Digby's Hullabaloo

Socialist Schmocialist

by digby

A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”

Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”

Awesome. But they’ve missed a huge opportunity here. They could try to “rebrand” the Democrats as the National Socialist American Worker’s Party, which would have been rilly, rilly kewl cuz then they could have merged Obama’s picture with Hitler ‘n stuff. Oh wait:

Or they could just go all the way and call it the Communist Party Of America then they could say, like, Obama was all Mao-like. Ooops they’re ahead of me again:

Simply rebranding the opposition party as the Democrat Socialists of America fails to see the full scope of the possibilities.

I’m joking because it seems so absurd, but it speaks to something much more malignant lurking in the conservative id. Here’s Ed Kilgore:

Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”

The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:

The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.

Maybe the Democrats should all be put in coffins with some bugs and then waterboarded for a while. That’s one way we could make sure we still recognize our country.