Scripsit Ghettoputer:

‘Puter, for one, welcomes the upcoming Obama administration crackdown on free speech. The hypocrisy will make for some great blog fodder.

Sure, until they start shutting down websites (scroll down to “Well, really, it is simple.”). Far-fetched? Canada is well down that road.

Can’t happen here? First Amendment? The One has already attempted to use the Justice Department to silence critics, and he’s not even president yet. Think the Clinton’s were, um, casual in their regard for legal niceties? Even Hillary’s background flirting with the radical left pales in comparison to Obama’s. The father whose “dreams” Obama’s first autobiography is named for was a “scientific socialist” (read: communist); his mother Stanley Dunham was the epitome of a self-hating American who chose to live abroad apart from her son; his grandparents moved to Hawaii because the continental U.S. because of his grandfather’s political alienation from American society; his teenage mentor was his grandfather’s drinking buddy Frank Marshall Davis, a communist; Obama spent his time at college seeking out the far left*; and his adult pre-political career was formed around community organization with groups like ACORN imbued with Saul Alinsky’s Marxist-inspired rhetoric.

Now, there’s some circumstantial evidence that Obama found the ACORN model ineffective and that a lot of his presentation of himself as a left-winger in school (see below) is tinged with irony, recognizing his foibles.

And yet. Bill Ayers’ hiring Obama out of nowhere to run the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; Obama’s twenty years in the pews at a church whose “black liberation theology” explicitly decries assimilation into mainstream society and espouses the villainy of whites; and Obama’s funneling money to radical leftist Fr. Michael Pfleger, etc., all suggest that Obama’s taste for anti-American radicalism remains. A “harmless” nostalgia of his youth, perhaps. Or, more troublingly, an indication that he actually remains convinced of the Marxist/Fanonist critique of “capitalism” and the West. If the latter (and possibly even the former), there’s no chance that Constitutional and legal niceties will bind an Obama Administration from imposing its will. And politically, with a Democratic House and potentially a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, there can be no effective resistance, if Pelosi and Reid are able to whip their members into voting obligingly. Which shouldn’t be that hard, given the leftward shift among Congressional Democrats over the last decade or so. It still amazes that after Clinton’s clinic in how to govern from the center, the hard left has been able to so totally capture the Democratic Party, using a hate campaign against President Bush to conflate American interests with the demonic machinations of an evil Republican cabal. It’s a startling success, in political terms, but one to be lamented by anyone who cares about America as a distinct historical project.

That the press hasn’t even asked these questions of Obama, much less dug up some answers, is a complete indictment of their abandonment of objectivity or neutrality while daintily maintaining its pretext, like a syphilitic prostitute caking on makeup to cover the rash.

Liberalism in America, not so long ago an centrist ideology, has become completely undone by its adherence to post-’60s pas d’ennemi à gauche mood. If Obama and his cohorts are as radical as Obama’s not-so-distant past indicate, it’s possible that under the guise of liberalism, the U.S. may experience its first genuinely, ideologically vicious, left-wing government with no qualms about quashing its opposition (who, after all, are in the grip of “bitter” false consciousness and therefore bad faith if not simply possessed of an evil nature) since the wartime administration of FDR and the dictatorial war socialism of Woodrow Wilson, with the added bonus of an anti-American marxisante attitude.

The Republic will muddle through, but one wonders at what cost.

*“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” Dreams from My Father: 100-101

UPDATE: Yet another hard-left ally surfaces. With Ghettoputer’s favorite words, “social justice,” attached.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.