Missouri’s favorite anti-tax zealot is all worked up over the impending beating his cadre of losers is about to absorb – to the point that he has taken total leave of his senses and forgotten the definitions of the terms he learned in ninth grade civics.  

In other words, this word “socialism” – I don’t think it means what he thinks it means.  Yet in spite of this, the odds are not in our favor that he will a) shut his fetid maw or b) stick to actual, you know, facts and dictionary definitions.  

“Make no mistake,” Hancock told a John McCain rally in St. Charles, “this campaign is a referendum on socialism,” echoing a common, but totally wrong, republican mantra that has permeated the final weeks of the campaign.  

Let’s cut to the chase and address the actual definition of socialism.  Put simply, it means that the workers control the means of production.  Now how the hell does progressive taxation translate to socialism?  The answer, of course, is “Don’t be an idiot.  It doesn’t.”

Paul Beck, a professor of political science at The Ohio State University was succinct in his dismissal of the silliness.  “The answer is clearly no, Senator Obama is not a socialist.  We’ve had a progressive tax system for some time, and both Republicans and Democrats have bought into it.”

But the right wingnuts aren’t just spouting ignorance – if they were, they could be forgiven.  Instead, they are flogging a far more insidious meme.  

When the rabid right says “socialist” they are, for all intents and purposes, employing racist code and dancing all around that horrible word they really want to use but can’t.

Affixing the socialist moniker to uppity black folks who had the temerity to fight for equality was a favorite tactic of J. Edgar Hoover.  He applied it to everyone with brown skin who dared stand up.  He used the term to dismiss Martin Luther King, Jr. who led the civil rights movement in the 60’s.  He applied it to Paul Robeson who refused to abandon his pride in the thirties.  He hurled the term at W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP in the early years of the 20th century.  What was the one thing that these three men, who lived at different times and moved in different circles had in common?  Bingo.  They were all black.

Hoover and men like him used that word to foster  a distrust of “the other,” who they perceived as a threat to the status quo.  Taken a step further, threats to the status quo were by definition threatening to Hoover and his ilk, men who enjoyed a privileged status in society by virtue of their race and gender.  

And now the last barrier is about to fall.  But before it does, McCain and Palin and their bigoted, small-minded, desperate and pathetic stooges like Hancock will make that last feeble stand on fearmongering and hatred.  It is sad, really, to see the depths the republicans have proceeded to plumb.  It is so ridiculous on it’s very face that it would be funny, if not for the deliberate mendacity involved in perpetuating this whole sordid mess.