If It Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck...

Out of curiosity, I occasionally visit the website of the Communist Party USA to see what the wackos are up to.

It amazes me that the Communist Party still exists. After almost a century of abysmal failure, one might hope that people would have figured out Communism is not the way to go.

Just consider the awful barbaric history of Communism: the millions of Russians murdered by Lenin and starved by Stalin, the tens of millions who perished in the slave labor camps of the Soviet gulags, the tens of millions who suffered and died in the inhuman conditions of Communist prisons in China, Cuba, North Korea and eastern Europe.

With such a track record of cruelty and human misery, you might think that the Communist brand would be out of favor. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

Human beings have an amazing capacity to keep repeating the same stupid mistakes while hoping for entirely new outcomes. I cannot explain this. I can only observe that it is so.

So this morning when I visited the website of the Communist Party USA, I was not surprised to see the same tired old Socialist drivel being featured on the home page.

There were links to articles about: The War on Women -- The Dangers of Paul Ryan's Tax Cuts --  Recalling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker -- Supporting the Occupy Movement -- Fighting Against Voter ID Laws.

I clicked a link to a page with this headline: 
Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!

I read the usual boiler-plate indictment of the evil rich Capitalists and how they were destroying the lives of the poor downtrodden masses. At the end of the article, there was a bullet-pointed list of action items that I found interesting. I will quote this list below:

• End the Bush-era tax giveaways to banks, corporations and wealthy individuals.

• Close corporate tax loopholes, especially billions in tax subsidies for the oil companies.

• Raise new revenues by restoring 70% tax rate on incomes over $1 million.

• Raise $150 billion a year by imposing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculation.

• Cut the military budget by half. Bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Create jobs in a major public works program to repair our nation’s infrastructure and to make our nation number one in “green industry.” 

• Target the jobs to hard-hit inner city communities and the rural poor.

• Fully fund a national health care program and drastically increase federal aid to education, Pell Grants, and other vital human needs programs.
  

• Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that CEOs and hedge fund managers pay the same rate as the rest of us.

Then it dawned on me: Everything written on this Communist Party website could have been reprinted verbatim on the Democratic Party website. There was not a single idea advanced by the Communists that I had not heard before from Democrats.

In fact, this action list sounds a lot like the Democratic Party platform.

So, I have a question for all my Democrat friends. Does it bother you at all that your party is completely in lock-step with the policy goals of the Communist Party USA?

And if not, why not?