The recent film by Agnieszka Holland, Mr. Jones, portrays the Soviet Russians’ attempt in the 1930s — with the assistance of sympathetic Western journalists like Walter Duranty — to cover up the famine caused by collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. The film is a heart-wrenching and damning account of the Soviet experiment — and of the dishonesty that enabled it.
And yet, 87 years after Gareth Jones showed the world the crimes of socialism, there are still Western enablers who engage in a different kind of coverup of the same facts. As a result, a growing number of young people consider themselves socialists, and socialist politicians have risen in prominence. One was almost nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States.
It is only thirty years since socialist regimes collapsed economically around the globe, leaving in their wake a death toll of tens of millions. We have seen the same pattern repeated in Venezuela in only the last twenty years. How do today’s defenders of socialism try to cover up this history and justify the ideology that supported such murderous regimes?
One tactic that today’s socialists employ is to portray the lessons of history and world affairs as irrelevant to their cause. They claim that the Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Cuba, and today’s regime in Venezuela are not real examples of socialism at all. Real socialism, you may have heard them say, has never been tried.
What makes people think this is true? What do they mean by “socialism” and is their view even plausible?
What is “socialism”?
Socialism, in a standard definition, means public ownership of the means of production, which implies the abolishing of private property and ending the capitalist system of free trade and free markets. This is often understood to mean state ownership of the means of production.
By that standard, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other authoritarian regimes all count as “socialist”: in every case, insurgents seized control of governments which then expropriated private farms, factories and shops from their capitalist owners — many of whom lost not only their property, but their lives. What’s more, these insurgents were led by figures (Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc.) that were explicitly committed to socialist ideology.
The economic failure, famine, and bloodshed suffered by each of these countries flowed directly from the same policies advocated by today’s socialists. Just as socialists demand, businesses were torn from the hands of their creators, those who both knew how to produce and who had a personal financial stake in improving their ability to produce. These businesses were then managed by bureaucrats who lacked both of these qualifications, and who also lacked the tool of the free market pricing system to calculate how much of which goods to produce. Production decisions were determined not with an eye to creating value above cost, but to the demands of arbitrary edicts from central planners. It is no accident that this system created shortages and starvation, and that regimes had to crush the resulting dissent to retain power.
Socialists try to insulate the system they advocate from this evidence of failure by using a talking point that (as we shall see) they have used since the beginning of their movement. They put a spin on the “public ownership of the means of production” definition. Real socialism, they say, doesn’t mean state control of the economy; it means control by “the people,” especially by the workers.
For instance, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto, claims that real socialism means “democratic” control of the workplace by worker collectives. He claims that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a socialist society because it did not involve democratic control.1 Likewise, Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs and author of Why You Should Be a Socialist, claims that, for similar reasons, none of the authoritarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century were socialist, and claims to “hate government and capitalism alike.”2 Richard Wolff, who has been described as “America’s most prominent Marxist economist,” agrees.3 He argues that the Soviet Union was really an example of “state capitalism”: while the nominally socialist party controlled the state, the state was “still capitalist in the employer-employee organization of its economy” because “a minority of persons . . . [the central planners] functioned as employers of an employee majority.”4
Using their definition of “socialism,” these thinkers would have us believe that since state control of the economy is not control by “the people,” no full-scale socialist political system has ever existed in history. If true, this would allow them to excuse their ideology from any responsibility for the murder and oppression of the brutal, allegedly “socialist” systems of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. It also allows them to pose as the torchbearers of a noble ideal that has simply been corrupted by political operators of the past.
Is there any plausibility to the claim that “socialism” doesn’t really mean state control of the economy, but something else? Are today’s socialists really envisioning a wholly new system than what the revolutionaries of the past actually implemented? Or are they simply playing games with the word “socialism” to avoid the obvious facts?
Fantasy speculation about the role of the state
Not everyone proposing a novelty is indulging in fantasy. A newly envisioned invention, like an airplane, can be based on known facts about birds, kites, and gliders. But even then, experiments are needed to prove the efficacy of the idea. And if the proposal is, say, a perpetual motion machine, which has no experimental basis and goes against the laws of physics, the proposal is selling a fantasy.
Although the proposal that “real” socialism doesn’t require the use of state power might sound new or innovative to the uninitiated, a few questions and a little knowledge of history are sufficient to show it is just as much a fantasy as a perpetual motion machine.
First, note that the socialists paper over the coercion and even violence that would obviously need to happen to expropriate private property from peaceful citizens to set up their system in the first place. (The mask drops when they start advocating “lawbreaking and sabotage” as worthy tactics in revolutionary social change.5) By itself this calls into question any assertion that socialism can be implemented without bloodshed: socialist ends cannot be detached from socialist means.
But even if we could imagine that private property holders were simply persuaded to give up their holdings peacefully, the notion that the ideal socialist system would work without coercion or oppression is hard to imagine, if it is even coherently meaningful to begin with. Consider Richard Wolff’s explanation for how a system of worker co-ops would gradually wean itself from the need for a state:
An economy based on worker co-ops would revolutionize the relationship between the state and the people. In their capacity as a self-employed collectivity, workers would occupy the spot traditionally held by the workplace in state-workplace relations and interactions. . . . The workers would collectively and democratically hold the purse strings to which the state would have to appeal. The state would thus depend on citizens and workers rather than the other way around. . . . The state would have fewer ways and means to impose its own momentum and goals upon citizens or workplaces. To that extent, the state’s “withering away” would become more immediately achievable than in any other variety of socialism known thus far.6
As I’ve argued elsewhere at greater length, the allegation that “democratic control” ensures freedom from coercion and oppression is an old fallacy that turns on an equivocation between a government with elected representatives and a society run by majority rule. The latter is what socialists advocate when they claim that factories should be run by workers, regardless of what the factory’s original creators have to say about it. This constitutes a direct violation of the rights of a minority of individuals. So if workers really do end up holding “the purse strings” of the factories and the power to make the state appeal to them, it makes little sense to say that the state would “wither away” as an entity independent of the workers.7 Rather, the workers would in effect be running a state.8
When Wolff is pressed to provide a real-world example of the system he envisions, he and other socialists often point to the Mondragon Corporation, a Spanish worker-owned manufacturer of a variety of industrial and consumer goods.9 But Mondragon is an international corporation that sells its products to private firms all over the globe, and employs an increasing number of foreign workers who are not members of the collective. At the same time, its workers increasingly depend on pensions from the Spanish state.10 Invoking the Mondragon example evades the question of whether a company like Mondragon could survive in the absence of a more general capitalist system that buys its products and provides market prices by which to calculate resource allocation, and the system of state-sanctioned private property rights that makes this possible.11 It also evades the question of whether a company run “democratically” (unlike most corporations) could exist in the absence of a coercive state that taxes capitalists to fund worker pensions.
The idea that real socialism involves social control of the economy without the state is not new, but you need to be aware of some history to realize this. It goes back at least as far as 1877, when Frederick Engels claimed in Anti-Dühring that after the proletariat seizes control of the state and thereby the means of production, the state would “wither away” or “die out.”12 Evading the important role of a state in protecting peaceful coexistence among individuals by protecting their rights, Marx and Engels held that the only role of a state is to enforce the exploitation of one class by another. Working from this fantastic premise, they deduced without evidence that once the state comes to represent the proletariat, class distinctions would disappear and, with them, the need for the state.13Lenin toed the same line in a lengthier work of no greater depth, but since he was himself a political operative who needed to rationalize his revolutionary actions, he argued that state control of the means of production was necessary as a transitional measure on the way to the achievement of real socialism.14 The same argument was then invoked for years by Stalin as he continued to starve and murder people in the name of eventually achieving the ideal of real socialism.15
All of this means that Lenin and Stalin and the other founders of the brutal Marxist regimes justified their actions using the exact same fantasy as today’s socialists do. They promised that the system they advocated would eventually eliminate state oppression as well. We saw what it actually delivered.
Why should we believe socialists today who also claim that their proposals to nationalize industries will take us further from and not closer to the specter of the Soviet catastrophe? They offer no better evidence than hucksters who sell perpetual motion machines. In fact what they’re doing is much worse, both because they actively evade the evidence, and because what they sell isn’t just dysfunctional — it’s deadly.
The real meaning of socialism
Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. But to understand what this means in practical reality — and why it cannot mean what the socialists propose — we must appreciate what “public ownership” actually refers to.
There is no magical entity called “the public.” A society is composed of individual human beings. In reality, the only mechanism by which the actions of an entire society can be coordinated is by means of a government. And so the only way for anything resembling “the public” to systematically deprive capitalists of private property and to abolish capitalist free trade is for the state to do it. Every socialist acknowledges this, whether they advocate violent revolution to establish a collectivist state or a majority vote to establish the same.
@Greg:
Ah yes…but you’re not lying, it’s everyone you oppose?
This is a common tactic to degrade the idea of objective truth. You and your Marxist fellows have done much to help this process along, and that’s the only reason you’re blathering here, even after being easily defeated in debate.
You and the antifa thugs with bullhorns are the same.
SO AGAIN, WHAT LIES HAS TRUMP TOLD??
I’LL WAIT.
GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE, YOU F*CKING COWARD. GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT ISN’T RELATIVISTIC DEMOCRAT DOUBLE SPEAK.
MARXISM HAS KILLED MILLIONS. IT WILL FAIL IN CHINA.
September 1, 2020 — The Payroll Tax Delay Is Here, But So Is Confusion About It
* This would be how they’d finally kill Social Security. It’s the Grover Norquist method.
@Nathan Blue, #201:
It’s Trump, his cohorts, and his allied propaganda-for-profit disinformation outlets that are lying, and they do so constantly. Generally speaking, their opponents and critics DO NOT routinely and shamelessly lie.
This is one of the striking differences between this administration and nearly all that have come before, when lies by either party were the exception rather than the rule.
Maybe we’ll stick to a single subject to better make the point. Trump has asserted all of the following:
COVID-19 isn’t a serious threat. COVID-19 is under control. COVID-19 will just go away; it will just disappear. If the shutdown continued, there would be more deaths by suicide than COVID-19 would cause. COVID-19 numbers are looking better almost everywhere; the numbers are coming way down. The United States has the lowest COVID-19 mortality rate in the world. Children are virtually immune to COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine is an effective preventative and treatment for COVID-19. The Obama White House’s response to the H1N1 pandemic was “a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now.” “Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks … didn’t have a clue!” Anybody that needs a test gets a test. All U.S. citizens arriving from overseas are tested for COVID-19. “I’ve always known this is a real—this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic … I’ve always viewed it as very serious.” This sort of pandemic “was something nobody thought could happen … Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.” etc, etc
@liargreg:
You really are a piece of shit You burp up totally unsubstantiated comments without any basis of truth. You lie more than anyone here but, because you are a scumbag leftist, you lie with impunity.
It is more than obvious at this point serious derangement has engulfed you. Reports are out since the RNC that President Trump is up over biden by 10 points. Not hard to believe after biden tried to speak yesterday. Have they decoded yet what he was trying to say to the seven people there yesterday?
Nothing mentioned above is unsubstantiated.
August 31, 2020 – Barr’s removal of career national security official, weeks before election, raises concerns
If Trump is blown out of the water in November, expect a rapid and far-reaching purge of all of his political appointees.
Socialism has killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone.
Socialism has killed more than 60 million babies in America since Roe v Wade since 1973…
That’s a guess at how many unwanted pregnancies were terminated as a result of a pregnant woman’s choice not to allow it to continue. It’s a favorite deception of anti-choice activists to conflate that with “killing babies”, and that has been taken up as part of the fundamental dishonesty of the right.
An acorn is not an oak tree. An egg is not a chicken. A first-trimester fetus is not a child. These things only have the potential to become.
The irony is that those on the right already resent tax dollars going for the care, feeding, and education of existing underprivileged children and their mothers. For the government to provide those things involves a variety of “socialist” programs, which they oppose already. I suspect 60 million more would have made them no happier.
@Greg: Of the comments you provided that were actually issued by Trump, taken in the context of the moment they were made, they WERE true. Many ARE true. For instance, COVID19 WILL go away; it would probably already be totally controlled were it not for the three solid months of left wing riots, looting and terrorism the nation has suffered. HCQ IS an effective treatment; that has been irrefutably proven.
You ignore YOUR lies. Like Trump said the virus was a hoax. Like Trump hasn’t taken it seriously. Like Trump hasn’t taken effective action. Like HCQ is not only ineffective but deadly. Like Trump told people to inject or ingest household disinfectants. Like Democrats didn’t hold up financial aid for political purposes. On and on and on.
@Greg:
Neither has Trump.
That funny, lot’s of “gotcha” that you obviously don’t apply to your own party or candidate. For the most part, the above is largely true. You’re used to slime politicians saying things out of both sides of their mouth. Trump is flawed. He should talk less, I agree. But he’s a leader, and an actual executive.
Your attempts at disinformation have, once again, failed.
@Greg:
Uh…a human being, even a potential one, is not a bird, and it’s not a tree.
I’d stick to your Marxist talking points from CNN. You can’t argue this one well, at all.
You don’t have much to say about suspension of the Social Security payroll tax, with employees having to repay this “loan” after the first of the year—and, incidentally, after the election. It’s a typical Trumpian scam.
But, he says, Congress might let employees off the hook for repayment. In fact, we might make the suspension of the payroll tax permanent.
Which would kill Social Security. Were would we get the funds to pay current beneficiaries if the payroll tax stream were cut off? It sure isn’t coming out of general revenue, when the administration’s budget had already created a one-trillion-dollar-per-year embedded deficit, even before our historically unprecedented $4 Trillion 2020 shortfall.
The man is a loon. He’s telling his base whatever the hell he thinks they want to hear, even if it’s complete nonsense. How long is it going to take the rubes to figure this out? Is it going to take a second term calamity that brings the entire nation down into ruin? If it does, it would be too late to do anything about it. The United States would be over.
@Greg: So…on the one hand, we have Trump threatening social security. Is this a “chicken little” claim, or legit? Let’s take it seriously then.
On the other hand…
We have armed insurrection both ignored and supported by the Democrat Party. Marxists have ACTUALLY murdered someone in Portland, and the textbook plan of taking down the police is underway.
Social Security…or…A fascist one-party police state trying to take over.
Not a hard choice which one is more important.
The Debt is all you have, greg, and it’s insufficient as a reason not to re-elect Trump. Biden will raise taxes and STILL increase the deficit.
It’s easy. Trump 2020. Look ahead to 2024, and STOP SUPPORTING MARXISM. IT DOESN’T WORK, AND WE DON’T WANT YOUR SILLY IDEOLOGIES. WE ARE NOT ABOLISHING THE POLICE, OR CONSTITUTION.
There is no armed insurrection.
@Greg: Yes there is. But I thanks for proving my point when I said Democrats ignore it.
Speaking of lying, how can you support Biden? He lies!!! About everything..all the time!!!!
Biden is a “goddamn liar”.
C’mon, Man!!!
He’s failed to acknowledge or denounce the armed insurrection by blm/antifa, movements that have murdered people in Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, and many other places.
“Get in their faces…”
“Let them know they are not welcome there…or anywhere…..”
“They need to keep going…”
Yup, all of this has been nakedly encourage by the Marxist Democrat Party.
There is no armed insurrection. As armed right-wingers frequently point out, they’ve got all the guns, and they’re also the ones who most frequently show up with them where they shouldn’t.
@Nathan Blue, #210:
They’re all lies that Donald Trump has actually told—each and every one, and many on multiple occasions. They’re lies that can have serious consequences. The man lies constantly, reflexively, about anything and everything, whenever it’s useful to do so. It’s a fundamental character defect. He has always been this way. It’s how he operates.
The totally reprehensible thing about him is how he will use lies and slander to destroy the reputations of people who are far better than himself in order to further his own ends. He corrupts and cheapens everything around him. He destroys ethics and principles while aping support of them, shamelessly posing with an upheld bible or literally hugging the nation’s flag. That adult Americans don’t immediately see through such infantile deceptions and manipulations is astonishing. The fact that they can’t separate truth from horse manure—and to all appearances don’t even want to—may be the end of us. If so, won’t be the result of an invading army. It will be the result of a gullible population and flamflam man and former reality TV host from New York.
@Greg:
BULL
SHIT.
Democrat-run cities, where the weakest and most ineffective governments are, are in a constant state of armed insurrection. Do you actually think if some pathological liars just deny it is going on, no one will notice them?
@Greg:
Out of over 600,000 cases in my state, only 2,700 children under the age of 20 contracted the Chi-Com flu. That is less than one half of one percent.
Hydroxychloroquine, along with Z-pac and zink has been proven in over 50 actual trials to be an effective treatment for patients, even the elderly, especially in the early stages of positivity. Why do you ignore the science?
When are you going to address the lies that have been told by Bargain Basement Joe Biden? You know, like how he was against fracking before he was for it?
And I am still waiting for you to tell me exactly what Bargain Basement Joe did during his almost 50 years in Congress. You know, like all those bills he wrote and got passed?
@Greg:
Yes there is.
Hehe…when the armed “rightwingers”, a.k.a., anyone not aligned with you far-left nutbags, show up, you’ll know it.
More like truths or statements taken out of context, but the real question is this.
What do you think about Biden’s habitual lying?
C’mon, Man!
You’re blathering is weak, junior.
Weak.
We have an armed insurrection by far-left extremists who the Dem Party supports, mainly because they are afraid not to.
This is textbook.
Fortunately the general population is armed, and Marxist revolutions cannot happen in such an environment.
MARXISM HAS FAILED EVERYWHERE IT HAS BEEN TRIED, AND SHED THE BLOOD OF MILLIONS.
Not in America. Not on my watch.
Thinking Americans have kept the left-wing mobs at bay, and Trump continues to thwart the “uniparty” and Chinese-bought Democrats.
All in all, we’re moving the right direction: an extrication of extreme Marxists and divestiture of Chinese finance.
Any “post-election” win by Biden will be fraud and not valid. The Dems/Uniparty/Outsiders/China coup is being killed off. It will come to head on Nov. 3rd, and that head will be severed promptly.
Did anyone see all that violence incited by Trump’s visit to Kenosha? Oh… right. There wasn’t any.
@Nathan Blue:
Far more Biden votes will be coming in as absentee ballots. Trump will appear to be winning late into the night of election day and probably through the day following. As the absentee ballots are tallied, his lead will shrink and then vanish.
At that point, Trump’s going to start ranting about election fraud. He’s already laid the groundwork for that with all of his bullshit about mail in ballots, which have always represented a majority of absentee ballots and have never been demonstrated to pose a problem.
@Greg:
If San Fran Nan can go out to get her hair done, you can certainly go to the polls considering all the precautions election boards are putting in place.
The Chi-Com flu scare is not going to win Bargain Basement Joe the election.
@retire05, #225:
Four years of putting up with Donald Trump’s incompetence, lies, corruption, bullying, divisiveness, and insults and then seeing the results coming in is going to win Joe Biden the election. Everything we’re seeing on the news has happened on Trump’s watch, not Obama’s or Biden’s. A vote for Trump is a vote for more of the same.
Over 200,000 Americans dead of COVID-19 by election day will also likely be a consideration.
The recent assassination attempt against Putin’s critic Alexey Navalny was done with a Russian binary novichok nerve agent developed by the former Soviet government. It’s the same agent that was used against the Russian political dissident and his daughter in the UK a while back. Still no comment from the White House…
biden is now a healer but short on specifics. Talking with platitudes accomplished nothing
Senate intelligence committee moving forward on hunter biden and his Ukraine involvement. His daddy got the prosecutor in Ukraine fires to protect his son.
Now biden says schools would be open if not for Trump.
@Greg:
Yes, and Leftwing and funded “analytics” company (Hawkfish) that serves the DNC handed out this little turd of disinformation yesterday. It’s only purpose is to pre-load the election results to promote open treason by the Democrats, who will handily lose the election.
When they lose, this little bit of information warfare will stir up your crazies and cause a civil war of sorts, the leftwing disinformation outlets calming claiming that it’s Trump, not Biden, that isn’t accepting the result.
Most likely, as Biden’s avowed actions would have killed more. Trump gets votes for being MORE competent than Biden. Good point.
But back this little point. Can you tell me how you know that? Have you traveled to the future in your Democrat Time Machine? The polls can’t even be trusted, but I’m going to just agree with a Dem intelligence agency that makes up reality, before hand?
Hehe, no.
We suddenly can’t have them counted by election night? Here in Colorado, we already have mail-in voting. We’ve never needed an extra week to count the vote, so…
WHAT THE F*CK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????
I, and the vast majority of Americans, will not honor nor cede to a week of manufactured votes.
The Dems have lost. They know it, and they are just taking big psy-op sh*t all over our fair and free elections to sow doubt and discord.
@Greg: Sure, we’ve seen the drill. Behind in the tally? Oh.. LOOK! Here’s some boxes of ballots in the trunk of that car! Still behind? Oh… LOOK! There’s a warehouse with boxes of ballots that have not had a chain of custody. Just keep finding more ballots and counting them up until you have what you need. That’s the purpose of “vote by mail”.
Democrats have laid the groundwork for massive fraud. In addition, THEY have established the groundwork for refusing to accept the outcome, just like they didn’t in 2016. The Democrats are totally corrupt.
@Nathan Blue:
Because the Democrats are already printing them up, putting bogus signatures on them and mailing them in!
@Greg:
Tell me, Comrade Greggie, if Bargain Basement Joe is elected will he finally make sure historical black colleges are well funded and don’t have to go crawling to D.C. every year? Maybe BBJ will pass criminal justice reform so that those who were unjustly sentenced to severely long terms will be released from prison? Will he finally move the embassy to Jerusalem? Or negotiate a peace treaty between Israel and the UAE? I’m sure BBJ is thinking about investing in minority neighborhoods. Bet he calls them “Opportunity Zones” where minorities are the business owners providing services to minorities, right?
And nothing like what is going on in our Democrat run cities happened under the Obama/Biden watch, right?. Oh, wait………..there was Oakland, and then Ferguson, Missouri. And wasn’t there a little dust up in Baltimore?
And maybe when it comes to the Chi-Com flu, Biden says he will rely on the scientists. Maybe he’ll use Ron Klain again, like he did before. Remember, Klain just recently said about the handling of H1N1 during Biden’s time as VP:
“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It was just luck.
Wow! What a recommendation for Biden that is.
I certainly hope so. Democrats have been making promises to minorities that were never kept since FDR. Trump changed all that. Thanks for reminding us all what a failure Obama/Biden really were.
@July 4th American: @July 4th American:
I’m sure that’s coming up right after Hillary Clinton is prosecuted for her “many, many crimes”.
What does it mean that the same guy can come back four years later and sell you a second lot in Florida that adjoins the swamp property you bought four years before?
@retire05, #232:
September 2, 2020 – 81 Nobel laureates endorse Biden’s White House bid
Because they’re not stupid.
Trump’s list of endorsing scientists of similar stature seems to consist of a blank piece of paper. Maybe he could pull a few names off of the Heritage Foundation’s list of climate change deniers.
Klain’s comment wasn’t a criticism of Biden. It was an observation regarding our unpreparedness for the emergence of any new and deadly virus. Our “luck” was that H1N1 was not a new virus to humans. It’s a subtype of the Influenza A virus. Variations of H1N1 have been endemic in the human population for decades, so a degree of immunity exists.
Bad luck would be something like COVID-19, which recently jumped species from bats to human beings. Nothing related to it has never been endemic in the human population. Consequently we had little or no immunity to it when it suddenly appeared.
The Trump administration rolled back several Obama initiatives to address this situation. Notably, he pulled our epidemiologists out of China before the appearance of COVID-19, and quietly planned to cut funding for Obama’s ebola response program before the negative press made doing so a political liability. He also had a hissy fit and cut funding to the World Health Organization, one of the parties he has attempted to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden confuses basic facts about murder of Trump supporter in incoherent press conference.
One of Trump’s gun-toting supporters is currently charged with murder.
Are you aware that .jpg files are not videos, or are you still waiting for it to start playing? I watched the press conference. It was anything but incoherent.
@Greg:
You’re a f**king liar. I know you’re a f**king liar and you know you’re a f**king liar. Here is what Klain said in its entirety:
“I wasn’t involved directly in the H1N1 response but I lived through it as a White House staffer and what I would say about it is a bunch of really talented, really great people were working on it and we did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1 during that period of time. It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It was just luck.”
Klain was referring to the “we” of the Obama/Biden administration and H1N1. Not the Trump administration and the Chi-Com flu.
What a cowardly little weasel you are, Comrade Greggie, that you can lie with such abandon. Just like the candidate you support.
“
Biden copied Pence’s convention rhetoric against violence, now Biden is planning to copy Trump’s trip to Kenosha (after harshly criticizing Trump for going yesterday). Difficult to ignore the optics of who is leading, who is following.
@retire05:
Yeah, that’s what he said. It wasn’t a criticism of Joe Biden. It was a critique of our general unpreparedness to deal with the appearance of a new virus like COVID-19.
The context was a conference on Biological Attacks and Pandemic Outbreaks carried by C-Span, which some lying, anonymous, scum-sucking, pro-Trump propagandist—possibly foreign—took out of context, labeled, and posted to YouTube. As usual, there’s no information provided beyond the bogus assertion in the video title. It’s impossible to leave a comment to point out that it’s a load of crap. If you click on the poster’s name, you find a basket full of such deceptive b.s, all set up the same way. It’s not opinion, it’s a propaganda methodology. If you click on “About”, you find nothing whatsoever, which is most often a tip that you’ve happened onto a disinformation operation.
It works well on the rubes, if you’re any indication. It’s the sort of crap that got Trump elected to begin with, and the sort of crap that he hopes will work for him again. He has to rely on this sort of material, because the truth won’t win him a second term. The truth is in plain sight. Anyone with an ounce of sense can see it. Trump is responsible for what happens on Trump’s watch. What we’re seeing are the results of having a liar and an incompetent in the White House. Things were far better before. Things are totally screwed up now, and will continue to be for sometime after.
Today, this idiot actually suggested that people should try to vote twice, to make sure their vote gets counted.
@Greg:
Spin it all you want, Commie. It was a criticism of the entire Obama/Biden administration.
“It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. “
“Us”, as in the Obama/Biden administration.
You are projecting the reality of the Obama administration on to Trump. And when did you ever hold Obama responsible for his lies and incompetence and don’t give me that bullshit that Obama is no longer in the Oval Office (meaning Obama’s disaster of 8 years is off limits.) Did you blame Ferguson on Obama? How about Baltimore? Did you blame that on him? No, you worshipped at his Socialist feet.
You brattle on about “Trump lies” but swallowed everything Obama every said as truth like the ship channel hooker you are.
@Greg:
Easy there, sport. You’re referencing about 70-80% of the US voters, who solidly support and will vote for Trump.
I’m afraid you’d better hold that mirror up to yourself before you’re out there, alone, and all the other Marxists have been locked up awaiting a fair trial…speedy…and base on our Constitutional Laws you seems so eager to destroy.
I hope you add this to Trumps list of “lies”. Apparently humor is wasted on Democrats, when it serves their disinformation campaigns. Fortunately, very few are buying it.
The death toll was calculated to be in the millions. It’s not. 1% of the population has gotten covid, as we know. Many, many times more people got the H1N1.
The “lies” are Trump trolling your idiots and you, butthurt, holding on to it as it gains him more votes. You played right into his hand, moron.
Anything screwed up right now is due to Covid and/or Democrat Leaders.That’s a fact.
The economy is recovering. Schools are re-opening. The menace of marxist/racist/sjws has been fully revealed, their genocidal ideologies now un-masked so we can take them down and get back to teaching our kids to think freely and speak freely.
You dodged the question, because you don’t have answer:
WHAT F*CKING PLANET DO YOU LIVE ON THAT YOU THINK A POLITICAL PARTY CAN TELL US THE VOTE WILL SHIFT A WEEK AFTER AN ELECTION DUE TO A PROCESS THEY’VE ALL BUT PROMISED TO CORRUPT!!!???
NO MAIL IN VOTING THAT’S NOT ALREADY THERE, FOR THIS ELECTION. IT’S NOT RIGHT, AND NOT SAFE. IT’S NOT FAIR TO ANYONE, INCLUDING THE DEMOCRATS AND THEIR VOTERS.
NO DICE.
A reminder. I LIVE IN A STATE WITH MAIL IN VOTING, AND WE KNOW THE F*CKING VOTE THE NIGHT OF THE ELECTION….LIKE WE ALWAYS HAVE!!!!!!!!!!
@retire05, #240:
Horse hockey. Ronald Klain is a Biden supporter and has been publicly promoting Biden’s proposed COVID-19 plan.
@Nathan Blue, #241:
Reality arrives in November. Then we’ll see.
The numbers will shift as the absentee ballots are processed. Polls indicate that a much higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans intend to vote by absentee ballot to avoid crowded polling places. This is usually the case, but even more will likely do so than usual owing to COVID-19 concerns. It’s very unlikely that accurate projections will be possible on election night or the following day. Everyone paying attention already knows this.
It is already there. The majority of all absentee ballots have been submitted by mail for years. The mail will be even more heavily used because of COVID-19.
Some states proposed adding locked drop boxes at polling places as a work-around when DeJoy suddenly started removing mailboxes, cutting overtime, and shutting down automated sorting machines. Why do you suppose he did that right before an election, with 2020 census lagging behind schedule? I have a pretty good idea, since there’s really no other reasonable explanation.
@Greg:
I never said Klain wasn’t a Biden supporter. Hell, he was Biden’s Chief of Staff.
He said the Obama administration screwed the pooch when it came to H1N1. FACT!
You’re sick. Get mental health assistance immediately.
But then, all you commies are sick in the head.
@retire05, #244:
What was Trump’s COVID-19 plan? I don’t recall ever having heard. Didn’t he hand that off to his son-in-law or something?
@Greg:
But the fact that it hit, there was no immediate treatment or preventative and people died is all Trump’s fault… right? I think you just destroyed yet ANOTHER of your weak and silly arguments.
By “Nobel laureates”, do you mean people like Obama and Gore, who got their Nobels based solely on politics? Gore got one for an ideology proven to be false and Obama got one based on what he PROMISED to do (though he eventually released the most cruel plague on human beings ever seen in ISIS). Yeah… they’re “smart”. Let’s listen to them.
As with the McCloskey’s, the evidence is pretty clear he is innocent.
Oh. So, by saying the H1N1 was a pretty standard virus with treatments already available but we still had 60,000,000 infections and 20,000 (plus… they just stopped counting) deaths when Obama/Biden “handled” it, it is a criticism of Trump’s response to a virus that has no peer? You are delusional. Whether Klain MEANT it to be a criticism or not, it WAS a scathing denouncement of how Obama/Biden did NOTHING to stop its spread but burn through all the PPE and not bother replacing it.
Yeah, because, a) Democrats don’t have to worry about having THEIR vote changed or tossed and, b), Democrats are already printing up the votes to dump on the system as the tallies require.
And there’s your problem; your left wing propaganda only told you Trump wasn’t doing anything when, in fact, he had been acting to meet the virus from the middle of January (while Democrats were impeaching and encouraging large groups to gather). I’ve provided numerous links to Trump’s plan and the timeline of his action. Again, you simply should have paid attention instead of keeping your head buried up your colon, getting sphincter-strangled, choked for air.
@Deplorable Me, #246:
He’s been doing things…pretty much randomly. He has routinely contradicted the advice of the government’s own experts, who have had to tiptoe around his personal fixations, overriding political concerns, and occasionally bizarre media pronouncements as if they were negotiating a minefield.
He has actually made the single most useful responses to reduce spread—wearing a mask and abiding by social distancing recommendations—into a political identity issue. Rather than setting an example of responsible behavior, he has encouraged a disinformation environment where millions of his followers believe masks are not an effective pandemic measure, but an attempt by plotting leftists to deprive individuals of their right to personal choice and personal freedom.
He’s allowed preposterous claims to go unchallenged, or even appeared to buy into them if he calculated it would win him some points—for instance, the assertion that gathering restrictions intended to prevent super-spreading events are actually a means of keeping people from going to church.
That’s what he’s done. One consequence is the CDC’s most recent COVID-19 projection of 200,000 to 211,000 U.S. fatalities by September 26th.
Other modern nations have had coherent response plans that their citizens were actually attentive to. As a result, they’ve brought spread under better control. They have much lower rates of spread because they are resuming normal activities with common-sense measures widely in place. Half of their populations haven’t responded to the inconvenience of simple, effective, common-sense COVID-19 measures as if they were spoiled children.
@Greg: Here. We’ll try this again.
The Trump timeline
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/timeline-the-trump-administrations-decisive-actions-to-combat-the-coronavirus/
Trump addressed coronavirus in January
https://publicpool.kinja.com/subject-statement-from-the-press-secretary-regarding-t-1841341883
Chronology of Trump’s actions shows he was on top of the crisis from the beginning while Pelosi impeached and the WHO, CDC and Biden downplayed the risks
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/31/the-real-coronavirus-chronology-shows-trump-was-on-top-of-it-while-biden-was-mocking-the-danger/
Trump moved to stop the spread of the virus in January
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/trump-us-has-shut-down-coronavirus-coming-china
Oh… and while all this was going on? Democrats were doing nothing but obstructing, lying and spreading fear.
September 3, 2020 – Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’
@Greg:
OK, Comrade Greggie, we get it. You hate Donald Trump. You have made that clear ad naseum.
So, here is the question I have asked you multiple times and you seem adverse to answering:
In all of Bargain Basement (Hiden) Joe Biden’s time in Washington, D.C. as a career politician, what bills did he write that he got passed. What exactly are his accomplishments besides getting cushy monetary contracts for his family members?
Tell us exactly why anyone should vote for hiden Joe Biden. Not what you think he will accomplish, but what he HAS accomplished.