Channeling Katie

What to write? What to write? I need something really cathartic right now. The civil war in Iraq is going from bad to worse. The gay marriage ban amendment won’t be on the ballot this fall. We Republicans look to get whacked in November. And now, his holiness, George W. Bush, just scored the highest in a worst-president-ever poll. All of my hopes and dreams, hatched when Newton Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995, are just dead birds. There is only one thing to do. I’ll call the Democrats names! That’ll fix ‘em! [shrieking maniacal laughter]

This is Katie’s imagined (by Spot) thought process for her column Historian of communism began with DFL. Katie writes about John Earl Haynes, a former DFL activist and member of the Wendy Anderson administration. Here are a few grafs from the column:

Haynes first heard hints about Communist influence in Minnesota politics as a campaign volunteer [for Hubert Humphrey]. "The old DFLers would tell me about how Uncle Hubert had run the Reds out of the DFL," he says.

"I would listen patronizingly and laugh. I'd learned as a graduate student that there was never any serious Communist presence in mainstream American politics. It was a myth, a product of McCarthyism and Cold War exaggeration."

But in the mid-1970s, Haynes began digging through musty archives at the Minnesota Historical Society to complete his dissertation on the history of the DFL. "I discovered, to my astonishment, that the old guys were right," Haynes says. "In the 1930s and '40s, Humphrey and his colleagues were engaged in a desperate fight for control of the DFL with 'progressives,' who were secretly controlled by the Communist Party USA."

Haynes knew that the subject was "politically radioactive." But, in 1984, he wrote a book about it -- "Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party."

Yikes, the DFL was full of commies! (And maybe by innuendo it is today.)

Remember, it was Uncle Hubert who ran the “Reds” out of the party, according to Haynes’ witnesses’ accounts. During the Depression, were there people to whom communism looked good? You betcha. But it obviously isn’t relevant to politics in Minnesota today.

Two can play this game, Katie. The Bush family is being sued by two Auschwitz survivors for $40 billion because, they allege, W’s granddad, Prescott Bush, profited from slave labor at the camp:

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

This is a quote from an extended article in the Guardian online, which Spot invites you, boys and girls, to read.

So George W. Bush must be a Nazi, right Katie?

Tags: Katie Nazism communism Minnesota DFL