Aside from this McCain video and the fact that Palin's Alaska essentially redistributes the weath earned from the state's oil industry, the charges that Obama's policies are socialist are absurd:
These are hard times to be a socialist in America. And not just because there's a bourgeois-bloated Starbucks on every other corner, thumbing its capitalist nose at the proletariat.
No, it's tough these days because you've got politicians on the right,
the same guys who just helped nationalize the banking system,
derisively and inaccurately calling the presidential candidate on the
left a socialist. That's enough to make Karl Marx harumph in his grave.
Local communists, rarely tapped as campaign pundits, say Sen. Barack
Obama and his policies stand far afield from any form of socialism they
know.
John Bachtell, the Illinois organizer for Communist Party USA, sees attempts by Sen. John McCain's
campaign to label Obama a socialist as both offensive to socialists and
a desperate ploy to tap into fears of voters who haven't forgotten
their Cold War rhetoric.
"Red baiting is really the last refuge of scoundrels," Bachtell said. "It has nothing to do with the issues that are confronting the American people right now. It's just a big diversion."
