Hullabaloo

Saturday, August 04, 2012

 
So the anti-communists were socialists?

by digby

The other day I wrote about Darrell Issa dissing the Depression and WWII era Americans as either commies or criminals. A reader sent this to school me about the fact that this is actually common wisdom on the right:

ON SEPTEMBER 12, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a wide-ranging interview with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, prominent conservative activist, and Karl Rove ally. It was a long interview, presented in a traditional Q & A format. You can go to El Mundo's website, access the interview, and find Norquist saying this (in Spanish):

Each year, two million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying.

Or at least that's how another news outlet, Agence France-Presse, translated the Spanish into English. And it took no time at all for publications like the New Republic and Slate to jump on Norquist's incendiary language. Whereupon Norquist denied the whole thing. Sort of.

He denied that he'd called the anti-American. But not the rest.

I thought I was aware of most of the wingnut mythology and I certainly knew that they hated the policies of the New Deal and post WWII era. I didn't know they blamed the entire generation for it though. It would have come as a hell of a surprise to the hardcore anti-communist right wingers in my father's circles to know that pissants like Grover Norquist were counting the days until they died. After all, they never voted for a Democrat in their lives.

The funny thing, of course, is that many Democrats are counting the days until the baby boomers die, which also presumes that we are all right wingers. I'm not sure that generational theory is a very good guide to politics.

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digby 8/04/2012 03:30:00 PM