Sage Advice from the Huffington Post

Please, please. please let this happen. Here are the highlights (emphasis added) followed by a few of my own observations:

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President Obama Should Embrace the Socialist Label
by Mark Joseph

Barack Obama is a Socialist and I can prove it.
...
[A]ny politician who is to the political Left of [Bernie] Sanders is by definition a Socialist and has earned the moniker. By that calculation, according to National Journal's 2007 poll of members of Congress there were four Socialists in the United States Senate that year: Sanders, Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Sheldon Whitehouse.

What's so terrible about being a Socialist? It's a perfectly respectable political philosophy and the last time I checked it wasn't against the law or anything and Sanders seems to be doing just fine. So why do President Obama and his Republican critics act as though it's such a dirty word?

If Barack Obama wants to be a transformational President like Ronald Reagan, inspiring a new generation of Americans to believe as he does, he would be wise to own the label and change the public perception of it rather than running from it. And the President's Republican critics should get over their timidity and engage in the kind of full-throated public discourse that debates the issues on the merits and calls him what he, objectively, is.

As for the rest of us in the vast mainstream of American life who aren't blindly beholden to any political ideologies, we'll continue to be believe in a sort of hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism, celebrating a political and economic system that allows people to get rich even as we aggressively encourage the wealthy among us to give away much of that wealth to charities and churches in order to help the less fortunate among us all.

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Okay, this is just bizarre. Here are my thoughts:

1) Socialism is definitely NOT a "perfectly respectable political philosophy." It's a respectable personal or emotional inclination, but for anyone who has studied history, it is an abhorrent political philosophy. The distinction between personal inclination and political philosophy is very important. For instance, I think everyone should go to Church; that's not the same as thinking that the Church should run the government.

2) He says that Republicans should "get over their timidity and engage in the kind of full-throated public discourse that debates the issues on the merits and calls him what he, objectively, is." What planet has Mr. Joseph been on for the past two years that he thinks (a)conservatives haven't been calling Obama's policies socialist, and (b)this tactic will ever be treated by the Left or the Media as anything other than pure hate-speech?

3) The political and economic system we believe in that "allows people to get rich even as we aggressively encourage the wealthy among us to give away much of that wealth to charities and churches in order to help the less fortunate" is not "a sort of hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism." It's just Capitalism. It would only become Socialism if you replace the words "aggresively encourage" with the words "forcefully coerce under penalty of law," and change "charities and churches" to "government bureaucracy." No wonder this guy thinks Socialism isn't so bad...he obviously has no idea what it actually is.