Posted on 01/09/2010 9:09:37 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
...Romney’s argument with the Iowa talk-radio host starts with the two discussing their shared affinity for W. Cleon Skousen. “You and I share a common affection for the late Cleon Skousen,” the radio host says. The former governor agrees, affirming Skousen was his professor."
Who is Cleon Skousen you might ask? In answering that question, it’s hard to even know where to begin. Skousen was by turns an FBI employee, the police chief of Salt Lake City, a Brigham Young University professor, consigliore to former secretary of agriculture and Mormon president Ezra Taft Benson and, well, all-around nutjob.
Skousen was active with the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s, even going so far as to write another book titled The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, accusing those that criticized Birchers as promoting Communism.
Skousen’s Communist paranoia may have reached it’s apotheosis in 1970 when the Mormon church and BYU in particular began receiving a tremendous amount of external pressure to change the church’s policy on denying the Mormon priesthood to blacks. Skousen, then a professor at BYU, published an article entitled “The Communist Attack on the Mormons” and noted that critics were employing Communist tactics which were “distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.” The Mormon Church reversed course on its discriminatory practices in 1978 and began ordaining black men to the priesthood.
..."I sincerely doubt that Mitt Romney believes anything near as outlandish as many of the things Cleon Skousen espoused, and to be fair Skousen wrote on numerous topics with wildly varying degrees of intellectual sobriety."
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
The comparison of apples to oranges is so beyond inane that it moots your post. The National Association of Man Boy Love Alliance (or whatever NAMBLA is) are rotten oranges; the Birchers are crisp, tart apples.
I don't know much about the Birch Society, but I do know empty emotional knee-jerk straw-man comparisons when I see them. They're like a compass being off a few degrees -- the end result is thousands of miles off target. If yours is the mindset that deplores the JBS, then I'm automatically inclined to lean toward the position that the JBS might not be as bad as you say.
Romney was educated at Harvard Business School, the same place all the slick, corporate execs who helped lead us into this economic mess we are in and who have put us into debt for bailing THEM out received their training.
He was also Valedictorian at Brigham Young University, the same place many great conservatives come from.
Again, talking points.
Be it apples or oranges, there can be no dispute that NAMBLA are a bunch of fruits.
indeed, the NAMBLA people are in the same category as polygamists with minor-aged “wives.”
I’m done posting to you.
I know that JBS had their share of crackpots. But go back a couple of decades, and see them in context in their time.
There was no internet. There was no talk radio. There was only the news outlets who refused to cover the soviet penetration of the government, the universities, the entertainment and news media, it was going on but no one would cover it.
Anyone who tried was dismissed as a “McCarthyite”. Keep in mind that since the Venona papers we know that McCarthy was telling the truth... but you wouldn’t know that even to this day if all you had was the straight press.
That was the void that JBS tried to fill, and that frustration at seeing what was happening, and being unable to draw any attention to it, all you could do was scream and no one hears.
They had their share of crazies, they attacked some stalwarts in the conservative movement who refused to take on some of their causes. Sound familiar? We do the same thing ourselves, we go after conservatives who won’t move on the birth certificate issue, we go after the rinos, and with good reason, but not everyone is going to agree with anyone on everything.
They were an embarrassment partly because some of the things they said were over the top, but they were also an embarrassment because they were out there largely all alone in calling attention to communist penetration of every one of our institutions. We see it now, and we see the communists reaping the harvest they have prepared for all these decades. The interlocking networks that put O in the White House and sustain him there, ACORN, the unions, Tides Foundation, all Soros’s fake foundations, JBS called it. Sometimes they were jerks about it, but they called it.
We need to relearn history. McCarthy was right. They destroyed him just the way they will try to destroy any of us if we get too outspoken. They tried to do the same thing to Judge Thomas, and Bork, look what they did to GW for eight years and he’s not even a conservative. If you get your news from the straight press you haven’t got a clue what is happening. Now we’ve got FR and Limbaugh. In the fifties and sixties, all we had was Buckley for the high brows and JBS digging dirt on the baddies.
They were doing in the fifties what basically FR and Beck are doing in the new millenium. Some of them were crazy but look around you. Some of us are crazy too. That doesn’t make the other side right.
off topic,
question once again, personal experience with jbs?Beyond internet?
It is a good basic book on the Constitution. They used it as text for the federal lands conferences back in the early 1990s.
“If I subscribed to the Bircher vision of an omnipresent conspiracy pulling every string and commanding every leader in the never ending plot to (redundantly) take over the world I don’t know why I’d bother with politics at all. What would be the point?”
With respect, have you read-up much on the major communist players over the last century?
We do indeed have enemies and some are indeed communists. They know they cannot take us down in a conventional war so they have, over the decades, spent much time, money, effort, and human life searching for ways to dominate.
Is that too far fetched?
The KGB spent 15% of its resources on spying, the rest went towards subversion.
The worst thing we could do is fool ourselves into believing that communism (the hard-left) died with the Soviet Union. I assure you, they did not.
Just take a long hard look at your government right this minute and you will see many working against the fundamentals of the US—precisely the same way communists would work against our way of life.
Of course they wouldn’t call themselves anything resembling “communist.” And they can’t drive tanks down Pennsylvania Ave., with hordes of goose-stepping soldiers.
But they could slowly change our direction, couldn’t they? They could work towards collectivizing health care, crushing business/capitalism with intense taxation and regulation (cap ‘n trade), and turn us against each other, more and more, etc.
Call me crazy, if it serves your denial. But they are working locally, nationally, and internationally to bring us under their thumb.
Do you think “global warming” or “climate change” is about the environment?
One thing that might throw you off is how the hard-left is enlisting capitalists to further their cause. It appears to be corporate greed, and it is, but it is being used and manipulated by the hard-left.
Unprincipled capitalists are the new “useful idiots.” If you can get your enemy to willfully assist you in destroying them, then why not?
“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” — Norman Thomas (1884-1968) six-time U.S. Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America
Keep in mind, socialism is but a temporary transitional mechanism by which a capitalist system is converted to a communist system.
If the “socialists” (useful idiots) manage to dominate the US (we would have become an extremely weak country by then), the war is then between them and the real-deal communists.
Guess who wins that one?
___________________________________________________________
This is one way to look at all that is happening right now.
Got a better explanation?
I have several friends involved with “Campaign for Liberty” and who were Ron Paul supporters since before it became “cool.” They are also staunchly anti-interventionist and while not anti-semititic, are weary of American favoritism toward Israel in foreign policy. I haven’t spoken to any of them about JBS specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are strong sympathizers or even members. That’s why I clarified that while I am sure many JBS members are true patriots with the right intentions and the right view of the Constitution, itit doesn’t change the fact that its legacy is tainted or that too many other of its members are blatant racists or anti-semites.
“If you can get your enemy to willfully assist you in destroying them, then why not?”
I meant to add: (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, “sub-prime” loans, etc.)
Anyone who can't support his candidacy knowing capitalism is on the line is just stupider than dirt.
Hey, Jim, you (and I) are "stupider than dirt". LOL
All, I can go on is my personal experience with what I guess would be the mainstream Birchers,we were never ,ever taught racism,or brought up to be anti anything,except for the Federal Government,I was taught the Jeffersonian belief a government big enough to give,is a government big enough to take(I left out a few words)
So I guess my point would be,self reliance,not conspiracies,Well let me rethink that last statement!
Translation: You can't answer the question honestly, so you go straight to the insults.
You lose! :)
“The former governor agrees, affirming Skousen was his professor.”
This makes him a nut?
BTW, that link/info is dated August 6, 2007.
And?
Who are you supporting? The Democrat or the Libertarian?
To compare a group with an anti-communist political agenda to a group with a sexually perverted homosexual agenda involving men and boys was the insult -- to my intelligence and to yours.
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