In 2003, a scumbag by the name of Mark Levin was encouraged by two other scumbags, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, both of whom made tens of millions of dollars by trashing the government, the Middle Class and the poor and supporting the military-industrial complex, even though they never have, and never would, see the inside of a barracks.
He lives a secretive personal life, because, like Rush Limbaugh, he has hurt so many people that there are many people who would kill him, literally tear him limb from limb if they ever get their hands on him. He says he does his radio show from “a bunker.”
Remarkably, in interviews, the interviewer apologizes for using cuts of his own show to demonstrate what he does. In other words, what he does is so vile, that he himself is sensitive to the playing of tapes of his work!
Like all Right Wing Republicans, he writes books. Now, why do Republicans write books that have the same tired old crap in them over and over again? To make money. When Ann Coulter writes a book, a huge number of books are bought up by Right Wing Republican organizations. And why do they do it? Because book tours are good ways to promote Right Wing ideologies. The books are underwritten by big supporters of the Republican Party. Ann Coulter would never even sell enough books to pay for the printing.
Likewise, even though he does have a large Right Wing radio listenership, most of those people don’t buy books. Some of them probably can’t read. It’s not that kind of audience. But the Right Wing organizations, pushed by the Neo-Fascist publicists in the Republican Party get corporations to buy up tens of thousands of books at a special price and give them out to attendees at conferences, and meetings and conventions.
Every Right Wing organization buys up at least enough books to put any solid Right Wing author on the best-seller list. It’s automatic. It has nothing to do with books. It has to do with promoting the Right Wing (Fascist) agenda.
Let’s take for example a cretin named Mark Levin. He sells books on a large scale for precisely this reason…the support of the Right Wing. And why? Well, here is how he serves them. Just some examples of his work.
He refers to small business being “under attack” from government. People who are exclusively involved in small businesses do not agree. They never bring up government or government regulation in small business seminars. Never. The topics are…people, how to get them and keep them. Customers, how to get them and keep them. Financing, how to get it…and they can’t or have a very hard time of doing so. And remember, the government is not financing small business. The private banks do, or at least that is what they should be doing. But they are not.
At one point, in an interview, (and these are his exact words) “And we hear these politicians saying, ‘we have to have skin in the game.’ And I think to myself, skin in the game, is that what we were founded for, to have skin in the game? No. We were founded for them to assure that our liberty is protected. Not for us to give skin in the game to the bureaucrats and the politicians.”
Does anyone have any idea what that means? First of all, no one is saying that someone else should have “skin in the game.” No one has used that term at all, ever, except this clown, Mark Levin. Second…it is a meaningless phrases and even more meaningless the way he presents it. We are asked to have skin in the game, he says, but doesn’t explain why or to whom or what for or even what it is all about.
Then he says…no…no skin in the game…just protect my liberty. What? Who is not protecting his liberty. We spend $700 billion a year, more than all the countries of the world combined to protect his liberty! We’re in two wars. We bombed Eastern Europe. We killed Bin Laden. We sent planes and drones to make sure that Kaddahfi was bumped off. We are the strongest country in the world by far. How much protection does this yellow-bellied, draft-dodging coward want?
Now here is one of the maniacal idiocies that Mark Levin puts in his books. In an interview he says that the Ayatollah Khomeini was inspired by Plato’s Republic to create a “genocidal theocracy” in Iran. It was largely because, Levin states, the Greeks wanted health care for everyone so that they could control everyone. Ok? Having health care for everyone was going to enable them to control the population by euthanizing the sick and the elderly.
So, here we have a parallel drawn by Mark Levin….he finally reads Plato which most of us did in college…and his analysis (or so he says) is that if you read and are influenced by Plato, you are for health care (he apparently is not, or is only for health care for some…and some would call that de facto euthanizing about 45,000 people a year) and you are in league with Khomeini’s followers and aligned with Iran. All that from one simple reading of The Republic.
Next, he moves on to his fantasy interpretation of Thomas Moore’s Utopia. Here’s his opening about Utopia, “Thomas Moore’s Utopia…many people argue it was a fiction…” When you read or hear that, think of it this way, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs…many people argue that it was a fiction…” Of course it was a fiction, idiot. It was (St.) Thomas Moore’s imagined ideal society.
Of course, Levin goes on, because he want to make an “intellectual” argument to all the bumbleheads who listen to him. He says: “And that’s the problem. Communism in many respects is based on this notion of radical egalitarianism.” Somehow, an obscure book is creating wave among Democrats. Of course, Utopia has had virtually no influence from the late 16th Century until now on anything except perhaps a couple of communes in Arizona or California in the heydays of pot and hippiedom.
From this odd, largely unread source Levin says that the Democrats are now working on “the attempt at equal incomes the attempt at phony representative government.” Does this strike an immediate chord with you? Are you going to leave the totalitarian Democratic Party?
Let’s see. That would be the one fighting against people like Levin who are restricting the vote. It would be those who are coming out into the streets of lower Manhattan, sleeping there, in protest of the actions of the rich and powerful. This would be the same Democrats who want to raise the taxes on the rich to 39.6 percent and thereby “equalize” the incomes of the Koch Brothers at something like $20 billion a year–after equalization—with the average worker’s $46,000.
Levin is trying hard but so far he’s flunking his humanities exam on Plato and Thomas Moore. He even refers to “isolationism” (which has always been a Republican value) as coming from the idea of a peninsula and people being pushed out of urban areas into suburban areas in Utopia. It is bizarre the way he tries to shoehorn things that Moore said to make them fit today’s reality.
He then goes on to compare Moore obliquely to Mao Tse-tung. So a Utopian society, an imagined world, is translated into hard-core Communism and…and…the implications of course…the whole purpose of his commentary is…to tie the Democrats to this kind of thinking. He then ties the Communist Manifesto to another much, much earlier philosopher, of the 17th Century, Thomas Hobbes.
Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, during the height of the English Civil War. Cromwell and his parliamentarian ideas had defeated Charles II . Hobbes was a monarchist, and his book was devoted to showing the relationship that citizens should have to a monarchical authority and vice versa. But there was no question who held authority…the central government in the form of a benign monarch.
So why does Levin use this arbitrary example? So that, once again, he can make comparisons between this “intellectual” political theory and the Democrats. Absolutists, big central government, and as Levin puts it “this monstrous centralized sovereign” have control over citizens with a contract (compact is Levin’s term) from which they cannot escape.
So, Levin says, see…you cannot escape paying taxes, nor can the “sovereign” escape giving you unemployment (thanks to Democrats) or Social Security (thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrat) or Medicare, (thanks to Democrats. It passed with no Republican votes and a heavy lobbying against it by Ronald Wilson Reagan while he was still working for GE.)
If Levin were looking for a real advocate rather than a phony one that he could compare to a “tyranny” he could have used John Locke. Locke was also a proponent of the social contract, was not a monarchist and was perhaps the most influential source for the Declaration of Independence.
Levin is a little unintentionally funny when he says that Hobbes thought people were “nasty, brutish…and there’s a famous quote of his…” But Levin should really have read Leviathan rather than simply reading the Cliff Notes or the comic book version. What Hobbes is referring to—remember this was during the British Civil War—was that life, not the people.
Life, he maintains, in a time of war demands that people do what is necessary to take care for their own welfare because in those times, life is often “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Which of course seems to be the kind of life that Mark Levin and his monopolist sponsors want to return to society today. They falsely accuse the Obama administration by making these absurd comparisions, hoping that no one has read anything, while actually supporting Wall Street and the oil cartel and others who would destroy American Society completely.
Oh, but Levin is not through yet. He hasn’t yet earned his thirty pieces of silver from Pontius Pilate. Now he brings up the Communist Manifesto, which he says “…is really trash.” One of the great, if controversial, documents of world history, influencing billions of people…trash, according to Levin. “They create the ‘straw man’ of these two classes, the landowners and the laborers.” Straw man? I guess we must all have been wrong about the Russian Nobility who owned all the land…not just 90% of the land…all the land…and their workers, the serfs, the laborers, who were bound to the land, like slaves.
And that was not just in Russia. Has anyone ever heard of the right of primogeniture? This is the right of the first born son of a landowner, in Continental Europe and Eastern Europe, England and probably, very likely, Russia…to inherit the family land and continue to pass it down generation after generation.
That domination and ownership of land by the nobility and later the transfer of that same idea to the ownership of manufacturing facilities became the clear distinction between owners and workers during and after the Industrial Revolution. And in the mid-19th century two political theorists, journalists and activists, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid out those relationships and in the Communist Manifesto said that they were not fair or morally sustainable. This is what Levin calls “trash.”
Of course the idea of bringing up the Communist Manifesto is to try to make a comparison between the Democratic Party and the idea of destroying everything in its path. Which, of course, is what Communism became under the Bolsheviks and Lenin but which was not exactly the intention of Marx and Engels. Nonetheless, there is no comparison between the capitalist-based, democratically empowered ideas of the Democratic Party and those of totalitarian Communism. Levin knows it but he is, of course, a liar.
And why does Levin do these things? Remember, the ideas of the Republican Party in the last 20 years has been to use Fascist methods. Here is one that applies to Levin. You, Levin, belong to a Party that is authoritarian and dominates the thinking and the actions of its members. So what do you do? You compare your enemy to the very thing that you most resemble, in this case, the ideas, as described and interpreted by Levin, of Leviathan. In other words, you steal something from someone’s pocket and then you point to the very person from whom you stole it and cry “Thief! This man stole something from me.”
He then goes on to say that people have died, been brutalized under theses theories…once again, use the rhetoric that describes what you want your audience to register in their minds….Utopian, bigger, more powerful, issues regulations….all the buzz words of the Right. The idea is just to set up a framework…that the “politicians” (and who does Levin think he’s kidding…he means “Democratic” politicians) are too Utopian.
The comparison of course, that the billionaire-supported Levin wants to make is between this Levin-created idea of “Utopia” existing only in his mind, and the “Constitution” which again, is an interpretation that exists only in his mind. He says of course that the Constitution does not allow for a “Utopia” where there would be health care, social security, Medicare for the aged, subsidies for health care for the poor, and benefits to those who work but are laid off.
None of those things are in the “Constitution” as Levin interprets it for us from the demands of the billionaires who want to pay less taxes, not more…which they are going to pay no matter what Mark Levin says. Of course Levin says that FDR tried to “destroy” individualism, you must “attack” individualism to control the country from the central government.
So, here we go again, the Utopians are attacking the Forefathers. Ridiculous. We have come so far from the original government of this country that we are lucky to have any Constitution left at all. Every single person in government owned slaves in 1789 or knew someone, or was moderately at least friendly with someone who did. We no longer own slaves, nor even allow segregation. Times change. People change. Except Mark Levin.
Of course Levin takes two words that President Obama once used in a speech “fundamental transformation” of society, by which he meant more education and a better ability to respond to international competition…and Levin changes their meaning completely…which he admits. He says: “these are not my words; they are Obama’s words.” But then he makes up what his own meaning.
So his version has two points. Does the President, he asks, have the power to fundamentally transform America? The answer to the question and the premise that he made up in his head is of course “No.” And then he says, based on his own premise, not that of the President’s which was completely different…”That means you don’t like America very much.”
We could go on for pages and pages about this guy because his lies are relentless. He works hard for his masters. He wants to be paid by those billionaires and multi-millionaires. So he keeps it up. But whenever you get the chance, look up Mark Levin on YouTube. And remember when you give to Democratic candidates that the kinds of lies I laid out here are falling on the ears of people listening to radio, day in and day out. These lies, no matter how outrageous, begin to take their toll.
