The Chris Moeller Archives

"Why socialism?"

That baffoon Steve King is right: Same-sex marriage is "a purely socialist concept." Just like single-payer health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, and dozens of other concepts that have led to greater social justice. Same-sex marriage is socialist because gay men and women do "want access to public funds and resources"-- equal federal benefits and recognition.

In Europe, progressives commonly and more successfully organize themselves under the umbrella term "democratic socialist," and their countries have the highest quality of life on the globe. Liberals here (many of them social and economic conservatives in disguise) do themselves no favors by continuing to deny the label of "socialist." It makes having to make your case that much harder when you deny that a concept such as single-payer health insurance, or even the proposed "public option" for health care is not socialism. Of course it is. Federal highways are socialism. If I could co-opt George Bush Junior's fractured English for a moment, is it any wonder our kids isn't learning? We're denying a major reality of social definition.

Despite the wild success of "socialist" programs and ideals during the New Deal (each program introduced first, almost universally, by the Socialist Party of the United States a generation before), leftists have been running from the s-word all the way back to, at least, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and to the left's obvious political detriment. The capitalists were down on their hands and knees in 1932 begging the government to save them, and the New Deal did it. The capitalists were back down on their hands and knees again in 2008.

No less an intellect than Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 that "the crippling of individuals...(was) the worst evil of capitalism," and that "our whole educational system suffers from this evil." How can a capitalist system truly uplift "the individual," as we're often told it does, when so few individuals are permitted to thrive. The success of one denies the next. Einstein wrote that he was "convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist (my italics) economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals." Having a cogent left-wing is particularly imperative for the United States because our right-wingers are seemingly dumber than right-wingers in other countries.

Don't deny your socialism. Own it. Will we allow visionaries like Albert Einstein to define our hopes and ideals on the left, or should we go with Steve King?

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Supercitizen Ralph Nader has become a political novelist. He describes his new book instead as "a practical utopia," or "a fictional vision that could become a new reality." The book stars Warren Buffett in an only partially-fictional role. Buffett, in real life, believes he pays too little in taxes. Washington Democrats disagree.

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There have been a lot of great baseball moments throughout history that have transpired off the field. Among them: the time Babe Ruth, in a display of strength at a party, hurled an upright piano off the porch of a rural cabin into a pond of water; the time that the little black book of a notorious Hollywood madam was found to include the name of Tommy Lasorda; the time Sparky Anderson appeared as himself on an episode of "WKRP in Cincinnati," and the time a group of late-night revelers that included Bob Uecker paid a cocktail waitress to serve an inebriated Harry Caray a drink while topless and then pretended that nobody but Harry had seen the peculiar act.

Here's a tabloid report of one of the latest great moments, albeit less humorous than above, that occurred last Saturday night in St. Louis.

posted by CM @ 4:58 AM