I am not especially partisan. I agree, as I said, that a certain kind of "single payer" would be superior to the status quo, to say nothing about Obamacare, for example.
But you keep avoiding answering my actual questions. Let's try again:
Allowing for semantic fog effects, and all that: Are the militaristic, corporatist etc French Socialists, for example, still "real socialists" or impostors?
Or, when Jon Corzine (D-Wall Street) was pushing for universal health care, universal gun registration and state-funded college education - these policies were somehow not socialist, just because the politician was a member of the country's "financial elite"?
From my perspective, socialism is not militaristic by its very nature. However, capitalism is .. and what we see in France is the mix of the two when it comes to foreign policy. The French will declare its the result of Nazi occupation, but whatever its origin, as a socialist, I'm not comfortable with it.
That being said, I agree with your point .. while cringing.
I would indeed call Corzine a socialist and a crony capitalist .. which is the very reason that he was never going to get the financial backing from Wall Street that Obama did .. which is my point. If you're suggesting that Wall Street would have bathed Corzine in the same money they gave Obama, I suggest that isn't true.
Calling everything on the other side of the fence 'socialist' is nothing new for the right. It's the same worn out story ..
Wall Street soars under Obama’s socialism
excerpt
As we talked about earlier in the year, if President Obama is trying to impose socialism on the U.S. economy, he really isn’t trying very hard.
The real fun begins when we reminisce about what Obama’s Republican critics were saying in early 2009. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal ran an entire editorial in early March 2009 arguing that the weak stock market was a direct result of investors evaluating “Mr. Obama’s agenda and his approach to governance.”
Karl Rove and Lou Dobbs made the same case. So did Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fred Barnes. For a short while, it was one of Mitt Romney’s favorite talking points, too. Even John Boehner got in on the larger attack.
Just so we’re clear, I still don’t think a strong stock market is necessarily proof of a robust economy. There are far more reliable indicators – job growth and median wages, for example – that tell us far more about the relative strengh of the economy than where major Wall Street indexes close on a given day.
But when it comes to the politics, consistency matters. Conservatives can’t say a falling stock market in early 2009 is proof that Obama’s agenda is a dangerous failure, and then ignore a rising stock market as irrelevant.
Wall Street soars under Obama's socialism | MSNBC
It's soaring because it isn't socialist.
