Yeah… right. That’s what I said.

But it’s true. In an op-ed for the New York Times, William Kristol compares a statement made by Obama at a San Francisco fund-raiser about the “bitter[ness]” of poor, rural, working-class people to that of Marxist rhetoric about the religion being the opiate of the masses. Obama was explaining the frustration of the economic blight of the rural class when he said:

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Apparently, after Kristol heard/read this statement he was hit with a bit of Marxist insight. Even though Kristol admits he hasn’t “read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s,” he claims an Obama-Marx nexus of political ideology. In his op-ed he quotes from Marx:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Oh, for the love of philosophical integrity, please stop.

First off, if you haven’t read Marx since the late 80s, and you’re a self-proclaimed neo-conservative, you ought to abstain, when at all possible, from the Marxist references. This, lets-scare-them-with-red-language, nonsense has already been politically wasted. McCarthy did this same type of thing, albeit with more vigor and with a broader, more noxious agenda, some 60 years ago. You’re not fooling anyone Mr. Kristol; you’re only making yourself look like you’ve come down with red-fever and in need of immediate inoculation. Communism isn’t all that great of a political structure, thanks Mr. Kristol, I never knew. I better put down my Communist Manifesto.

Secondly, what is inaccurate about what Obama has said? The people he’s describing are those who haven’t much to call their “own,” other than their god, their gun, and their xenophobia. Who wouldn’t be “bitter?” Not to say that religion is necessarily bad; but I highly doubt that this is the “love-all” type of religion. Obama is looking at ways to alter this psychological conundrum induced by years of abject poverty and economic degradation by introducing economic reform. Does Mr. Kristol read it as such? No. Not at all, actually. According to Kristol, “[Obama's] disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.”

In the last quote, I think Kristol meant the “Proletariat.” If he’s talking about small town, rural workers, they’re anything but bourgeois.

I’ll leave off with a quote from Joe Lieberman, responding to a question given to him about whether or not he thinks Obama is a “Marxist:”

“Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.”

Joe Lieberman on mainstream America, everybody.