Rasmusen's Politics Weblog

Kerry's Fondness for Communists

On July 8 I blogged on "Kerry, Langston Hughes, Communism, and the Rectification of Names". Now the Weekly Standard has an article on "Kerry's Little Red Bookshelf". It turns out that Langston Hughes is not the only hard-core Communist Kerry enjoys quoting. There is a pattern....

...I was just learning how to use Comments in July, and I accidentally erased an
interesting exchange between myself and a reader who pointed out that Mrs. Bush
had also quoted Langston Hughes on one occasion. I'll see if I can reproduce my
point now, though I don't have the links to Mrs. Bush's quote. It was this. It's
fine to quote Communists, Fascists, and suchlike if they are good poets and the
poems are not ones in which they promote Communism and Fascism. That is what
Mrs. Bush was doing (though actually Hughes left Communism at some point-- I
don't know when). Even Communists can write poems about flowers and sunshine and
puppy dogs. It is only when a person quotes portions of poems which are not only
written by Communists but can fairly be called "Communist poems" that we should
get nervous-- and this is what Kerry did. Even if the particular passage quoted
is innocuous--"Let America be America"-- it is then an allusion to the meaning
and message of the entire poem-- that there should be a Communist takeover of
the United States and the imposition of a Stalinist system. If Kerry had done
this once, it could be chalked up to stupidity-- the liberal politician
posing as an intellectual who reads books, but embarassing himself by showing
that really he just reads quotation books. But Kerry seems to have a pattern of
doing this.

Does this mean he is a Communist? No-- not literally. He doesn't have a
membership card. But it is clear who he supported in the Cold War. I don't know
who he supports now.