The Republican ticket will be Palin/Jindal, not necessarily in that order. The big snag in Jindal running for president is that his term as governor ends in 2011 rather than 2010 as Palin’s does, and the convention is that a candidate for office promises to serve a whole term and not run for higher office. Nobody actually believes candidates when they make this promise, and nobody holds them to it afterwards, but the convention is that one must say it, and that will be difficult for Jindal, since by the time he’s up for reelection his presidential campaign will have to already be in full swing. That’s why I think Palin/Jindal is slightly more likely.

Anyway, those are my predictions for the two tickets in 2012; white men need not apply.

So the bottom line, then, is that we are operating from vastly different definitions of what “socialism” means.

Perhaps so, as I’m defining the term in line with what most self-proclaimed socialists advocate, while you’re defining it strictly in terms of what a minority of them do. Give me a reason why I should care whether the federal government legally owns all industry or whether it merely taxes and regulates it to the point of making nominal private ownership irrelevant, and I’ll rethink my position. But thus far you haven’t even tried to do that, much less succeeded. And if you think for a minute that Obama will tax industry at a lower rate than Reagan did, I can get you a great deal on a bridge near Brooklyn for less than your forthcoming tax cut.

You’ve done an equally piss-poor job of documenting my “mischaracterization” of Obama’s flip statements about Iran. What exactly have I “mischaracterized,” and how? The reference to a tiny country was his, not mine.

Finally, I can’t recall if you specifically are guilty of this, but plenty on the right have been calling Obama a “Marxist,” which is very much “the brand of socialism that existed on the other side of the Iron Curtian.”

I’m curious..why do you support Palin/Jindal? Why not Jindal/Palin or for that matter Jindal/Anyone? Maybe its the Indian-American bias in me showing, but how is Palin a better candidate than Jindal in your mind?

She’s not. I’d be every bit as happy with Jindal/Palin as with Palin/Jindal. The reason I listed her first is because she has a lot more national pull today. whether she will four years from now is anybody’s guess, but if it makes you feel better, given what I currently know about both candidates, I may well vote for Jindal over Palin if they turn out to be the two leading candidates in the ’12 Republican primary.

As for the the last quote about “strong” leaders talking to their enemies, I’m not sure what you’re hoping to prove. Kennedy’s meeting with Khrushchev was a disaster, and may well have led to teh Cuban missile crisis and the Berlin Wall. Reagan made it through his entire first term without meeting with a single Soviet leader. Even after Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov dropped off, he still wasn’t in a mad rush to meet with Gorby, and only did so when it was clearly in the U.S.’s interests for him to do so. Say it with me: preconditions.

TGirsch:

Well, for starters, I don’t see Obama calling for us to nationalize any industries. Maybe I’m operating from an “old school” definition of “socialism,” but nationalizing industries is a pretty damn important criteria for calling someone a “socialist.”

By that definition, most self-described “socialists” in Western Europe aren’t socialists, either. Of course, if you tax industries to death and regulate them to the hilt, at some point the distinction between private and “social” ownership becomes largely a matter of semantics. Even if legal state ownership of all industry were a necessary component of “real” socialism, I don’t recall Obama saying anything against the concept, either. He hasn’t weighed in on that question one way or the other. So even if we assume your definition of socialism is right, the most we can say is that Obama is either not a socialist, or he is a socialist who has the Alinsky method down pat.

Also, I recognize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I have a friend (a partisan Republican, no less) who actually grew up in South America, and he frequently complains that all the talk about Obama being a socialist, on AM talk radio and elsewhere, is “ridiculous.” This is a guy who knows first hand what actual socialism looks like, and according to him, nothing that the farthest left in the Democratic party has to offer comes even close.

Not sure why you think South America has a lock on what actual socialism looks like, but my time in Europe gave me plenty of exposure to both the democratic and the undemocratic varieties. When I call Obama a socialist, I’m not pegging him with the brand of socialism that existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I’m pegging him with the kind that existed in Western Europe then, and across Europe today. There’s a reason why Obama is more popular in Europe than he is in the U.S.

“Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries,” Obama remarked. “That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union.”

“They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,” he said. “And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying ‘we’re going to wipe you off the planet.’ “

And then you wonder why I call you “disingenuous.” :)

And, for the record, being a dictatorial thug doesn’t make one a socialist, it just makes one an asshole. Thuggishness has nothing to do with socialism. Nationalizing industry, on the other hand, does.

To quote hilzoy:

Look: socialism is a word that has a meaning. It means public control of the means of production. It does not mean taxing the top bracket at 39%. Likewise, "collective ownership" has a meaning, and it does not mean the situation that obtains when the government can repeal tax cuts for the top 5% of the population.