Saw photo of Obama and a Bogus Krushchev Quote Today

[ebt12]

"We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism."

It was posted on Facebook by a right-wing friend from high school. I pointed out that anyone who thinks Obama is a communist or a socialist is ill informed and not paying attention, including that he has a number of Wall Street people in positions in his administration. A number of replies were made by a few people including including from the poster that he is informed and paying attention, that Obama is surrounded by communists, socialists, and Maoists, and that Obama is one big heaping of socialism. Other people posted "Dictator Obama", he has been destructive to America, we're losing our freedoms under him, and that a number of their friends will be voting conservative this Fall as they have seen the light. One person replied that Obama was caught on tape saying our allies and America would be thrown under the bus after the election.

I also did some homework about the quote and learned it was an urban legend, and posted the link as a comment. Soon after I noticed all of the comments to the picture were gone, but then it could also be Facebook screwing up.

The continuation of a number of Bush policies has been destructive, such as the tax cuts for the wealthy, the continued existence of Gitmo, welfare to corporations that have record profits.

How does one argue against BS like this? I can make a good argument but there are times when I am at a loss without writing a novel.

[MADem]

1. Didn't Nikita also come up with the DSW tag line "Where'd you get those shoes?"

Ya gotta do what needs doing with garbage--throw it out.

[patrice]

2. See if posters won't tell you precisely what he's done that they are calling

socialist. Concretely. Then segue into an analysis of what socialism is vs. what they think it is.

Use lots of examples of the socialistic traits of what is called our "free market" economy.

[Voice for Peace]

3. posting the urban legend link did it! I've seen this same phenomenon happen with many FB posts

people realize they're idiots and delete their comments before anyone notices

[progree]

4. Business and investor community sure likes Obama -- stock market up 59% during his presidency

At least Obama stabilized the economy, even grew it some, so that it is now higher than it was at the peak in 2007 before the crash. When Bush left office, he handed Obama an economy that was losing 700,000 jobs a month and the GDP was contracting at a 6.4% annual rate (Q4 2008). Under Bush, the unemployment rate increased 3.5 percentage points while the Civilian Labor Force Participation rate fell 1.5 percentage points: from 67.2% to 65.7% (had the participation rate stayed the same, the unemployment rate would have risen even further).

And look what Bush did to the stock market. When Bush took office, the S&P 500 was 1343. When Bush left office and Obama took office, it was 850 (a 37% drop during Bush's 8 years). As of this writing, 5/11/12 close it is at 1353, up 59% since Obama took office. (Google: Historical Prices - Yahoo Finance S&P 500 ). Clearly the business and investor community has a lot more confidence in Obama than it did in Bush.

I keep posting stuff like this over and over in the comments to news.yahoo.com stories on the economy, where the CONNEDservatives predominate. I sometimes get crap about how great the economy was until the Dems took over Congress in January 2007. To which I point out that housing prices were already heading down from their July 2006 peak, and there were trillions of dollars of credit default swaps and collaterized mortgage obligations in bank portfolios ready to explode if housing prices underwent a sustain decline. And the Dems weren't the ones that created the exploding rate ARM mortgages or that gave AAA ratings to mortgage bonds that were full of toxic mortgages. Don't get me started on Bush's "ownership society", where in a speech in October 15, 2002, he said, "you don't have to have a lousy home for first-time home buyers. If you put your mind to it, the first-time home buyer, the low-income home buyer can have just as nice a house as anybody else."