened our allies. Coupled with overly restrictive rules of engagement for combat operations, the pullout (troops in theater call it the “bug-out date”) threatens to jeopardize any prospect for a positive outcome in Afghanistan. In his confirmation hearings this week, the new ISAF commander distanced himself from the O-Team on both issues.

Sen. John McCain, inquiring about the withdrawal date, asked, “Was there a recommendation from you or anyone in the military that we set a date of July 2011?” Petraeus responded, “There was not.”

The general also told the solons he already had talked to President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan government officials about the rules of engagement and stated, “I want to assure the mothers and fathers of those fighting in Afghanistan that I see it as a moral imperative to bring all assets to bear to protect our men and women in uniform.”

Abandoning a withdrawal date and revising the rules of engagement to “bring all assets to bear” are absolutely essential. Convincing Obama of these necessities may be the hardest task of all.

Oliver North is a combat-decorated Marine. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served 22 years as a Marine. His service awards include the Silver Star, Bronze Star for Valor and two Purple Hearts for wounds in combat.

In analyzing the more recent history of socialism, a good place to start is Henry Wallace’s Third Party movement in 1948, the Progressive Party.

Elena Kagan’s controversial “Final Conflict” thesis on socialism was written in 1981 when she was 21 years old. Professor Harvey Klehr, an expert on the socialist and communist movements, told me that while he sensed “a lurking sympathy” in the document for the left-wing of the Socialist Party, he didn’t find a “red flag” that would derail her nomination. Kagan’s thesis covered the rise and fall of the socialist movement in New York City from 1900-1933.

Clearly, however, the socialist movement has risen again, under the cover of the “progressive” tradition that includes not only the President who appointed Kagan but her backers at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP).

The embrace of Kagan by this movement is the real “red flag.” But Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) has noted in an editorial the “free ride” that Kagan has received in her confirmation hearings, as Republican senators have mostly “played dead” and the major media have acted as “compliant shills” for the nomination. Yet, as noted by IBD, Kagan has a radical record that includes:

• Twisting scientific findings in order to protect the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion.
• Banning military recruiters at Harvard Law School to please radical homosexual activists.
• Arguing as solicitor general that books, and maybe pamphlets, too, might not be worthy of First Amendment protection.
• Seeming to agree that it would be constitutional for the federal government to tell people what to eat.

As we have seen with Van Jones, who has been rehired by CAP, it is today fashionable in left-wing or “progressive” circles to be a socialist and even communist revolutionary. This wasn’t always the case.

Jones resigned his White House job after the scrutiny into his Marxist background and membership in STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) was threatening to implicate Obama and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in his hiring. It recently came out that Obama favored Jarrett for the U.S. Senate seat he vacated after his election to the presidency.

The open collaboration with Jones by CAP represents a sharp break with the anti-communist liberals, once a major force in the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, who had rejected any ties or associations with supporters of totalitarianism and communist dictatorships.

During the 1980s, for example, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, including the American Institute for Free Labor Development, actively fought the communists, especially in Latin America. This stance was dropped after John Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, became president of the AFL-CIO in 1995.

CAP’s so-called “Campus Progress” affiliate has continued this break with the anti-communist liberal tradition by running a very sympathetic interview in 2008 with Weather Underground terrorist Mark Rudd. The Weather Underground was a Cuban-trained Communist gang, led by Obama associates William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, that waged violence and murder in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The group killed Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell on February 16, 1970.

In analyzing the more recent history of socialism, a good place to start is Henry Wallace’s Third Party movement in 1948, the Progressive Party. Wallace was not an insignificant figure, having been vice president in Franklin Roosevelt’s third term.

In his report, “From Henry Wallace to William Ayers—the Communist and Progressive Movements,” Herbert Romerstein points out that while Wallace wasn’t a communist, the party was under Communist Party USA (CPUSA) control. “The Communists even reassigned some of their members from Soviet espionage to run the Progressive Party,” he says. The CPUSA was funded by Moscow and was so obedient to the Soviet line that it backed the Hitler–Stalin pact.

Picking up where Kagan’s thesis leaves off, Romerstein notes that Earl Browder, who headed the Communist Party in the 1930s until 1945, had boasted in 1960 about the success of the communists under his leadership. Browder had said:

“Entering the 1930’s as a small ultra-left sect of some 7,000 members, remnant of the fratricidal factional struggle of the 1920’s that had wiped out the old ‘left wing’ of American socialism, the CP rose to become a national political influence far beyond its numbers (at its height it never exceeded 100,000 members), on a scale never before reached by a socialist movement claiming the Marxist tradition. It became a practical power in organized labour, its influence became strong in some state organizations of the Democratic Party (even dominant in a few for some years), and even some Republicans solicited its support. It guided the anti-Hitler movement of the American League for Peace and Democracy that united a cross-section of some five million organized Americans (a list of its sponsors and speakers would include almost a majority of Roosevelt’s Cabinet, the most prominent intellectuals, judges of all grades up to State Supreme Courts, church leaders, labour leaders, etc.). Right-wing intellectuals complained that it exercised an effective veto in almost all publishing houses against their books, and it is at least certain that those right-wingers had extreme difficulty getting published.”

In this context, a far more questionable treatment of the socialist or “progressive” movement can be found in a lengthy report issued by the Center for American Progress entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.”

Curiously, it ignores Henry Wallace and his communist-dominated Progressive Party.

A Curious Omission
I asked John Halpin, who wrote much of the CAP report and also co-authored The Power of Progress with John Podesta, CAP president, about this omission. He replied:

“Henry Wallace received fewer votes than Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 and carried no states. Nearly all progressive and liberal support went to Harry Truman. Wallace was a decent man and his work on agriculture and his stands on ending segregation and fighting for racial equality were admirable. However, because of his foreign policy stands and his naive approach to Communist influence in the party, most of the major progressive and liberal voices of the time—including Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr—gathered within Americans for Democratic Action, an explicitly anti-Communist, pro-civil rights organization. Long term, Wallace’s 1948 campaign had no real impact on progressives.”

But while the Dixiecrats faded from the scene, the “progressives” did not. This is a critical point.

Noted historian and author David Pietrusza confirms this, telling me:
“Following their humiliating 1948 defeat, Wallace’s Progressives refused to surrender. They instead embarked upon a ‘Long March’ that led to their ideological heirs’ capture of the modern Democratic Party. A key milestone in their re-birth was 1968. That year, Democrats turned against Truman-JFK-LBJ Cold War policies. That same year, former Progressive Party national convention delegate Senator George McGovern emerged as the heir to the martyred Robert Kennedy. Four years later, McGovern captured the Democratic nomination and re-wrote party national convention rules to cement the transformation of his party’s leftward drift. The Obama victory of 2008, and the personnel and policies of his administration, largely translate into a victory for Henry Wallace’s ideological heirs, not for Truman’s. The Truman-style Democrat is largely extinct.”

Halpin’s reference to Wallace’s “naive approach to Communist influence in the party” suggests recognition that communism was and is a danger and that Wallace was not sufficiently alert to this problem. But is this the case with the modern-day progressive movement? CAP’s employment of Van Jones—and rehiring, after details about his communist background had emerged—suggests it is not.

The non-communists like Wallace who tolerated communists became known as “fellow travelers” or dupes. The Communists used such people to influence non-communist Americans in the trade union movement and the Democratic Party.

Romerstein notes, “Two secret Communist Party members became Democratic members of the United States Congress. They were John Bernard from Minnesota and Hugh DeLacy from Washington State. A ‘friend of the Party’ was Vito Marcantonio, who was elected to Congress first as a Republican, then as a Democrat, and finally as a candidate of the Communist Party controlled American Labor Party in New York.”

DeLacy’s memorial service was attended by Rep. Leon Panetta, now the director of the CIA under Obama, who had paid tribute to DeLacy and his wife as “lifelong activists for social justice.”

Bringing the history of socialism and communism up to the present time, Romerstein has explained how the “New Left” of the 1960s and 70s included Communists involved in such groups as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its terrorist offspring, the Weather Underground. Later, some of these Marxists would emerge in the group called “Progressives for Obama,” which included Carl Davidson, formerly of SDS, and Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago branch had backed Obama from the start.

Van Jones worked closely with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), a Communist Party spin-off group. Several members of his STORM group traveled to Cuba in 1999 as part of the notorious Venceremos Brigade, organized with the active involvement of the Weather Underground.

Karen Nussbaum, a top official of the AFL-CIO, participated in one of those trips to Cuba. But when I asked her about it, after she made a presentation at the 2009 Campaign for America’s Future conference, the leading “progressive” organization in the U.S, she turned and walked away.

The Vietnam Betrayal
As documented by several Congressional committees, the Communists also manipulated or controlled the major anti-Vietnam War organizations, using liberals, “progressives” and socialists as fellow travelers.

This was critical because the Communists could not win the war on the battlefield. In addition to media figures such as Walter Cronkite, who turned the enemy’s defeat in the 1968 Tet Offensive into a victory for the communists, Hanoi was depending on the anti-war protests to force a U.S. military withdrawal.

The strategy worked.

As leftist Danny Schechter wrote, in the introduction to North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap’s book How We Won the War, “Throughout the war, the Vietnamese cultivated the active political support of peoples and governments throughout the world… Politically, the Vietnamese always believed in the importance of the anti-war movement…They encouraged it as best they could, knowing that creating a climate of opinion hostile to the war would be one important way of ending it. In the end, their victory was accelerated by Congress’ refusal to vote more aid. That refusal was a response to a climate of public opinion which the anti-war movement helped to forge.”

Perhaps the most significant example of the support for the North Vietnamese was displayed by Tom Hayden, who was caught with a June 4, 1968, letter to “Dear Col. Lao,” a North Vietnamese official, which ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” Hayden, once married to “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, would later emerge as a member of “Progressives for Obama.”

Meanwhile, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communists reorganized, with many of them establishing the CCDS. Not as widely known, however, is the fact that a secret member of this group was Barbara Lee, who would become a member of the U.S. Congress, leader of the congressional Progressive Caucus and leader of the congressional Black Caucus. She would be honored in 2009 as a “progressive” champion by the Campaign for America’s Future.

Van Jones spoke to a 2006 CCDS fundraiser. Another figure active in the CCDS was Harry Hay, the former Communist Party member who founded the modern gay rights movement.

Part Two

The alleged “failure of American radicalism,” perhaps appropriate for a paper that covers 1900-1933 and written in 1981, is not so apparent these days.

As a student, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was so interested in the socialist movement that she wrote a thesis about its history in New York City from 1900-1933. But the history of the Progressive Party, which ran FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate in 1948, helps bring the subject up to date and explains the current direction of the Democratic Party.

The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat in 1948. Communists and “progressives” then targeted the Democratic Party for a takeover from within.
A semi-official history, in the form of the book, Gideon’s Army, was written by Curtis MacDougall, a professor of journalism at Northwestern University who also wrote Interpretative Reporting, a standard text in journalism schools for more than 50 years. MacDougall, who wrote critically (even in his journalism textbook) about efforts to expose communist influence in the U.S. Government, was himself a Progressive Party activist and candidate.

Not surprisingly, MacDougall’s influence was felt not only on generations of journalists, but on his own son, A. Kent McDougall, who was acknowledged in the 1972 edition of Interpretative Reporting as then being with the New York office of the Wall Street Journal and lending “valuable assistance” in its preparation. Kent came out openly as a Marxist after working at the Journal, where he said he inserted positive stories about Marxist economists and “the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.” Stone, it turned out, was a Soviet agent of influence.

MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, released to this journalist, revealed that he had a close association with the Chicago Star, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, and many different CPUSA front organizations. But the Star connection deserves special comment. The executive editor of the Chicago Star was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member who would later become President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor in Hawaii and was active in the Hawaii Democratic Party.

In 1948, notes historian David Pietrusza, Davis’s Chicago-based paper, the Chicago Star, wholeheartedly backed Henry Wallace. That summer, he adds, the Progressive Party “apparatus” converted the paper into the Illinois Standard, thus enabling Davis to relocate to Hawaii on the advice of fellow Progressive Party activist Paul Robeson. Robeson, it turned out, was a secret member of the Communist Party.

It is significant that MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Italian-born American Communist Carl Marzani, who served a prison term for perjury in falsely denying, while employed by the State Department, that he was a Communist Party member. His publishing house, Marzani and Munsell, was subsidized by the Soviet KGB.

However, the history of the “progressive tradition” issued by the Center for American Progress (CAP) ignores all of this. It claims:

“With the rise of the contemporary progressive movement and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, there is extensive public interest in better understanding the origins, values, and intellectual strands of progressivism.

“Who were the original progressive thinkers and activists? Where did their ideas come from and what motivated their beliefs and actions? What were their main goals for society and government?

“The new Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress traces the development of progressivism as a social and political tradition stretching from the late 19th century reform efforts to the current day.”

Unfortunately, this series ignores the role of the Progressive Party of 1948 and the Communist Party influence in it.

The book, The Power of Progress, written by CAP President John Podesta (with John Halpin), is a bit more open and honest. It does mention the communist influence in the Progressive Party, noting the “perceived tolerance of communists within the 1948 Progressive Party” and quoting leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger as saying that “the political tolerance of an illiberal creed like communism, coupled with progressives’ earlier isolationism, could not hold during a time of ideological struggle with a spreading Soviet empire.”

But the use of the word “perceived” is interesting.

It is important to note that Podesta apparently does not regard communism as an “illiberal creed.” After all, Podesta strongly defended communist Van Jones, before and after he was fired by the White House.

Podesta’s book goes on to say that “The practical application of many of these fiercely anti-communist positions quickly became problematic for many progressives” because of the loyalty reviews ordered by President Truman and “the overt Red-baiting of Joe McCarthy and [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover…” The loyalty reviews were designed to make sure that government employees were loyal Americans and not sympathetic to communism.

Why the use of the term “fiercely” anti-communist? Can one be too strongly opposed to an ideology that has resulted in 100 million deaths?

Also notice how Democratic President Harry Truman has become a villain in the Podesta narrative, sharing equal billing with the “Red-baiting” Senator McCarthy and the FBI director. Such a formulation displays the ideological shift in the Democratic Party.

This is more evidence of how modern “progressives” have broken with the anti-communist liberal tradition.

The Van Jones Scandal
This attitude explains not only why Obama-friendly progressives associate openly with characters such as Van Jones but why the Obama Administration is virtually silent on the human rights violations and the pro-terrorist foreign policy of the Marxist Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela.

Podesta notes in matter-of-fact language that “President Truman adopted a strong stance against communist expansion, first with the Truman Doctrine, which offered economic and military support to Greece and Turkey in repelling Soviet ambitions, and shortly thereafter with the Marshall Plan, which provided $13 billion to help rebuild the economies of Europe and prevent the rise of communism still in ruin from the war.”

But Podesta writes critically when he says that the “hard line of liberal thinking”—that, is, liberal anti-communism—took the form of “Vowing never to bend to communist aggression anywhere in the world” and President Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Podesta writes this as if he had been willing to consign Vietnam to the communist camp from the beginning. Not only that, but he writes that the liberal anti-communists “firmly rejected the belief that there could be any acceptance of domestic communism within the larger liberal project.”

This, then, is quite explicit and revealing. Judging by Podesta’s embrace of communist Van Jones, it is clear that he—and CAP—currently accept communists as being part of “the larger liberal project.”

This helps explain why a CAP history of the progressive tradition would ignore the lasting influence of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and how communists continue to work and operate in the “progressive” movement and even influence their hero, President Obama.
Far beyond mere tolerance, however, the communists ran Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate for President in the1948 presidential election. A 1948 Communist Party election manifesto declared that “…in 1948 we Communists join with millions of other Americans to support the Progressive ticket to help win the peace. The Communist Party will enter its own candidates only in those districts where the people are offered no progressive alternatives to the twin parties of Wall Street.”

Romerstein explains:
“In reality, many Communist Party operatives were in control of the Progressive Party. Before it was even formed the Communist Party merged two of its front organizations, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC) and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts and Sciences, to form the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which became the organizing tool for the Wallace campaign.”

Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s 1981 thesis at Princeton University was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” However, she wrote that “In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States.” This appears to be a comment on modern-day America, at least as it was in 1981.

Kagan’s verdict, of course, depends on how you define “socialist.” The modern socialist movement calls itself “progressive.”

Kagan’s thesis is well-researched and interesting, but only to a point. Professor Harvey Klehr told me:

“I scanned through Kagan’s undergraduate thesis. It is very well-written and well-organized, a very impressive piece of undergraduate writing. It is also pretty sound academically. She considers a variety of answers to the question that has perplexed lots of scholars like myself—and radicals—why no successful radical movement in America? Looking at the fate of the SP [Socialist Party] in NY is an interesting take on the problem and I thought her account was reasonably convincing. She seems to have used appropriate sources — although the footnotes were not attached to the version you sent, so I can’t tell exactly which ones she consulted. But it sounds as if she was pretty thorough.

“Although it is not pervasive, I sensed a lurking sympathy for the ‘left-wing’ of the SP, as representing a more militant and pure opposition to the depredations of the manufacturers and the inequities of the system. She acknowledges, however, the faults and flaws of both factions and makes clear that the Communists’ own disastrous policies helped destroy the radical movement in the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union]. The conclusion bemoans the lack of unity that destroyed this radical movement and hints that that is one of the major factors in the failure of American radicalism. Not surprising coming from a 21-year-old college student.

“So, I would give her a pretty good grade for an impressive piece of scholarship for an undergrad. And, I don’t see anything here like a ‘red flag’ in regard to her present situation.”

Clearly, the “red flag” is not a 1981 college paper but why she is being pushed for a seat on the Supreme Court in 2010. The alleged “failure of American radicalism,” perhaps appropriate for a paper that covers 1900-1933 and written in 1981, is not so apparent these days.

Consider that, after his resignation from his White House job, Podesta declared that Van Jones “is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country.” When Jason Mattera staged an ambush interview and confronted Podesta about hiring Jones, Podesta replied, “Van Jones is trying to make this country a better place.”

If Podesta, who ran Obama’s transition team with Valerie Jarrett, is serious about these comments, then the “progressive” movement has become something that represents a sharp break with the liberal anti-communist tradition. It is no wonder that CAP doesn’t want the public to understand how communists once dominated the “progressive” movement and still manipulate it to this day.

From the AIM Syndicate, 4455 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Ste. 330, Washington, DC 20008; www.aim.org. Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org