. . . when you come across something like this PBS quiz.  They pose you twelve super-generic questions and from that want to tell you how “conservative” or “liberal” you are.

One of the considerations when launching a blog (even before the question, “Who would give a damn anyway?”) has to be the entry-level question of what will I ever think of to write about, on a daily or more frequent basis?  The law of ideal gases applies outside the laboratory, after all.  We’ve now got — what? — 500-odd television channels, yet you can wear out both thumbs trying to find something on worth watching, unless you short-circuit the process and go to a channel where all they do is run old stuff.  If you’re willing to confine yourself to perusing distillations of the very best of 60 years of television and the very best of 80 years of movies then yes, you probably can find something to watch.  But if you want something new, something fresh?  The same amount of quality has expanded to fill a vastly increased space, with the result that the individual molecules are that much farther apart.  And if all those tens of thousands of people in Entertainment, who have years’ experience and billions of dollars of money washing about the industry, cannot reliably come up with something that a person of average-or-better intelligence would pay attention to except under compulsion, what is the likelihood that a lone blogger, somewhere between keeping the office doors open, the pantry reasonably stocked, the clothes washed, homework done, supper cooked, and the dishes washed, will be able to do it?  Daunting, I think was the word Jeeves told me it was.

And then along comes PBS and serves up a meatball like this idiot quiz.  Seven of the twelve questions relate to what are economic matters.  One is asked to agree or disagree, or somewhere in between, with statements like, “Business corporations make too much profit.”  Other than the drunk-on-a-barstool nature of the statement itself (one is involuntarily reminded of Grandpa Simpson’s complaint that, “There are too many states these days!”), can anyone spot the fallacy in weighting the answer?

Right:  It’s the assumption that completely disagreeing with the statement is a “conservative” position.

Disappointingly predictable is the PBS Marxist assumption that free markets are somehow “conservative.”   Nothing could be farther from the truth.  You cannot “conserve” anything, anything at all, once you concede freedom to people to house, clothe, and feed themselves by their own efforts, talents, and luck. Freedom has never produced an hereditary nobility, or an NKVD, or party-machine politics, or crony capitalism, or tariff walls, or Berlin Walls, or cartels, or any of the other structures, systems, and habits the effect (and it’s the effect that matters, dear children, not the intent) of which is stasis of human achievement, growth, fulfillment, or prosperity. 

The supposition that free markets are inherently monopolistic, inherently retrogressive, inherently oppressive is an idea that traces straight back to Karl Marx, one of the most economically illiterate writers who ever should have had his thumbs lopped before he found his way to the ink well.  Marx’s ideas stood in diametric opposition to, and were contemporaneous with, the movements which repealed the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts in Britain.  Both of those latter movements were hailed, and rightly so, by the great masses of Britons as being enormously liberating, enormously empowering, and greatly to their own advantage.

Every socio-politico-economic arrangement in history you can name which has had the effect of entrenching some to the detriment of others has come into existence and endured solely because it enlisted the coercive power of government to maintain itself.  Chattel slavery could never have existed without government’s enforcement of it, both by way of things like the fugitive slave laws and by dragooning the locals, slave-owning or not, into slave patrols.  For years the ICC permitted railroads to charge higher freight rates out of the South than into it, with the result that products of the South operated at an additional disadvantage relative to their northern competitors.  Sugar is as expensive as it is here not because it’s unavoidably expensive to produce, but because the government forbids us to buy foreign-produced sugar, which is much cheaper than what can be grown this far north, as cheaply as it can be produced and got here (in fact, it was the Big Boss of the largest U.S. sugar company who was on the telephone with Bill Clinton while Monica Lewinsky was fellating Clinton in the Oval Office).  Railroad cartels arose not because there was something inherently monopolistic about them, but because you can’t build a railroad without the power of eminent domain.  If the cartel owns the legislature what do you think the odds of securing that power to a railroad that doesn’t agree to become part of the cartel?  The Schechter Poultry case arose because a couple of kosher butchers (hence their name) violated the National Recovery Act’s prohibition that customers . . . wait for it:  be allowed to choose their own chicken to be slaughtered for their own damned dinner table.  There were also then pending prosecutions for failing to charge the minimum price for a pair of trousers.  Wickard v. Filburn affirmed the proposition that government can forbid you to feed your own family from the produce of your own land, if doing so will enable you not to buy from the industries who dominate the legislature.  And so forth.  The Consumer Financial Protection Board, acting under Dodd-Frank, is set fair to annihilate your community bank’s ability to continue offering home mortgages.  The compliance costs will crush them, the liability for non-compliance will destroy them.  So if you want to concentrate the home lending market into even fewer hands, too-big-to-fail hands, just wait it bit.  And if your community bank can’t make home loans, in 20 years there will be scarcely any left.  The Local Banker, who has been a not-always-loved fixture of the American scene for 200-plus years, will go the way of the dinosaurs, and for the same reason.  The planet that both inhabited will have been hit by some external disruption that wipes out the environment they live in, at a stroke.  The only difference is that no one chose to aim an asteroid at the earth 65 million years ago.

It was the genius of the constitutional framers in 1787 that the document they wrote denied the ability to federal government to shackle the people to entrenched powers. To the extent we have forgot that and permitted the federal government to impinge on our freedoms — whether the ICC in the 1800s, or Roosevelt’s NRA in the 1930s, or today’s CFPB and its 60,000-odd regulations — we have done nothing more than cement in power the haves, and assured the have-nots that they have naught better to hope for than crumbs from the table.

What we have-nots will be left with is the pork barrel.  And here is appropriate a bit of history.  The expression “pork barrel” to refer to the scramble for bits of money, power, and perks from the government first arose back in the 1800s.  Back during the days of gang labor.  Back during the days of slave labor.  It referred to the actual, physical barrels of salt pork which were typically the slave’s only or at least primary source of animal protein (except for chickens they might have been permitted to keep, or what they could steal from Massa’s smokehouse).  It was miserable stuff, mostly fat anyway, and of course eaten with maggots.  The meat of it was hard as a rock (it was, in short, the same stuff we fed sailors in the navy).  The expression “pork barrel” came into use to describe the scramble for money because approximately the same scene unfolded when a new pork barrel was opened in the slaves’ presence.  If you wanted a halfway decent piece to take back to your cabin so that maybe tonight your children would not go to sleep quite as hungry, then by God you saw to it that your hand got in that barrel first.

The pork barrel, in sum, was what you offered your slaves periodically.

PBS and its masters have once again betrayed just how deeply they have drunk from an essentially Marxist well of thought.  For them freedom is threatening.  For them freedom is oppressive.  For them freedom is an active impediment to the achievement of the workers’ and peasants’ paradise on earth. 

In fact freedom is corrosive. You cannot be either “conservative” or leftist and permit freedom, because (with apologies to Winston Groom) freedom is in fact like a box of chocolates. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.

I can’t recall who it was who first observed that fascism is always descending on America, but always landing on Europe.  Certainly that’s been the case up until now.  Our most recent assurances that fascism was on its way was during the Bush administration, when the hand-wringers at the NYT and those like them were just convinced that the administration’s monitoring international cross-border communications among known terrorist affiliates was somehow the foundation stone of a new chain of concentration camps — one coming soon to a neighborhood near you — and bearing the smiling face of Bushitler over the gates.  These hand-wringers would be the same crew who haven’t weighed in much about Dear Leader’s assertion that he has the right — unilaterally and secretly — to promulgate a kill list disposition matrix under which anyone in the world outside the U.S., including U.S. citizens, may be blasted to shreds of meat by a missile fired from a lazily-circling drone.

But what do I know?

The ominous quotation from this article about Golden Dawn, Greece’s nascent and increasingly fashionable fascist party, comes from the fellow — an MP for Golden Dawn — who allows, “Most nations, well, not the US or Australia, have a single nationality that defines its culture and Greece must return to this ideal.  The Golden Dawn is a very well organised party that is intervening to support and help people. Without us in a country where two million of ten million people are illegal, there would be chaos.” 

Some years ago I read a book by Ludwig von Mises (can’t recall the title any more, alas) in which he identifies as the point where Europe began the course change which pointed it towards the rocks of the 20th Century that point at which became common currency the idea that each linguistic group needed to be gathered into one polity purged of other linguistic groups.  At that time, of course, we had two — actually, three — enormous polyglot empires in Europe, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian.  Each of their dozens of native languages, in many cases fragmented across the map, had sullenly chafed under distant monarchs for centuries.  But then pretty much everyone chafed under monarchies for centuries, when you get right down to it.  The German-speaking serf in 18th Century Austria was neither in better nor worse shape than his Polish- or Hungarian-speaking counterpart in the 19th Century . . . or the 14th.  The wheels began to loosen on their hubs when someone whispered in his great-grandchild’s ear that it was an outrage not so much that he was a peasant but that he had all these Czechs cluttering up the place.  To say nothing of all those filthy Joooooosssss.  And so forth.

How deeply that idea took root we got to see when the restraining forces of the monarchies crumbled with the end of the Great War.  The fistful of nation-states that sprang into existence in Central Europe were not creations of the peace-making process; they were called into being by whichever dominant ethnic group happened to live there and by the time of the Paris Conference in 1919 they were facts on the ground that could not be ignored.  What didn’t change, however, was the geographic distribution of the groups within those new states.  Every single successor state had within its borders large numbers of language groups which had — from their perspective, at least — only traded dominance by some lantern-jawed Habsburg or nitwit Romanov or strutting and puffing Hohenzollern for dominance by the People’s Party of Whatever-the-Hell majority ethnic group happened to have seized the levers of power in the neighborhood.

In short, they all had the Minorities Problem, only this time the groups’ jealousies and resentments had the blessing of America’s first quasi-fascist national politician, Woodrow Wilson, and his pernicious doctrine of “self-determination.”  For all his posturing as a Deep Thinker and Mr. Cosmos himself in the flesh, Wilson like any other human could not see the world from any frame of reference other than his own.  Of course everyone ought to have the right of “self-determination,” because it had worked so well in the U.S.  Everyone pretty much rubbed along (well, except for that lynching thing across the South and up into Indiana, which Wilson really doesn’t seem to have had much problem accepting) and whether it was the Tammany Democrats or the Boston Brahmins in charge at any particular moment, we all more or less agreed on the rules of the game and we’d self-determined to throw in together.  Hell’s bells; we’d even fought a civil war that decided once and for all that we really had thrown in together and for keeps.

So what could go wrong with transplanting that notion of “self-determination” onto an ethnic mosaic the forms of which had begun to coalesce with the latter days of the Western Roman Empire (there’s a reason “Romania” is nowhere near Italy, guys) and the massive migrations of the next few hundred years?  The Sudeten Germans who had migrated to Bohemia beginning in the 1300s and by the 1900s comprised around a quarter of the total population of ancient Bohemia were simply among the more prominent groups — and more pregnant with mischief.  The Sorbians, a Germanic people who spoke a Slavic language, and who gave names to such places as Drežhdany — “forest swamp dwellers” — which we now know as Dresden, were among the lesser.  Toss in several million Roma and Sinti, Ruthenians, Slovenians, Rumelians, Bulgars, Croats, Ukrainians, and millions upon millions of Jews (Wilson’s high-falutin’ principles don’t seem to have applied to them), mix them in with several centuries’ worth of genuine grievance and several generations of demagoguery, and you’d think anyone with more than just walking-around sense would expect something along the lines of what actually happened.

But not Wilson.  To understand how disastrous Wilson’s influence on history was, you have to understand how nearly universally admired the United States was back then, even among people who couldn’t stand Americans because we were . . . well, we acted like Americans.  [One of my favorite Twain passages is from The Innocents Abroad, in which he describes some American in a Paris restaurant loudly proclaiming himself a “free-born sovereign, sir,” an American, who never dined without wine, sir, and so forth; Twain observed that he failed to mention that he was also a “lineal descendant of Balaam’s ass, but we all knew that without his saying so.”]  When Wilson spoke he did so not as some momentarily-successful politician.  When Wilson spoke he gave words, specific words, to an abstract and idealized Promised Land, a secular Zion for the Gentiles, which millions of people all over Europe looked up to.  Many of them had family members, fellow villagers, friends, or fellow parishioners who had crossed the oceans and sung the praises of the Land of Unlimited Opportunity in writing.  When Wilson began to bloviate it was the same as if in ancient Rome the massive statue of Capitoline Jove had in fact opened its mouth and said, “So let it be done.”

Had Lloyd George or Clemençeau blathered about a bunch of “self-determination,” it would have swirled about the floor a few times then gone right down the drain.  Wilson gave the idea the sanction of Idealized America.

After World War II, that is, after the next round in the fight which Versailles made if not inevitable then something which only phenomenal luck could have avoided, Central Europe solved a large measure of its Minorities Problem.  The minorities got their country asses kicked out, is what happened, frequently on twelve hours’ or less notice.  Ox carts full of possessions (and frequently pulled by their owners, the animals in the span long since having dropped dead or vanished into a cooking pot somewhere along the line), parents slogging along loaded down with pathetic bundles, filthy, emaciated children in tow, their faces bearing the pole-axed look that only violated innocence can show, the corpses of those who could no longer keep up lining the road sides: all those were part of the landscape in 1945-46.  Who has counted the loss?  Who has measured the suffering?  Who today traces the psychic scars of those savage adjustments on the survivors and their descendants?

The EU is no more exempt from the Law of Unintended Consequences than is any other human undertaking.  Its intentional obliteration of barriers to human movement has encouraged exactly that.  And with it is returning the Minorities Problem.  Whether it’s “illegals” in Greece or cheap Polish labor flooding Germany (won’t someone please explain to Germany that fixing their demographic issues is fun?  I mean, guys, c’mon, you’ve got a statistically irrefutable mandate to hop in the sack as frequently as you can and with as little precaution as possible; so shuck them clothes and Get it On), or the Islamization of wide areas of ancient European cities, the tide is setting towards the rocks, once again.

Pray God we may not see Europe visited with Wilson’s legacy once more.

. . . being in the tasting, in evaluating the relative merits of the two visions of the citizen-state relationship on offer this coming Tuesday, might we not with profit ask ourselves:  From which of the two systems are people most intimate with it willing to endure the greatest hazards to escape it?

Exhibit A:  China is having a hard time holding on to precisely those people which it must, absolutely must, keep as willing participants in the great adventure that is China if it is to continue to flourish.

Exhibit B:  The Antifaschistische Schutzmauer, better known over here as the Berlin Wall, which up to 200 people died trying to cross between its 1961 construction and its 1989 breach (this ignores those shot elsewhere along the border between the two Germanies).

Exhibit C:  The periodic waves of people fleeing Castro’s Cuba.

You know, I’m not a Deep Thinker, and certainly not one of them Sophisticated Northeasterners, and so I tend to ask real damned simple questions, and to weigh the answers accordingly.  But I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that if large numbers of people are willing to throw everything they’ve ever worked for overboard, if they’re willing to risk being shot, if they’re willing to consign their nearest loved ones staying behind to prison (if they’re lucky), just in order to escape your system . . . then you might ought to think real hard about whether you need to change how you do things.

Forty-eight years ago today, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater.  The speech has become known as “A Time for Choosing.”

 Listen to the speech.  Listen to all of it.  Speeches which have any sort of historical legs all seem to share one attribute:  You can listen to them, or read them, decades, generations later, in some cases centuries, and they still read fresh.  The ideas and the concerns and the hopes they capture transcend the verities of the moment.  From Washington’s Farewell to Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne to the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, through to Churchill’s Beaches and Finest Hour:  They are all immediate to us now.

We still struggle with the problems brought by entangling foreign alliances; we watch what happens when men who deny any God higher than themselves assume the helm of state.  The fact of union, from out of many lands and peoples, and what that means for the hope of the world, is at the very center of gravity of civilization.  We forever exhort ourselves to grant this last, best hope of the earth a new birth of freedom, and highly resolve that our honored dead shall not have died in vain.  As we struggle over whether to depose blood-soaked tyrants half a world away, and as we fondly hope and fervently pray that the scourge of war may quickly pass from us, we still try to balance a heart bearing malice towards none and charity for all against that necessary firmness in the right, as (we hope) God gives us to see the right, that will permit us to finish the great work we are in.  And when we are attacked, we vow that we shall fight our enemies every step of the way, from behind every fence, every shop building, in every ditch and at every creek and river crossing.  We hope that when our remote descendants examine us under the cold, unforgiving light of history, knowing then what we cannot know now, they will say of us that ours was the finest hour (although we’d be mighty proud if we never are asked to prove it up).

I don’t mean to suggest that Reagan achieved the towering heights of Lincoln or Churchill.  I am no student of rhetoric, but I do question whether snippets of his will still be part of our civil DNA 100 years hence.  What I do mean to suggest is that in much the same matter-of-fact voice of Washington, he outlined for us the choices presenting themselves to us, and that his foresight of these choices and his description of them and their portent is in its own way every bit as prescient as Washington’s in 1796.  Here then, is Ronald Reagan in 1964, almost twenty years before he dared Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall: 

. . . That is, the Sinti and Roma, which we English-speakers describe as “Gypsies”?

The horror of the Holocaust sometimes burns so blazingly bright that it destroys our ability to understand that the Jews were not the only group consigned to death by the Nazis.  The homosexuals of course were done to death as and when caught (OK, it’s impossible not to note that the fellow who composed “Des Großen Kurfürsten Reitermarsch,” Graf Cuno von Moltke, came from the same family which provided the commander who defeated France in 1870, and also the same fellow who dropped dead before the kaiser while wearing a ballerina’s costume), and of course the mentally handicapped were dispatched as “useless feeders.”

When one thinks of Nazis, one thinks of Jews.  Properly, by the way.

But the Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi genocide.  So also were the Gypsies, like the Jews the Eternal Other, the People Who Do Not Belong.  The people who wherever their camps were pitched were to that extent convenient objects to load up with blame for whatever misfortune happened to plague the neighborhood that year.  They died, but unlike the Jews they have had no wealthy, influential kinsmen in other lands to rub our noses in their degradation and death. 

Jewry’s dispersal, the Diaspora, was not only their curse but also their salvation.  To kill them all one must first lay hands upon them, and when they have sunk roots deep in the soil of the United States, which is quite capable and willing to dole out such ass-whippings as may be necessary to warn off the aspirations of ambitious princes (to borrow, imperfectly, from Gibbon), their complete eradication is not possible.  But the Gypsies didn’t come to the U.S.  They stayed in Europe.  Where Hitler found them.

Mourn them, as well as the other victims.  Promise their survivors that we will not stand aside once again.

True to his Chekist personal heritage, Putin arranges for contact with foreign NGOs to be punished as high treason and/or espionage, if those organizations “endanger the security of Russia.”  The existing law makes reference to the “external security” of the country; the new law ominously omits the foreign security nexus.

Russian politicians who are neither in Putin’s pocket nor frustrated latter-day Stalinists agree that the omission of the foreign security criterion will enable contact with foreign organizations which cause purely internal political problems to be classified as high treason and espionage.

Don’t think it will happen?  It has, already.  Most of the Red Army purges of 1937-38 were on the nominal basis of collaboration with foreign intelligence networks.  The Harbinisty, those Russians who had gone to live in China to work on the China branch line of the trans-Siberian railroad, were lured back home, only to be slaughtered almost to a man.  Their “crime”?  Acting as Japanese spies.  And on.  And on.  And on.  The allegation of foreign intelligence collaboration/agency was one of the NKVD’s top three charges to paste on an arrestee, right up there with “counter-revolutionary activity” and “counter-revolutionary agitation.”  Of course, the latter two also came with the “Trostkyite” sub-flavor.  And so forth.

And this is the fellow to whom Dear Leader has promised “more flexibility” after the November elections.

Fars News Agency is reporting that Dear Leader has “recognized” Iran’s “nuclear rights.”  What precisely that’s supposed to mean is not terribly clear from the article.  The article cites only a “parliamentary” source for the statement, but then again coming from a place like Iran I’d have to imagine that parliamentarians don’t just go talking out of school.

What is also interesting is the route by which this recognition was conveyed.  Apparently we handed the message to the Swiss (who attend to such affairs in Iran as the U.S. has left), who then passed it on.

There was also the quickly-denied and quietly-air-brushed report that Dear Leader is making good on his campaign pledge to pursue direct talks with Iran, without pre-conditions.

What gives?  It’s impossible for anyone with even a nodding familiarity with the history of Europe in the 1930s not to see the parallels between this developing situation and 1938.  Once Chamberlain and the French had conceded legitimacy to Germany’s demand for the Sudeten Germans, the game was effectively over.  Ceding the Sudetenland to Germany not only gave away Czechoslovakia’s principal line of defense; in fact it made the balance of the country indefensible.  The Sudeten Germans had never, ever, lived under a “German” ruler, or in a “German” state.  They’d always belonged to the Bohemian crown.  Their claim that they wanted to go “heim ins Reich” was as transparent a fraud as has ever been made.

But the fraud was enough for Chamberlain, who was desperate to do something, anything, rather than face down Hitler.  The French were likewise eager to suffer any indignity rather than man up and defend a country which was their formal ally (France had an actual treaty with Czechoslovakia which obliged it to come the latter’s defense; at least Britain wasn’t selling out an actual ally).  Grasping back to Wilson’s alleged principle of “self-determination,” they cynically sold out the one country bordering Hitler’s Germany that could have put a whipping on him.

The key point was reached when they conceded any legitimacy at all to the German claim.  Once you admit that the other guy is right, you really don’t have much to stand on publicly, other than expedience, and if you’ve conditioned  your public to perceive surrender as expedient, you’ve come to the end of the game.

Let’s be honest where Dear Leader has put us.  We have conceded the moral right to Iran to pursue nuclear weapons.  I’m sure that paragon of candor, Susan Rice, will assure us that the “rights” extend only to “peaceful uses,” such as nuclear power, but there is absolutely zero indication that any of Iran’s nuclear program has ever been oriented towards peaceful purposes.  Having made that concession, how do we appear before the Security Council and demand even the continuance, let alone the increase, in any sanction against Iran?  How?

Iran has announced, repeatedly, its intention to obliterate the state of Israel from the map.  We have now admitted its right to do so.  When you validate a man’s possession of a tool, how do you deny him the use of it, especially the use he has announced as his principal intended use?

Tonight we will have another “debate” between Dear Leader and Mitt Romney.  I do trust that whoever it is that puts words in Dear Leader’s mouth for him will not think “Peace in our Time” is a good campaign slogan to take into the final days of the race.

It’s remarkable, really, how up-front would-be totalitarians are about their goals.  Whatever can be said about its indigestibility as writing, Hitler was utterly frank in Mein Kampf about precisely what he intended to do.  He then went out and did it.  The Russian communists spelled out the terror they intended to unleash, and then did so.  And the Muslim Brotherhood, the outfit which occasions Dear Leader such “relief” that they’re finally in charge in Egypt, is equally forthcoming about where they’re headed.

From an article in yesterday’s The International, we read, “The MB is both a political and social movement that advocates moving away from secularism and toward a political and civil society that is organized by the principles outlined in the Qur’an, including the implementation of Shariah law.

“Louay M. Safi wrote an article for The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences in which he describes Shariah law as, ‘a comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences. It is not simply a legal system, but rather a composite system of law and morality.’

“Shariah law regulates and guides all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene and is meant to provide a guide for all things concerning morality.”

Got that?  It’s a “comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences.”  And “political and civil society” is to be “organized” according to its principles.  There’s a name for that, folks — totalitarianism.  I believe it was Solzhenitsyn who observed that in the Soviet Union even sleep became politicized.  Under Shariah, “all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene” are to be “regulated” by whatever someone else determines to be the law, based upon precepts articulated for a desert society of robber-shepherds 1,400 years ago.  Sandra Flake seems to believe that a third party refusing to pay for her birth control is just the World’s Most Intolerable Oppression of her and her lady parts; I’m sure she’d do so much better under Shariah.

We’re supposed to be reassured, though:  “Whilst emerging as a political force in the Islamic world, the Muslim Brotherhood has also actively engaged in a number of public works and charity projects. They have run banks, schools, hospitals, social clubs and facilities for the disabled, while at the same time adhering to principles of transparency and accountability.”  Repeat after me, chillerns:  Autobahnen; Kraft durch Freude; Winterhilfe; Bund deutscher Mädel, Hitlerjugend.  Shirer has an entire chapter on the nazification of everyday German life in the 1930s.  The Soviets likewise “engaged in a number of public works projects,” like the Baltic-White Sea Canal, a.k.a. Belomor, which cost only several hundred thousand lives, and no one could run banks, schools, hospitals, and social clubs quite like the NKVD.  Why, they even had an entire sub-system within Gulag for children, including children born in the camps.  Isn’t that heart-warming?

We’re also comforted to find out that the Brotherhood is committed to attaining power through the trappings of democratic processes.  We are not encouraged to recall that Hitler was the lawfully appointed and serving Reichskanzler, and the Ermächtigungsgesetz — the Enabling Act — which handed over more or less unbridled power to him, was a lawfully enacted statute, permitted by their constitution.  How’d that work out, again?

This is the outfit whose ascendancy our current administration applauds.  This is the outfit one of whose leading families has now placed a member — a family member who was actively engaged in the Brotherhood’s American propaganda arm — at the right hand of the Secretary of State.

But don’t worry, ladies.  This election is about how them Rethuglicans is a-comin’ after your lady parts.