Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said the Occupy Wall Street movement was “laughable” for its “hypocrisy” and alleged that the movement had ties to the Communists and Nazis in an interview Tuesday night with conservative media outlet Newsmax.
“I think the hypocrisy of this movement is somewhat laughable,” he said. “I would agree with them that we don’t need to have crony capitalism in the United States of America, where we have government picking winners or losers in the free market or trying to be a venture capitalist. But when I see signs that these people are holding up signs saying ?end capitalism,’ then my question is: What do you replace it with?”
“I think there is a danger in the people on Capitol Hill starting to embrace this movement, especially now that we know that the American Nazi Party and the American Communist Party are also starting to align themselves with this Occupy movement,” he said.
‘GOP Punk’ Allen West Martin Luther King Jr Would Not Have Supported ‘Occupy Wall Street’!
Playlist: Occupy Wall Street Protests
Protestors calling themselves members of “Occupy Palm Beach” protested a town hall for West Tuesday chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Allen West needs to go!”
West disputed, as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have said, that the Occupy Wall Street movement is similar to the Tea Party.
“When you talk to somebody with the Tea Party, they can tell you what they want — limited government that’s constitutionally mandated, fiscal responsibility, they also want to see our free market and free enterprise systems adhered to, as well as our national security,” he said.
West won election in a South Florida district in 2010 that voted for Obama in 2008, in no small part due to Tea Party support. “But when you talk to these Occupy Wall Street gangs, they’re all over the place. It’s like a shotgun as opposed to a precision-guided munition,” he said.
West, who is African-American, rejected that Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported the movement. “Martin Luther King Jr. would not have backed these types of protesters. He had a focus, a message. He was divinely inspired. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these individuals.”
King’s daughter said her father would have looked favorably upon the Occupy Wall Street movement. Obama drew parallels between King and the Occupy Wall Street movement Sunday at the dedication for Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
When asked whether the protests could turn violent, West said, “I think there’s a propensity for that. I’m very concerned about class warfare rhetoric.” In the 2010 campaign, West faced accusations over his connections to the Outlaws Motorcycle Gang, which the FBI targeted for violent crimes. He also was forced to retire from the Army in 2003 after firing a gun past an Iraqi police officer in an effort to get information.
————————————————————– •The Crimes of Allen West: Read Here and Here
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A Guide To The Smear Campaign Against Occupy Wall Street: The right-wing media have engaged in a relentless smear campaign against the Occupy Wall Street movement, including calling the protesters socialists and Marxists, saying they represent the “fringe of the fringe of the fringe,” and claiming they “sound like the Unabomber,” among other attacks. [ READ MORE ]
The Latest Desperate Smear Of Occupy Wall Street Protests: The Nazis Like Them — The American Nazi Party put out a statement on Thursday that was supportive of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Rocky Suhayda, the party’s chairman, said, “My heart is right there with these people.” The right-wing blogosphere saw an opportunity to associate the protests with Nazis, and the pile-on began. [ READ MORE ]
Noam Chomsky on Tea-Party Protests: “It is very similar to late Weimar Germany.” “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.” “I listen to talk radio.” “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
By: Chris Hedges Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate.
Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor's note:To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, clickhere, here, here and here.]
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.
“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”
“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.
“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”
MeadiaMatters: Conservative media figures and outlets have falsely claimed a New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) survey found that 46 percent of primary care physicians would consider leaving their profession if Democrats’ health care reform bill passes. In fact, NEJM says that the 3-month-old email “survey” was not published in or conducted by NEJM. [ READ MORE ]
Two IDIOTS Agree: Hannity, Palin agree health care legislative procedure is “unconstitutional“, “un-American“ Note: One dropped out of college, the other had to attend five different colleges before getting a measely degree in Journalism
Beck purports to analyze how Obama was scarred because both his parents “le[ft] him” for “Marxism“
Beck revives witch hunt to paint Obama advisers as Marxists, Maoists and communists
This goon never checks his facts and/or is just totally academically inept. Democratic TRAITOR, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) helped Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn’t last long at Yale. He took one class, “Early Christology,” and dropped out!
Today, he is an intellectual on American history at Fox ‘News’.
Reports indicate that this nut-BAG has hired an armed guard. When he(Beck) attended a recent preview of Broadway musical “Memphis,” people noticed that he was closely monitored, even to the men’s bathroom, by a bodyguard armed to the teeth — with a concealed weapon(s).
I hope those communists and socialists running around in his warped mind strangle him one day, or better still, could someone please strip him naked and dunk him into the icy Hudson river.
Columnist – John Sammon I, Billy Bob Lee Harvey Duke Wayne Butler, bein’ a’ sound mind, do hereby say that I wuz born in the little town a’ Backwards, Arkansas, and I come up from a background where women and niggers knew their place.
I have my gun. And I have my God, and you liberal one-world-order cuttin’ babies outta mother’s wombs faggots ain’t gonna take ‘em away from me. You wanna rule that there world from Paris, with that faggot Al Gore as the new lord-high boo-poof, but it ain’t gonna happen, nary-a-one, long as I have my gun.
You mess with me and I’ll kill ‘ya.
I ain’t-a-kiddin.’
That Al Gore got the Nobel Prize from those faggots up there’n Norway, cause he’s spreadin’ all them lies ‘bout that global warmin‘ shit, when their ain’t no truth to it. It’s always warm down yonder in the Sleepy Hollow bog where I done all my game shootin’ and pelt skinnin.’
All them liberal faggots up there in their liberal paradise sad ’cause a chunk of ice broke off, oh big deal. I could shoot it off with my gun, and it wouldn’t cause me to lose no sleep. No-sir-ree!
I wuz born white. I’m proud of, ya-hear? If God had intended me to be a nigger, he woud-a-made me one. If God intended me to be a woman or a faggot like that there Hillary Clinton, he would have put me in a kitchen a-bakin’ a pie. I got a message for that there Hillary. You just go on a ?suckin’ that faggot toe of that liberal lesbian bitch you been-a-seein.’ You jus’ stay away from me.
That nigger up-yonder in the White House, he’s a college nigger. He never had to make a livin’ like me a-cause he’s got all them faggots ’round him a-tellin’ him what to do and what to say.
But as long as I got my gun I’m a-independunt man. God put my gun in me hands. And that’s where it’s-a-gonna-stay. No faggot Frenchman or Al Gore is gonna’ take it away.
Look at how that darkie up there in the white screwed up the car industry. We wuz all doin’ fine ’till he showed up. He and all his faggot budiies may thing they got the upper hand, but I still have my gun.
You jus’ try and take it away from me. I’ll give ‘ya a dose a hot lead.
All them A-Rab lovin’ faggots and their liberal toe sniffers in that faggot UN one-world cat-house ruled from Paris and bein’ put together by that Hillary and her husband, that faggot Bill and his coon friends.
I’M A MAN! YA-HEAR ME? I’M WHITE AND I’LL FIGHT!
All you abortion-lovin’ faggots better watch out. you jus’ try-n-tell me what to do. I’d like to see ya’ try. Send one of your liberal faggots out. You’ll see what happens.
When God mad the world, he made the white man to rule over it, that includes faggots, niggers, lesbians, liberals and communists, gooks, nigger-A-Rabs, dinks, kikes, spics, and frogs and all the rest of ‘em.
