Bukharin

A bit of luck this week, I've finally got the Obama program into my stupid, racist, fascist head and I didn't have to spend anytime in some American Gulag or have my head wrapped in a plastic bag so a member of the American Volunteer Service (Or Young Pioneers or whatever they're calling the Obama Youth.) doesn't have to waste a bullet.

I get it. Its time for us conservatives (I don't know how I got to be conservative, I'm the most profligate person I know.) to step out of the way with our woolly headed slippery slope arguments and let the Progressive Express chug through on its way to creating heaven on earth even if it looks like heaven is a siding in Auschwitz. Fun fact: Totalitarians love trains. Under our hapless old democracy Amtrak has become a bumbling embarrassment to European intellectuals and emblematic of failed transit policy, maybe one of the Czars (or Tsars) will make it run on time.

My liberal friends tell me there is nothing wrong that can't be fixed with the application of more money. Health care will be administered by the same kind folks that made Medicare the smooth, efficient, trouble free operation it is, maybe with the velvet touch of the IRS thrown in just to leaven the fun. There might be some bumps in the road, the government seems to have trouble with simple things like handing out free money for clunkers but I'm assured the details will be worked out just as soon as they hire some more bureaucrats.

I'm confident our representatives and senators are studying, researching and reading every detail of the health care bills to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

I am holding my breath to see how they tidy up the messes at the Departments of Education and Energy. We are so close to being energy independent and getting our kids educated. If only rich conservatives would only be a little more generous and get out of the way. With a couple or three more trillion dollars our bureaucrats will get back behind their desks and begin fixing the organizations they have run into the ground.

They need us to shut the f**k up. (When did we start spelling fuck with asterisks?) Hopefully the administration is busily consolidating its power so it can crack down on the recalcitrants and cranky kulaks that fail to understand that all this is for their own darn good. With all their critics safely tucked away they can deliver on the promised change they believe in.

Which brings me to the tragic-comic life of the bright, well meaning, idealistic, hypocrite and cynic Nikolai Bukharin. As everyone knows Buhkarin was an intellectual apologist for Communism and crony of Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky as well as Zinoviev, Kamenev and other people you've never heard of. He wrote a lot of propaganda justifying the worst of the Bolshevik program then enjoyed a laugh or two with his politburo buddies when it turned out he was bullshitting. He had an unfortunate habit of jumping on bandwagons late and not getting off in time which caught up with him in 1929 when he disagreed with Stalin on the NEP (That's the New Economic Policy for you in the back row.) and lost.

Later on he was tried and convicted for being an asshole that Stalin got tired of arguing with but he kept at it, writing long letters to Stalin ("Koba, why do you need me to die?") in which he argued that the revolution was great, killing millions of Kulaks made sense and of course counter revolutionaries had to die but not him. Stalin considered what he had to say then had him shot, packed his lovely wife Larina off to the gulag for twenty years and kept the letter in his desk until he died either as a memento of their friendship or as a handy source of a good laugh.

I always think of Buhkarin when the politically correct sands of the progressive program shift. My progressive friends always assure me that that sort of thing just can't happen here, dissent will never be criminalized and they'll get it right this time. Of course they will, they're bright, well meaning and idealists but then again most have no idea what a kulak is and have never heard of Buhkarin.