Blame the Predecessor, Not the Ideology: A Historical Leftist Tactic

PJ Media  I witnessed this strategy in the Soviet Union, and now I see it at Occupy Wall Street. It always fails. Ion Mihai Pacepa  "Instead of pulling up their socks and encouraging the production — not redistribution — of wealth, the leaders of the Democrat-run White House and U.S. Senate blamed former president George W. Bush for the current economic calamity. No American really bought it. So then the Democrats blamed the Japanese tsunami. No more luck. Blaming the Arab Spring and the European economic crisis did not do the trick either. Now the Democrats are blaming Wall Street — whatever that means — and America’s rich. They are the real evil. They are sucking the people’s blood, wrecking America.

"In the sanctum sanctorum of the former Soviet empire, to which I once belonged, finding a scapegoat for the mistakes of a country’s leader was called “political necrophagy.” Although Marxism proclaimed the deciding role in history to be played by “the people,” the Marxists sitting on the Kremlin throne believed that only the leader counted. From the lips of Khrushchev himself, I used to hear over and over: “Change the public image of the leader, and you change history.” "  Emphasis added.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest official who has ever defected from the Soviet bloc. In 1989 Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose main accusations came out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons...