Milos Forman Knows Socialism And Barack Obama, Sir, Is No Socialist

There is no clearer evidence of just how good we have it in the United States than those among us have the luxury of pretending Barack Obama is a socialist. Moreover, our nation is so prosperous and secure that they have the luxury of living in pathetic Walter Mitty-like faux-reality where the everyday existence of upper middle class America is somehow confused with suffering through Stalin’s purges.

Czech-American filmmaker Milos Forman, however, doesn’t have the luxury of that fantasy. He escaped from an actual Marxist dictatorship and knows what that horror looks like in reality, as opposed to Glenn Beck’s masochistic daydreams.

Forman, after laying out personal examples of Warsaw Bloc tyranny from his own life, explains in Wednesday’s New York Times the difference between Obama and the bandits who crushed the Prague Spring with tanks.

Whatever his faults, I don’t see much of a socialist in Mr. Obama or, thankfully, signs of that system in this great nation. Mr. Obama is accused of trying to expand the reach of government — into health care, financial regulation, the auto industry and so on. It’s fair to question whether the federal government should have expanded powers: America, to its credit, has debated this since its birth.

Adding later: “Today, our democracy, a miraculous gathering of diverse players, desperately needs such unity. If all participants play fair and strive for the common good, we can achieve a harmony that eluded the doctrinaire socialist projects. But if just one section, or even one player, is out of tune, the music will disintegrate into cacophony.”

Doctrinaire ideologues that refuse to place the common good ahead of their own sociopolitical ends? You mean like Rush Limbaugh’s boast that he is rooting for the President of the United States to fail or Michigan’s resident treasonist Matt Davis openly pondering armed insurrection?

These right-wing Jacobins lack the basic patriotism expressed so eloquently by John Wayne, Hollywood’s most famous conservative, about John F. Kennedy’s election: "I didn't vote for him but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job."

Perhaps the people shouting “socialist” are just projecting. After all, they sound like they have more in common with the Eastern Bloc’s rigid party apparatchiks than Obama ever will. -- JTW