Democratic candidates: "We’re Marxist-Leninists, and we always have been. Deal with it.”

All the candidates get a turn to confess.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14243

“Let’s Get Real”

“Listen,” Hillary Clinton told a stunned collection of reporters yesterday in Des Moines, Iowa. “If the Republicans and the right wing noise-machine are going to just constantly call us socialists, let’s show them what the word means. And let’s quit running from who we actually are. I’ve been doing it for too long. It’s time to say what we really think. No more hiding behind reformist bourgeois labels and agendas. Listen up Fox News, because you’re going to love this. We’re Marxist-Lenninists, and we always have been. Deal with it.”

“You know, it’s like my mother used to say,” Clinton added: “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”

Wearing a red bandana and a Che Guevera T-Shirt autographed by Hugo Chavez, Clinton introduced her “fellow-travelers on the road to American and world socialism.” Her new “comrades” and fellow Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama (sporting a new black beret and dashiki), John Edwards (wearing a vintage Soviet Red Army jacket purchased from a Russian clothier), Bill Richardson (dressed as Fidel Castro and sporting a Cuban cigar), Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd joined her on the stage of a high school auditorium to unveil a new 10-point plan “to overthrow private ownership in the means of production and distribution” and to establish “workers’ control.”

Eschewing the “limited goal” of “socialism in one country,” Obama proclaimed his determination to link the “new American revolution” with “revolutionary proletarian forces and cadres around the planet” to “overthrow the world capitalist system within the next 20 years.”

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Obama laughed as he read selected passages from his bestselling 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope. “Here’s a good one,” Obama said, as he recited the following paragraph:

“Calvin Coolidge once said that ‘the chief business of the American people is business,’ and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that’s been more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material rewards. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models...As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.”

“The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources...our free market system.”

Shaking his head in mock amazement, Obama asked, “is that kissing the ass of the bourgeoisie or what? I wrote all that reactionary nonsense to keep the capitalist thought police off the trail and impress the people with the money and power.”

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Paul Street is a writer, speaker, activist, and satirist based in Iowa City, IA and Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11

the funniest thing I have read. It really is hilarious. Biden as a Spartacist, and Dodd as a member of the Frankfurt School. Dennis - "“I am their one man Krondstadt Rebellion.” Thanks so much.

I wonder how long before Faux Noise picks it up and presents it as news.