Margie Wakefield begins race with "extremist" smear

Margie Wakefield, a Lawrence attorney, announced yesterday that she will be a Democratic Party candidate to challenge GOP Rep. Lynn Jenkins for the Kansas Second District congressional seat. Demonstrating that she will be more of a name-caller than a problem-solver, Wakefield told the audience, "Kansas will lead the country this year in a backlash against the extremists and obstructionists that hold elected office now."

Liberals/progressives/socialists have been using the "extremist" smear against conservatives for many decades now. Sometimes it works, such as when Democrat Dennis Moore used it against Republican Vince Snowbarger in the 3rd District race in 1998. Moore won that race, but then went on the be named a "Liberal Hero" by Americans for Democratic Action, the largest liberal lobbying organization in the U.S., in 1999.

More often than not, the "extremist" smear does not work in Kansas, and for good reason: Members of Wakefield's party are the ones out of the mainstream in Kansas. That Wakefield would use the term suggests that she is being directed by advisers in D.C. and really doesn't have any original ideas of her own.

In her essay "'Extremism' or the Art of Smearing," Ayn Rand characterized the "extremist" smear as an "anti-concept." According to Rand, "The purpose of 'anti-concepts' is to obliterate certain concepts without public discussion; and, as a means to that end, to make public discussion unintelligible, and to induce the same disintegration in the mind of any man who accepts them, rendering him incapable of clear thinking or rational judgment. No mind is better than the precision of its concepts." Further, "If an uncompromising stand is to be smeared as 'extremism,' then that smear is directed at any devotion to values, any loyalty to principles, any profound conviction, any consistency, any steadfastness, any passion, any dedication to an unbreached, inviolate truth—any man of integrity."

Keep that in mind as Wakefield continues with the "extremist" nonsense.

Also, keep in mind that Wakefield hopes to join a Democratic Party caucus in D.C. that has 80 members who belong to the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).  CPC was founded by socialist Bernie Sanders and five other members of the U.S. House in 1991. Another founder was Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA), who was also a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In fact, DSA helped set up CPC and describes CPC as the "socialist caucus in Congress." According to DSA's website, "Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus."

DSA is an affiliate of the Socialist International, which, according to Michael Harrington, the chairman of DSA until his death in 1989, claims "direct descent from Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association." Other affiliates of the Socialist International include the Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua and Fatah, the Palestinian political party that was classified as a terrorist organization by the United States Department of State and United States Congress until it renounced terrorism in 1988.

As the late Balint Vazsonyi, who first exposed that CPC’s official webpage was originally hosted on DSA’s website during the late 1990s, noted in 2002, "every single tenet of the Socialist International is the exact opposite of the principles upon which America was founded, and which define the U.S. Constitution." That’s the same Constitution CPC members took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend.

Lynn Jenkins is no extremist. If Wakefield wants to see true extremists, she should take a good look at the members of her party in D.C.

- For more information on the CPC-DSA connection, see www.chapter19.us.