Thunder on the Mountain
November 19, 2016
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The Wall Street Journal is being “cautiously optimistic” here about the installation of a Leninist in the White House —but while hope may spring eternal so does reality.
“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon told a profiler for the Daily Beast, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
“Brietbart publishes offensive items, but we doubt the site will inform the State of the Union Address.”
“Brietbart will need to persuade the public…”
Those last two statements are particularly startling given the first one. Is the idea that Trump will have to persuade the public that Bannon is not a Leninist in the sense Bannon himself described Lenin? And will that persuasion have the color of the persuasion that characterized Trump’s campaign rhetoric, filled with falsehood and implicit violence, but muted, coded?
The WSJ in wrapping up says (as if to blithely gloss over 60 years or so of Soviet rule) that it didn’t work out well for Lenin. Well, Jesus! it didn’t work out well for the Russian people either, even the ones who initially followed him thinking they’d finally had a leader they could trust.
As Nobel winner Dylan has written, “The writing’s on the wall, come read it, come see what it say.” —Thunder on the Mountain
Jim Culleny
11/19/16