The online right wing magazine "American Thinker" is to thinking like American cheese is to cheese. Close but not really living up to its name.
Anyway today's article "Obama, Alinsky, and Scapegoats" by James Lewis is an example of the latest uptick in anti-Alinsky memes in the conservative rags.
I've noticed a few more of these articles lately that use Saul Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals as a hook to label all progressive ideals and actions as communist, anti-American,and anti-capitalist. My local newspaper's rather conservative editorial page started a three part Op-Ed series last week with the first one titled "Following Alinsky, is the goal to Deceive?" Interestingly he writes about Alinsky advising all these dangerous people like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Van Jones, and Anita Dunn like its happening today even though he died in 1972. Anyway the writer (local businessman Richard Zawack)is sure that
'His followers have taken over the Democratic Party although many Republicans also are participating in the movement under the guise of Progressivism."
Apparently we are going to eliminate freedom, representative government, free enterprise, democracy, private ownership, individual responsibility and religious faith. Damn, and I thought we progressives (Republican progressives, seriously?) just wanted good government not dominated and bought and paid for by a few Billionaires, international corporations, and religious Dominionists. Similar to the Lewis article characterizing this son of Russian Jews who fled from pogroms
Alinsky did not write his little book of Rules against the Tsar of Russia, nor against mob demagogues in general; rather, he wrote it in a rage against free market wealth, against capitalist individualism, against the prosperous middle class and its most successful home, the United States of America. Alinsky became the hero for other agitators -- people who used to call themselves "communist agitators." Those were not shameful words when little Saul was growing up, they were proud words.
And how does Mr. Zawack see America?:
"Americans have become lazy, inattentive and naive."; "Capitalism is at this moment in disarray. The policies of the government are aimed at its disruption. The ability to create wealth is being destroyed intentionally."
And Mr. Lewis ominously (out of context) quotes Alinsky:
'Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.'
And in his opinion to get a Pakistani Talibani fascisti mob to whip a flirting girl you must
"Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It, and Polarize It. And notice that "the target" is no longer a human being. It's an "It." Try substituting the word "victim" for "target," and you see how it works. This is exactly what the Dixiecrats did to blacks in the Jim Crow South, and what President Obama does today with capitalists who run General Motors and Wall Street."
So Obama is destroying wealth creation by lynching Wall Street and GM? No matter what you believe that is still illegal.
So why this renewed attack on current community organizers and on a revered but long dead practitioner? It may be that the conservative activists want to demonize some of the best techniques progressives have while at the same time borrowing a bastardized version of them for their dirty tricks (ACORN/Landrieu).