What's a pinko?

After years without one, I've watched TV every day for the past 6 days. Madness, I know. But I needed to see it, to get a sense of what's shaping the opinions of my people. I got to see and listen to people I only read or write about, Obama, Emanuel, Palin (lots of Palin), and a founding communitarian politician, Senator Hillary Clinton. (CNN gossip tonight is she's being considered for Sec of State.) I got to see the crowds of people crying when Obama won and it made me think about all my friends who had to have been overjoyed to see a black man become president. Some part of me wishes I too could believe in the change this should represent for Amercans, that I didn't know Obama was trained in methods for community change by the top Communitarians in the US. This is the ultimate rude way to sneak the communitarian government on the world. No wonder they created the whole eugenics movement first. They needed a race card, and without their teachings we wouldn't have the race relations we have today. Their science of anthropology and social evolution created and perpetuated the very core ideology of racism in the US.

Somehow I forgot TV included a whole slew of super slick, nicely posed experts telling us what's really going on in the country. I watched a few I recongnised, Larry King, Lou Dobbs and a few guys I'd never seen, Cooper and ?. There was a question something like, "When is it too early to critisize the new president?" and one guest said talk radio is already calling him a fascist. Not one mention of the word communitariansm yet, and I'm already pretty sick of listening to these experts so I may not endure the wait. It's gotta come up sometime, doesn't it?

What do you get when you cross a capitalist fascist with a hardliner communist? A soft communitarian.

We moved to Palmer, right next to Wasilla. Palmer is where all the planning records are. :) I've seen it said on craigslist and other forums that Wasilla is the capiltal of the KKK in Alaska. (And wow, all these 30+ years I never knew there WAS a KKK in Alaska!) I accidentally found a reference to that Charlie Daniels' song I always sing to people when they ask me why I moved to their area, better work on my voice.

Wikipedia: pinko
http://www.answers.com/topic/pinko

Pinko is a derogatory term for a person regarded as sympathetic to Communism, though not necessarily a Communist Party member. The term has its origins in the notion that pink is a lighter shade of red, the color associated with communism; thus pink could be thought of as a "lighter form of communism" promoted by mere supporters of socialism who weren't, themselves, "card-carrying" communists.

History

In politics

The word pinko was coined by Time magazine in 1926 as a variant on the noun and adjective pink, which had been used along with parlor pink since the beginning of the 20th century to refer to those of leftish sympathies, usually with an implication of "effeteness".[1] In the 1920s, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial described supporters of the progressive politician Robert La Follette as “visionaries, ne’er do wells, parlor pinks, reds, hyphenates [Americans with divided allegiance], soft handed agriculturalists and working men who have never seen a shovel.”[2]

Pinko and pink were widely used during the Cold War to label individuals accused of supporting the Soviet Union, including many supporters of ex-vice president Henry Wallace's 1948 U.S. presidential campaign with the Progressive Party. The word was predominantly used in the United States, where opposition to Communism grew strong among the population, especially during the McCarthy era. It was also in common use in South Africa during the apartheid era. In his two presidential campaigns, Alabama governor George Wallace often railed at "the left-wing pinko press" and at "pseudo-pinko-intellectuals."[3][4]

Some of the most infamous uses of the term pink came during future president Richard Nixon's 1950 Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas: "She's pink right down to her underwear!" — a play on the fact that, at the time, pink was the usual color of women's undergarments. Nixon regularly referred to her as "the Pink Lady", and his campaign distributed political flyers printed on sheets of pink paper.

In popular culture

One of the most famous uses of the term in popular culture was the ironic use by Charlie Daniels in his breakthrough 1972 hit "Uneasy Rider." The dope-running hippie narrator is stuck with a flat tire in Jackson, Mississippi. Attempting to avoid a beatdown by the locals, he attempts to deflect attention to one of the locals by accusing him of being "a friend of them long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags" sent by the FBI to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. {"why, he's even got a cammunist flag tacked up on the wall of his geerage!" ~Niki}

Recently, the term was used repeatedly on the television series John Safran vs God when Safran is referring to his target demographic. Safran is likely to have intentionally referenced Daniels' "Uneasy Rider", and notably Safran had on a previous episode infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan.

See also

* Fellow traveller
* Useful idiot
* Anticommunism
* Political colors

Notes

1. ^ Joseph J. Firebaugh, "The Vocabulary of 'Time' Magazine", American Speech, 15, 3, October, 1940.
2. ^ "Mirrors of Washington", The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 1924.
3. ^ "Wallace Campaign Aims at McCarthy Elements", Washington Post, March 23, 1964.
4. ^ "The Wallace Challenge -- and Opportunity", The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 1972.


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

"I don't even have a garage, you can call home and ask my wife!"

And there's that reference under See Also to Fellow Travelers. McCarthy used it too. I thought it was a freemason term. It was number 4 on Hoover's list of Masters of Deceit, http://www.answers.com/topic/fellow-traveler-1

Back to needing to know more about the National Bank. Reading up on McColloch v. Maryland and this is something I should have studied a decade ago. I actaully thought the bank was authorized by the Constitution. Apparently not exactly, so duh. The issue over the bank and the Supreme Court decision on this is what was used to expand the feds power and the New Deal?!? And this was at the core of the contention between the north and south/west. What about the power to coin money? Was Maryland one of the few states whose banks stayed open during the entire Big Depression?
http://www.answers.com/topic/mcculloch-v-maryland