Bucky Fellini, We presume.

Who said this?

It's not true and we have plenty of socialists here. Social Democrats, like most of the population the many democracies in the industrialized world. George Orwell was a socialist. You didn't think he was a capitalist, did you? How could he be? He was opposed to totalitarianism in all it's forms.

Clinton was a traitor

Monica Lewinsky was a Soviet spy.

and Popeye was a Sailor Man.

---

LWM and WT, appreciate your more sophisticated thinking on parties--I don't know if a third (major) party would help or not, but I'd sure like to see one. These two we have now are killing me.

For myself, I think it might be better to keep the struggle within the two umbrella parties, rather than inflict it on our legislature, which is confused enough already, or dissipate it in a plethora of ideologically pure minority parties whose ideologies prevent them from ever forming an effective governing coalition.

I'm inclined to agree. It's so... Marxian and dialectic.

...It's to our credit, I think, and the country's benefit that we endured it regardless of what it cost us as a party....

In my previous comment. Thanks.

You sound like you could use some cheering up. While I was reading one of your posts earlier, a little woodpecker slammed into the window by my shoulder. It's okay--he has a hard head and went right back to his business.

My tree soon will have many juicy figs. Wish I could share them with you.

Chirp. Tap.

In this country, since we don't have actual Socialists (other than corporatists receiving welfare and possibly Bernie Sanders, although I'm not too sure about the latter), that would have been Repub's and the media.

There is much more at the link below. This does answer your idea the it was the modern MSM and the Repugs. (Not that they would not have done it if they were around then. :-)

There is also a lot that puts lie to the ravings from certain quarters that the Austrian School is not liberalism and libertarians are loons as so forth. (but hey, every movement has the crazies)

A great read --- worth a few minutes of time.

Whether modern liberalism is founded upon the philosophy of classical liberalism is a subject of dispute. Scholar Leonard Liggio (a self-described classical liberal) holds that modern liberalism does not share the same intellectual foundations as classical liberalism. He says,

"Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. Happily they did not capture it in Europe, and were glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are."

He believes that this is why liberalism means something different in Europe from in America.[43] Proponents of the Austrian School and the Chicago School (sometimes called neo-classical economists), such as Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, also reject claims that modern liberalism represents a continuous development from classical liberalism.[44][45] According to Friedman

"Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy. It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable. The catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom. The nineteenth century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisistes of or alternatives to freedom. In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantalism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!"[46]

Neo-classical economists instead see themselves as the true inheritors of classical liberalism. For example, Hayek argued that he was not a conservative because he was a liberal, and had refused to give up that label to what he considered to be modern usurpers.[26]

Joseph Schumpeter stated, "As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label," implying that modern liberals have "stolen" the word and given it a definition opposite its original meaning.

Daniel Yergin, a pulitzer prize winning author, and Joeseph Stanislaw write on the subject of the changed meaning of liberalism in America,

"In the 1920s, the New York Times criticized "the expropriation of the time-honored word 'liberal'" and argued that "the radical red school of thought...hand back the world 'liberal' to its original owners.""[47]

Following from this New York Times criticism, they argue that leading Progressive writers used the word liberal as a "substitute for progresivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt." They also concur with F.A. Hayek view (in his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative") that Franklin Roosevelt adopted the term to "ward off accusations of being left-wing" [with Roosevelt] declaring that liberalism was "plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life."[48]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

Meets Buckminster Fuller

I'd like to have a beer at that table.

Man walking along a road in the countryside comes across a shepherd and a huge flock of sheep. Tells the shepherd, "I will bet you $100 against one of your sheep that I can tell you the exact number in this flock." The shepherd thinks it over; it's a big flock so he takes the bet. "973," says the man. The shepherd is astonished, because that is exactly right. Says "OK, I'm a man of my word, take an animal." Man picks one up and begins to walk away.

"Wait," cries the shepherd, "Let me have a chance to get even. Double or nothing that I can guess your exact occupation." Man says sure. "You are an economist for a government think tank," says the shepherd. "Amazing!" responds the man, "You are exactly right! But tell me, how did you deduce that?"

"Well," says the shepherd, "put down my dog and I will tell you."