The Red Scare (also known as McCarthyism) is officially revived.
First, U.S. Rep. Allen West (D-Fla.) confirmed (at a town hall meeting on April 10) that "there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party (specifically the Congressional Progressive Caucus) that are members of the Communist Party."
Then a week later, on April 17, West implied that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who served as commander-in-chief during World War I, was also a communist.
"I think that if you would take the time to study the political spectrum of ideologies, you’d understand that at the turn of the [20th] century, American Communists renamed themselves as progressives," West said. "If you study the Woodrow Wilson administration, people referred to the Woodrow Wilson administration as a progressive administration."
Mr. West, the folks at Mother Jones did take the time to study Wilson and his times. And they found that Wilson had not only thrown communists and socialists in prison, he also sent American soldiers to support Czarist forces against Bolshevik revolutionaries during the Russian civil war!
These preposterous assertions forced an embarrassed (Martin County, Florida) NAACP to cancel Tuesday's Freedom Fund Banquet in which West was suppose to be the keynote speaker (The Freedom Fund Banquet was re-scheduled for Sept. 15 with a new, to be determined, keynote speaker).
Now, comes more preposterous assertions.
On Friday, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs turned their fanatical defense of the 1% against former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who had the audacity to say ( during Wednesday's The Daily Show) that we can't expect big multi-national corporations to invest in things like education, research and development and infrastructure, so the government has to do it.
Reich "is a communist" who "secretly adores Karl Marx," O'Reilly flatly declared on his show Friday. Dobbs, sucking up to the big man, agreed that Reich is a "communist-slash-socialist. (He's) confused."
It is O'Reilly and Dobbs, of course, who are deeply confused.
Mr. Reich himself will join Ed Schultz tonight on The Ed Show at 8pET on msnbc to refute O'Reilly-Dobbs' ludicrous claims.