US Democratic vs Nazi platforms

Dinesh D'Souza made a film that Don Jr. saw and clearly, that was Don Jrs. only exposure to the material because he swallowed D'Souza's propaganda wholesale.

"Don Trump Jr. Calls Democratic Party 'The Real Nazis' After Watching D'Souza's Mess"

Okay, so let's look at what the Nazi Party platform of 1920 was:

1. Unification of Greater Germany (Austria + Germany)
2. Land + expansion
3. Anti-Versailles - abrogation of the Treaty.
4. Land and territory - lebensraum.
5. Only a "member of the race" can be a citizen.
6. Anti-semitism - No Jew can be a member of the race.
7. Anti-foreigner - only citizens can live in Germany.
8. No immigration - ref. to Jews fleeing pograms.
9. Everyone must work.
10. Abolition of unearned income - "no rent-slavery".
11. Nationalisation of industry
12. Divison of profits
13. Extension of old age welfare.
14. Land reform
15. Death to all criminals
16. German law, not Roman law (anti- French Rev.)
17. Education to teach "the German Way"
18. Education of gifted children
19. Protection of mother and child by outlawing child labour.
20. Encouraging gymnastics and swimming
21. Formation a national army.
22. Duty of the state to provide for its volk.
23. Duty of individuals to the state 

Points 1 through 4, 16 and 21 are specific to Germany's concerns at the time.
Points 5 through 8, 15, 17 and 23 sound just like the Trump Administration today.
9 through 14, 18 to 20 and 22 okay, these sound like items Democrats could agree with. Not so sure about point 11, though. Some nationalization would be good, but lots of Democrats are strong believers in capitalism. 22 is also pretty much straight socialsm. Not really sure either 10 or 12 survived very long then or would survive under Democrats today. Michelle Obama would especially approve of 20.
It's a pretty mixed bag. Certainly Democrats would agree with some of the values expressed, but Don Jr. sounds as though he's citing a very one-sided version and doesn't have enough historical knowledge to really make careful distinctions.

Looking at it from the other side

The other day, I and a group of others were asked to try and see things from the other political side's perspective. I saw these two comments below a Smerconish article:

0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 9:26 AM, 11/17/2013

If this summary below from a law professor is true, are you sure you want to encourage more and more people who are dependent on the government welfare voting for more and more politicians who support more and more taxpayer funded welfare? Also encouraging college students to vote is always a bad idea since they mostly are uninformed, irrational, lead astray by professors and have not paid taxes yet.

Food Stamps for Thought!

"In aggregate, the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income areas and living off various forms of government welfare..."

If we want fair elections, have party affiliation removed from all candidates names and ballots and force the voters to vote for the candidate's beliefs and not for any party.

— GAC

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0 like this / 0 don't   •   Posted 11:05 AM, 11/17/2013

A Republic ceases to exist when the people realize they can vote themselves benefits. Shame on the Obama/Smerconish line of thinking.

— Thoughtful&concernedvoter

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20131117_The_Pulse__Why_so_many_roadblocks_on_the_way_to_casting_a_ballot_.html#8lmi576l3C6PU6xu.99

Posted 9:26 AM, 11/17/2013

If this summary below from a law professor is true, are you sure you want to encourage more and more people who are dependent on the government welfare voting for more and more politicians who support more and more taxpayer funded welfare? Also encouraging college students to vote is always a bad idea since they mostly are uninformed, irrational, lead astray by professors and have not paid taxes yet.

Food Stamps for Thought!

"In aggregate, the map of the territory Romney won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country. Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income areas and living off various forms of government welfare..."

If we want fair elections, have party affiliation removed from all candidates names and ballots and force the voters to vote for the candidate's beliefs and not for any party.

— GAC

Posted 11:05 AM, 11/17/2013

A Republic ceases to exist when the people realize they can vote themselves benefits. Shame on the Obama/Smerconish line of thinking.

— Thoughtful&concernedvoter

 GAC doesn't give us the link to the fellow who makes this observation, but I have no reason to doubt that the observation is entirely true. Problem is, it's incomplete. If we look at Alexander Cockburn's description in The Nation:

On March 23, 1983, a friend of mine watched as a naval officer and a defense contractor in the Fort Myer Officers' Club in Virginia listened impatiently as Reagan churned his way through a longish overture to his excited launch of Star Wars. Then, as Reagan began to token forth the billion-dollar feeding trough of SDI, they screamed to each other in incredulous delight, "He's going to do it...he's doing it...he's done it! We're rich, we're rich!" With these words, they both made a rush to the telephones.

 What's that you say? That, somehow, what motivates the already-wealthy and the not-so-wealthy are in some strange way distinct from each other? That's obvious nonsense. Out of the $3.8 trillion in the 2014 budget in total spending, the Farm Bill, which contains the Food Stamps/SNAP program, is 4% of the total budget, keep in mind that the bill also contains farm price supports. Defense is 17%, Veteran's benefits are 4% and transportation, housing, education and energy are 4%, 2%, 2% and 1% respectively. Medicare and Social Security make up around 58% of all spending.

If we look at total Federal spending by county, we can see that rural, i.e., Republican-heavy counties, are pretty flush with Federal cash. So what GAC and TCV are going along with is called "cherry-picking of the data," choosing to look at very small slices of highly select and chosen data to reach really broad conclusions.

Santorum, anti-porn warrior

Robbery and homicide were at a little over two per 100,000 and around five per 100,000 respectively in the early 1960s. They rose to around nine in the mid-1970s and largely staying between 10 and eight until spiking in the early 1990s, going up to 11 for robbery and almost 10 for murder. Both stats have declined since then to under six. Now, if Rick Santorum were correct and pornography was a cause for rape and sexual assaults, then considering that porn has grown dramatically from its jump from still photos in magazines with the film “Deep Throat” in 1974 and grew rapidly during the late 1980s with first the introduction of the VCR, then even more so with the introduction of the DVD in the mid-1990s and then even more so with online porn in the late 1990s, we should have then seen a pretty steady and by now, a dramatic rise in rape and sexual assaults, right? Well, covering only the years 2000 through 2009, the Department of Justice concluded (Page 2 of the PDF) that rape and sexual assault declined at pretty much the same rate that all other crimes declined during that same period. As pornography became increasingly easy to get and to view privately during this period, I'd say Santorum's thesis, that America is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography” is a complete fail.

Update: To gauge how much the adult film industry grew, I looked at adult videos released according to Adult Video News on October 2000 and October 2007. The numbers were 150 and 345 respectively. Since the industry crashed along with everyone else since the end of 2007, it's a pretty good presumption using Santorum's thesis, that the crash would have made some visible difference to the amount of rape and sexual assault. According to Santorum, however, sexual crimes grew since President Obama took office, so again, Santorum achieves a complete fail.

Of straw men and arguments

George Will makes an interesting assertion in opposition to Elizabeth Warren's famous YouTube talk to a group of supporters:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.

Let's look first at exactly what a straw man argument is. G.W. Bush was famous for using them. Bush would address and “refute” arguments that no one was making in the first place. Bush tackled the question that perhaps the Iraq War was making terrorism wordwide worse. There was strong evidence for this, as terrorist incidents worldwide shot up enormously after the Iraq War was launched. But Bush spent his answer insisting that US interests were attacked before the Iraq War was launched. That's all very fine and well and entirely true, but that didn't address the essential criticism, that the Iraq War increased terrorism.

Have right-wingers asserted the opposite of what Warren asserts, that when they build factories and turn out products, that they owe their success entirely to themselves? As a matter of fact, some commenters quoted by the right wing Instapundit do exactly that:

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.

No, sorry, but when Warren's argument is met head-on and addressed directly by critics, it's not a straw man argument! George Will adds an interesting paragraph:

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. [emphasis in original]

Of course, Will completely fails to tell us how on Earth government is supposed to “facilitate individual striving” without taking “ as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.” Government is supposed to build useful things for us for free? Sure, I'll go along with Wills' statement near the end of his piece:

Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation.

But where is society supposed to get the money to produce “such public goods as roads, schools and police” if society cannot “take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving”? The airy-fairy philosophy of Will falls apart on the practical question of “Where are we supposed to get the money to pay for all of this?”

Juan Cole argues with President Bush

President Bush gave a speech on US-Mideast policy at the Sabas Forum on 5 December, Juan Cole then argued with much of what he said in that speech. In doing so, Cole reviewed and again called attention to many aspects of Bush's policies and explanations for those policies that have irked and annoyed liberals, lefties and progressives over the years.

Primarily, Bush annoys progressives by giving his listeners an entirely one-sided and very highly selective view on causes and events. He doesn't just speak as if wearing blinders, he speaks as if he were observing these things through a straw. As Cole observes, when speaking of various Middle Eastern "bad guys,"

A popular Shiite anti-Shah, anti-imperialist movement is no different from a small hyper-Sunni terrorist group?

According to Cole, Bush seeks to present the entire Islamic world as an:

undifferentiated terrain of seething irrational hostility

And I'm sorry, but Bush just plain flat-out lies in this paragraph:

"When Saddam’s regime fell, we refused to take the easy option and install a friendly strongman in his place."

Cole reviews the well-documented history of the Bush Administration's clear intention of installing Ahmed Chalabi as the Iraqi "friendly strongman" and continues with how the US tried again with Ayad Allawi. Both attempts failed because of Iraqi opposition. Neither attempt was unsuccessful because the US decided that such a thing would violate American ideals of democracy.

Even if we were to assume that Bush was being entirely honest and sincere in his desire to see democracy spread across major portions of the world, we'd still have a major problem with the way that Bush has chosen to go about it. The methods one chooses are important. Back during my college days, one of my professors got very excitable about the errors that people were making in interpreting a subject. Someone pointed out later that the professor had to realize that "He's not cutting down a forest, he's irrigating a desert." By the same logic, Bush and the neoconservatives around him seem to think that creating conditions for a democracy simply means getting rid of the local dictators. In reality, getting a democracy up and running means:

You need institutions like a well-trained legal and judicial establishment that can lay the groundwork for a rule of law. You need vital, independent unions and chambers of commerce. You need security. You need lots of things besides the Marines.

According to Cole, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party is the "bad guy" of today, but Bush's speech erases the history of how the Baath Party got into power back in the 1950s and 1960s with the enthusiastic backing of the US. Yes, it's entirely possible that "The Establishment" of the US regrets doing that and is now determined to right those old wrongs, but when their spokesperson ignores the history of US complicity in Mideast violence, there's no reason for anyone to have confidence that any new policies are being planned.

It's of course impossible to blame just Bush and his people for all this. Democrats haven't really tried to present an alternative view. I think that situation has changed a bit from years ago and the Democratic Party is more ideologically progressive than it was when Bush took office. The incoming presidency of Barack Obama is, I believe, a big improvement over Bush's presidency, but it's nowhere near enough for a lot of impatient critics, among whom I count lots of my buddies in the anti-war movement. The traditional media hasn't been presenting alternative views either, but again, the rise of the netroots with a more leftist perspective has ameliorated that problem somewhat. We're still not "there" and the press corps appears to still be unhealthily obsessed with Hillary Clinton and trivia in general, but I think we're making progress.

Answer to D'Souza's defense of Bush's 935 lies

Dinesh D'Souza presents an, uh, interesting defense of Bush against the charge that he and several other members of his administration told 935 lies in the run-up to the Iraq War. D'Souza presents the words of "liberals on campus" who "typically say"

Well, we're not saying that Bush knew for sure that there were no such weapons [of mass destruction]. We are saying that his administration stacked the data.

D'Souza then goes on to manfully and heroically blow this straw man away (And I've certainly heard "stacked the deck," but never "stacked the data." That's a new one on me). The question that this statement allegedly answers is:

If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn't Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out?

My answer to that would have been to recall the old statement: "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan." The "victory" in this case was the one celebrated by President Bush on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Had the Iraq insurgency not reared up, had Iraq been peaceful instead of turning into a full-fledged guerrilla war, there's no reason for Bush to have expected any negative consequences for his lies.

Such a belief would have had a sound foundation in historical reality. In 1846, President James K Polk launched the invasion of Mexico and the US ended up swallowing 40% of Mexico's territory. People including the young Congressman Abraham Lincoln condemned the invasion, but his condemnation proved to be unpopular and it was used against Lincoln all the way into his presidency. The Whig Party did not follow Lincoln in condemning the war and instead nominated the American commander, General Zachary Taylor, to be its candidate for 1848.

So certainly, Bush probably knew that he'd be eventually found out, but the very high likelihood is that all would have been forgiven if only the war hadn't turned into such a complete c*f*.