How To Bait Reds

I'm guessing Ken Macleod is still peeved about his son being assaulted in public a few days ago. I'd be peeved too, truth to tell. I wondered what he was doing yesterday when he posted this but he confirmed my suspicions today:

It took, oh, hours for the comrades at SIAW to pounce on the post below as apparently 'a quixotic attempt to rehabilitate Josef Stalin as a great Marxist thinker'.

Sounds like he was baiting the reds. Don't get me wrong— I'm not chastising him for it. I'm sympathizing.

Last time I was doing my street-corner hawking for my friendly, neighborhood Opposition Candidate (Ro Khanna is running in the primary against Tom Lantos for the 12th district U.S. House of Representatives seat), I was doing fine until the local cadre of the International Socialist Organization air-dropped six of their most annoying comrades onto all four corners of 9th Avenue and Irving Street to drum up signatures for a petition to stay the execution of some convicted murderer scheduled to die by lethal injection unless Herr Gropenfuhrer does something totally unexpected and issues a stay or something.

I so wanted to get in their face and remind them that for almost sixty years now they have sat on their hands about Taft-Hartley, and one wonders if they even remember that they're supposed to be trying to get it repealed.

Would have been bad sportsmanship, and I didn't want the inevitable scene this would produce to reflect badly on my candidate. But it was really annoying when one of them had the gall to get all up in my face about whether my guy was sufficiently emphatic in his opposition to the death penalty. Damned reds.

You can troll them all you want, Ken. I'll cheer you on.