Ted Cruz's office says "in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of 'critical legal studies'..."

"... a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans."

That's in response to a New Yorker article quoting something Cruz said in a speech 3 years ago. (What Cruz said back then, at an Americans for Prosperity conference, was that when he was at Harvard Law School "There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.")

The Cruz spokesperson called it "curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it 'news.'"

Curious... there's a noncommittal word. I don't see anything wrong with digging stuff out of old Cruz speeches. He's a new character on the national stage, so it's not like old territory is being reworked. It was an inflammatory statement, and he needs to stand by it (and back it up), defend it as hyperbole, or concede he was wrong.
The New Yorker writer, Jane Mayer, was following up after Barbara Boxer had compared Cruz to Joseph McCarthy. That was pretty inflammatory too (as I said at the time). What Boxer said made it a valid line of inquiry for Mayer and not odd at all. What you say to your base will be heard by the outsiders too, and any politician needs to be prepared for that. Republicans hoping for a new star better not forget how badly Mitt Romney faltered when he had to deal with the 47% remark he'd used on the insider group. This Cruz quote is the same kind of thing. Don't minimize it.

Mayer talked to Charles Fried, the Harvard lawprof who was probably the one Republican referred to by Cruz. Fried says:

"I have not taken a poll, but I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government".... Fried acknowledged that "there were a certain number (twelve seems to me too high) who were quite radical, but I doubt if any had allegiance or sympathy with anything called ‘the Communists,’ who at that time (unlike the thirties and forties) were in quite bad odor among radical intellectuals.” He pointed out that by the nineteen-nineties, Communist states were widely regarded as tyrannical. From Fried’s perspective, the radicals on the faculty were "a pain in the neck." But he says that Cruz’s assertion that they were Communists “misunderstands what they were about."

Clearly, it was rhetoric to call the Critical Legal Studies professors "Marxists" who believed in "Communist" revolution, and Cruz chose to do that at a particular place and time. Cruz is accountable for that. It's a shibboleth of the right to rely on the words "Marxist" and "Communist." It wasn't the way the lefty lawprofs of the time talked about themselves. I have a vivid memory of saying to a CLS lawprof — a very good friend, during a casual conversation — "I'd like to know about the connection between CLS and Marxism." She snapped: "There's none." I got the message: You sound right wing. It was understood that to sound right wing was to become toxic.

Here's a useful passage from the classic 1983 CLS book by Harvard lawprof Duncan Kennedy, "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System":

Left-liberal rights analysis submerges the student in legal rhetoric, but, because of its inherent vacuousness, can provide no more than an emotional stance against the legal order. The instrumental Marxist approach is highly critical of law, but also dismissive. It is no help in coming to grips with the particularity of rules and rhetoric, because it treats them, a priori, as mere window dressing. In each case, left theory fails left students because it offers no base for the mastery of ambivalence. What is needed is to think about law in a way that will allow one to enter into it, to criticize without utterly rejecting it, and to manipulate it without self-abandonment to their system of thinking and doing.

Now that we're talking about the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," we must take note of Ayn Rand.

We were talking about "King of Kings," because we were talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand, because various blogs were talking about an Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to carry out a stoning. I started to wonder whether the first commenter who mentioned "King of Kings" was talking about the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille picture or the 1961 Nicholas Ray flick. So I'm over here on the King of Kings (1927 film) page at Wikipedia, and I see:

Sally Rand, before becoming notorious for her "fan dance" at the 1933 World's Fair, was an extra in the film.

Ayn Rand (no relation to Sally Rand) also was an extra in the film, and met her future husband Frank O'Connor on set.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip of Ayn Rand in "King of Kings," but I did find Sally Rand and her notorious World's Fair fan dance:



I also found this 2009 New Yorker article about Ayn Rand that covers the "King of Kings" phase:

Rand... left the U.S.S.R. for America.... Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing.... Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.”....

How do you feel about all those connections? The Soviet Union, the love of movies, immigration to the land of movies, name-changing, finding the love of your life on a movie set in Hollywood, strippers performing what is only the illusion of nakedness, and... Jesus.

"It's always interesting to me to see what others, especially Americans have to say about 'what it was like' to live under Communist rule."

Writes my colleague Nina, as she begins her annual journey back to Poland. She's reading Anne Applebaum's new book — "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" — and thinking about her own nascent book:

Since I am so close to finishing my great (summer, as it turns out) writing project, it's a good time to take stock: to see if what I wrote still feels right. I'll be looking for that.

The atheist, building churches, said he "avoided conventional solutions, which had produced the old dark cathedrals reminding us of sin."

Oscar Niemeyer. Dead, now, at 104. He was also a communist. (Fidel Castro was a personal friend.) He won the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, which he accepted in Moscow, saying:

“On the politics, I’m with you.... But your architecture is awful. Look, I didn’t come here to criticize, but you asked. It’s terrible.”

"On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason."

Best answer to the question why Paul Ryan — and not Biden (or Obama or Romney) — drank water during the debate. I had 5 suggested answers in my poll:



But the commenters — both in my post here and over at the poll site — came up with some funny answers:

"Hey — you think you're the only one playing a drinking-game during that debate!?"

"Drinking water helped him keep his cool and avoid beating the shit out of that smug asshole Biden."

"Heat generated by combination of Biden's gusty pizza cheese-smelling sighs and the dazzling white-hot glare from Biden's fake chompers led to increased need for hydration."

"Possibly he had come across Enoch Powell's 'Full Bladder technique.' Powell was a British politician of fifty years ago, famous, inter alia, for being a brilliant public speaker. He always made his speeches on a full bladder, on the theory that it helped concentrate the mind."

"Actually, it was a specially devised clear liquid CHEAT SHEET full of rethuglican LIES!!!"

And thanks as well to those who said things like:

Thanks for posting this, Ann. I've long felt that Instapundit was a bit too heavy on links to relevant and/or interesting content.

Wow. That's some hard hitting insightful analysis there, Ann.

I say thanks because it's helpful to me to remember that there's a segment of the population that doesn't get fun. I assume my readers are fun-loving, but there are some people who are essentially fun deaf, and things like this are as annoying as Joe Biden guffawing while Paul Ryan is talking about nuclear war in the Middle East.

Perhaps for some people, the sorrows and travails of this world are so weighty that we ought to demand a somber demeanor at all times — not just from ourselves, but from others. I can imagine a religion that requires grim facial and verbal expression at all times and for everyone, forever. An eternal funeral. After all: People are dying, dying at the rate of one per second. Wipe that smile off your face. Permanently.

Okay. I just wanted to acknowledge that you of the Religion of Grim are out there. And now, why don't you just take it easy, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like?

"And when Ryan riffed on the handful of jobs he briefly held, his Ayn Randian roots were clear."

Writes Joan Walsh at Salon. Here's what Paul Ryan said that Walsh thinks is "straight out of Rand, and ’50s anti-Communist paranoia":

“When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life... I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”

If you believe the individual can think and decide for himself and pursue happiness as he defines it... you're delusional — in Walsh's view. You see what she's saying? She's saying you didn't build that — the very phrase Obama is straining to disown. You didn't build that, you can't build that, and you're psychotic if you imagine that you can. She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace.

But she doesn't think she's openly embracing it. She thinks Ryan is paranoid to imply that the Democrats favor "the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners." Pressed, she might — I assume — assert that it's fine for individuals to try to come up with their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives and to set out to achieve their goals, but that it's inaccurate to portray this enterprise as solitary and in defiance of the larger efforts of government and society (which they depend on no matter what they do).

But that's not what Walsh says. She's stirring up partisan discord and not inclined to concede that our differences, in the United States, are only a matter of leaning toward individualism or collectivism as we mostly keep to the middle of the road.

"White House Already Denying That Mandate Is A Tax. If you deny that it’s a tax, you admit that it’s unconstitutional...."

Says Instapundit, linking here.

I've got to disagree. Under Chief Justice Roberts' opinion, what matters under the constitutional law is how the thing operates in reality, not what you call it. You can switch the the labels around, play whatever political euphemism games you like, and the judges will let you get away with that. It's propaganda. Knock yourself out. Bamboozle the people. Democracy rolls on.

But in court — the message is — we look through the surface and see what is really happening. And if it is structured and functions like a tax, it's a tax.

You know, there's a saying that lawyers and lawprofs like. I think it's corny, so I haven't been saying it. I don't think that in 25+ years of teaching law I've ever said it, but I've heard it said so many times, and it's said because it's a way of saying something that lawyers and lawprofs really think about law: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Googling that saying, I get — as my first result — a Wikipedia page titled "Duck test."

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote "when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."The phrase may also have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist....

Later references to the duck test include Cardinal Richard Cushing's, who used the phrase in 1964 in reference to Fidel Castro.

Oh! I didn't know I'd encounter so much communism!

Make of it what you will. We have a democracy, and it's not going to work if we can't handle the bullshit.

The President can say it's not a tax, and it's still a tax for the purposes of analyzing the taxing power. The Supreme Court has validated lying.

Did you notice the other case that came out last Thursday also put the stamp of approval on lying? It was United States v. Alvarez — the "Stolen Valor" case. A man who lied and said he'd won the Congressional Medal of Honor was prosecuted, and he won on free speech grounds in the Supreme Court.

So Thursday in the U.S. Supreme Court was a great day for the grand old human practice of lying. From Justice Alito's dissenting opinion in Alvarez:

Respondent’s brief features a veritable paean to lying. According to respondent, his lie about the Medal of Honor was nothing out of the ordinary for 21st-century Americans. “Everyone lies,” he says. Brief for Respondent 10. “We lie all the time.” Ibid. “[H]uman beings are constantly forced to choose the persona we present to the world, and our choices nearly always involve intentional omissions and misrepresentations, if not outright deception.” Id., at 39.

 Everybody's always lying.

Now, grow up, pay attention, and don't get played.

I encounter "The Constitution Made Easy."

At a Tea Party rally here in Madison this evening, the author Michael Holler challenged people to understand the Constitution, and I took his quiz. Did I flunk? Did I ace it? Check this out:

Eric Hovde — running for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin — "said President Barack Obama is sending the country down a 'dark path' and the Democratic Party has its roots in communism."

Reports Patrick Marley in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I'd sure like a real quote there! So he used the phrase "dark path" — an unwise metaphor that can be picked up by race-card players. But what did he say that got paraphrased as "the Democratic Party has its roots in communism"?

We get this direct quote: "The other side -- our side -- is rooted in the philosophy of self determination, free-market capitalism and conservatism." Which sounds fine.

Hovde was speaking at the GOP convention, where he was eliminated on the first vote. Tommy Thompson, interestingly enough, was eliminated on the second vote, and no one is getting the endorsement:

None of the four Republican candidates for U.S. Senate were able to capture 60 percent support at the state party convention Saturday, meaning no one will get the party's official endorsement.

The vote was an especially tough blow to former Gov. Tommy Thompson — who was first elected to public office in 1966 — as he was eliminated in the second round of voting after getting just 18 percent support. It also served as a stinging rebuke to political newcomer Eric Hovde, who was eliminated in the first round of voting with 16 percent.

Saturday provided a boost to state Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, who has dramatically trailed both Thompson and Hovde in fundraising but emerged with the most support from Republican Party faithful after the third and final round of voting. Still, he couldn't reach the threshold required to get the endorsement and the money, access to the party's grass roots network and other support that comes with it. Former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann came in second behind Fitzgerald in the final vote.

"Turns out Allen West misspoke. He said Communist Party when he meant Congressional Progressive Caucus.'

"But really, what's the difference?" Oh, no! Meade is winding them up over at the Isthmus forum...

I have here in my hand a list of 78 card-carrying members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus....

"Allen West is denigrating the millions of Americans who voted to elect Congressional Progressive Caucus members..."

"... and he is ignoring the oath they took to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution — just like he did... Calling fellow members of Congress 'communists' is reminiscent of the days when Joe McCarthy divided Americans with name-calling and modern-day witch hunts that don't advance policies to benefit people's lives."

Said Representatives Raul M. Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose members Representative West has called "card-carrying Marxists" and "members of the Communist Party."

West's spokesperson defends his remark by saying "The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies," which doesn't explain how that makes them "members of the Communist Party."

West just sounds nutty. I'm saying that because I can't even think of a reason why he'd want to talk like that. 

"I get communism from this ad," said Meade...

... looking at the March issue of Bike magazine and alluding to the funniest thing Isaac Mizrahi ever said on "Project Runway." ("I get communism from this dress.")



That's my snapshot — which Meade urged me to take — with the "L" in "motherland" buried in the binding. Meade and I take opposite positions on whether this is a terrible ad. He's saying a company wouldn't appropriate Nazi imagery to push a product, and Soviet communism ought to be considered equally toxic.

I observed that the ad is anti-communist, with the headline: "This ain't the motherland, comrade. You have a CHOICE." In the Soviet Union, you had no choice. In America, you have choice! And "CCCP" — normally, a way to write USSR — is redefined as "Custom Color Choice Program."

Meade says it's still wrong, citing the millions of victims of Soviet communism upon whose dead bodies you cannot construct jokes. And I was all: Hey, wait a minute! The reason you wanted me to take the photo is because your right-wing friend has a Santa Cruz bike and you wanted to needle him!"

And thus the conversation gets good enough that I end up feeling like it's bloggable, and now Meade has leveraged my interest in whatever's interesting to the point where he can now needle [unnamed friend] with this blog post.

In looking up the Isaac Mizrahi quote, I found a blogger (Tina Waltke) who had heard the quote before seeing the dress — which you can see at the first link, above — and she was wondering what makes a dress look communist. Her idea was derived from an old Wendy's ad, which basically uses the same "choice" theme that Santa Cruz is using:



Hilarious ad! Now... are we not supposed to do that with communism? I'm saying mockery is great. And we do mock Nazism too (but we never connect a product to Nazism, even to distinguish it from Nazism, the way the Santa Cruz and the Wendy's ad distinguish their product from communism).

IN THE COMMENTS: k said: "I'm pretty sure CCCP was actually USSR in Cyrillic letters. Wasn't it?" And I said: "That's what I thought too... and then I trusted Wikipedia!"

ADDED: I've corrected the original now, and Wikipedia confused me but didn't really get this wrong. I was distracted by the "disambiguation" stuff at the top of the page.

Photos of the ruins of Buzludha, Bulgaria's extravagant monument to communism.

"A terrible snow storm surrounded the monument for the first 4 days we spent on the mountain.  During our daily visits to the site, I did not once get to see this fantastic structure from a distance. Striding towards it through deep powder, it would only emerge from the dense white fog just a matter of metres away."

Timothy Allen, via Metafilter, where the first comment reads: "It looks like what people in the 60s and 70s thought The Future was going to look like. I could easily see that as a set on a 1972 sci-fi show."

"When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine."

"I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn’t work, but I’ve never pretended it didn’t happen to me. At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind."

Wislawa Szymborska. RIP.

"Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history."

"Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home."

Life on the project has a way of sucking people in. Since 2008, more than a few crew members stopped pretending this was a temporary gig and have moved to Kharkov. Most are fresh out of film school, but several have left behind serious careers. Some moved their families to Kharkov. Others started new families right here....

"The Movie Set That Ate Itself" by Michael Idov. (This essay was pointed out in David Brooks's "Sidney Awards" column, which talks about a couple other things that I'd blog if it were not Christmas Eve Day. They are too horrible to mention today.)

ADDED: But Instapundit just mentioned one of them.

"Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred."

Vaclav Havel, RIP.

An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers like Frank Zappa, he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish.

18 seconds of raw class warfare.

Scary!



"It's coming! Get ready! All you fucking tea-party-baggers. It's coming. Get ready."

Meade visits the Wisconsin Capitol singalong — "Which side are you on?" — last Friday, August 26th.

R.A.A.N. = Red & Anarchist Action Network. I'll let you Google that yourself. It seems to be connected with a record label, and I can't help viewing this as mostly about promoting music. It's a tired old musical message at this point in punk history. But who knows? Maybe these people are coming to get us.

"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle."

ADDED: Longer video here.

"Parents can rid campuses of communists..."

"... who cloak themselves in 'academic freedom.'"

"[T]o achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another."

Writes Terry Eagleton in his essay "In Praise of Marx":

It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution.

Marx's goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having to work....

Love... and leisure...