Will anyone care that Stanley Kurtz has proven Obama’s socialist history?

I caught exactly one minute of Rush today, during which he mentioned a commentator who had said that the only reason that critics called Obama a “socialist” was because the “L” word had lost its power to scare people.  Rush disagreed, saying something along the lines of “words have meaning,” which is why people call Obama a socialist.

Those of us who looked at Obama’s history and his actions, and concluded that his guiding political ideology is now, and has always been, socialism were vindicated today.  Stanley Kurtz has definitively established that Obama’s own history explicitly labels him a socialist:

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

The New Party is and was an avowedly “socialist” political party.  Therefore, Obama, by signing onto its rolls was a socialist.

Those who already dislike Obama and his policies have long affixed that label to him based upon his acts.  In the run-up to the election, the MSM reflexively denied this claim, because people in the media understood that conservatives were using the term as a pejorative.  If we conservatives were stating something as a negative, they had to deny it.  I don’t think, though, that this denial involved any sense on the media’s part that there’s anything wrong with socialism.

Although the media always reserves for itself the role of the nomenclatura, meaning that it personally isn’t bound by the rigors of socialism, it thinks that the rest of the country, the peons and serfs, would benefit from a nomenclatura-controlled government.  Thus, I’m not sure they even denied the term to protect the public’s delicate sensibilities.  Like Groucho Marx, whatever the conservatives are for, they’re against it.  If we say “socialist,” they say “not socialist.”  It’s as simple as that.

Putting aside the MSM’s collective beliefs and motives, I wonder how the peons and serfs feel about the term “socialist.”  I’m not talking about their actual knowledge of what socialism entails or whether it’s good or bad for the citizens of the country in which it is the dominant political ideology.  I’m talking about the visceral response they have when they learn that their President, even as he was identifying himself on ballots as a Democrat, and vigorously (and dishonestly) denying every being a socialist, was in fact a socialist.

Does that newly proved knowledly send a shiver of revulsion up and down the ordinary citizen’s spine? Or, more than twenty years after the Soviet Union broke up, and more than forty years after the Leftists took over America’s educational institutions, is the word “socialist” utterly without emotional meaning?

Self-identified Democrat Progressives probably think it’s great that someone steeped in socialism got so far.  But they’re already all over Obama anyway.  It’s the other ones.  The loosey-goosey Democrats and the wishy-washy Independents — do they care?  Even if Obama’s self-identified socialism made the headlines on every evening news and in every American print publication, would it matter?

I don’t think it matters.  I think that, for conservatives, it’s vindication, insofar as we knew all along that the MSM and the Obama team were blatantly lying to us.  And to the extent politically disinterested people don’t like having people lie to them, the fact of the lie might matter.  But the lie’s subject matter — Obama’s true political orientation — doesn’t matter a damn.  Rush is right that “words have meaning.”  No one knows that better that the Left, with their constant PC Newspeak.  It’s no wonder, then, that they have spent the last 40 years draining the word “socialist” of any meaning within the American political scene.