Grandma's House

Well, John Kerry is actually proposing some resolutions in the Senate. Unfortunately, they are not exactly what I would call a good idea:

As sponsor of a resolution that would have the Senate honor the late W.E.B. Du Bois, Kerry is promoting a man who was fervently anti-American, a member of the Soviet-dominated Communist Party, and twice ejected from the NAACP for his opposition to racial integration.

It would not be the first time a nation has honored Du Bois. According to Daniel J. Flynn, writing in Human Events, the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, and Maoist China staged a national holiday in his honor in 1959.

Why in the world should we honor someone with those credentials? But it seems he wasn't acting alone in proposing this resolution:

Kerry promoted his Senate resolution, co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy (Mass.) and Carl Levin (Mich.), by declaring, "Dr. Du Bois taught us that the promise of freedom is honored through action."

The reality is far different. Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and joined the Communist Party. In writing longtime Communist Party U.S.A. Chairman Gus Hall in 1961, the reflexively anti-American intellectual called communism "the only way of human life” and predicted that the free market was "doomed to self-destruction."

Somehow I don't think the free market is even close to "self-destruction", do you? Want to know more about this pillar of the community John Kerry wants to honor?

Here's just a small part of Du Bois’ pro-Communist record, as reported by Human Events:

During the Korean war in 1950, in which 54,246 American service men and women would die, Du Bois said that "the North Koreans are fighting exactly the things for which Americans fought in 1776."

Three years later, he eulogized Soviet dictator Stalin - one of history's worst mass murderers - as a "great" and "courageous" man, "attacked and slandered as few men of power have been." In his posthumously published autobiography, he called the crackdown on religion behind the Iron Curtain "the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world."

After a 1937 visit to Nazi Germany, he admitted that the Nazis had stamped out freedom, but nevertheless praised the Hitlerites for creating "a nation at work after a nightmare of unemployment; and the results of this work are shown not simply by private profits, but by houses for the poor; new roads; an end of strikes and labor troubles; widespread industrial and unemployment insurance; the guarding of public and private health; great celebrations, organizations for old and young, new songs, new ideals, a new state, a new race." He failed to mention concentration camps and the gas ovens that consumed millions. And while condemning anti-Semitism, Flynn noted, Du Bois called it "a reasoned prejudice" in Hitler's Germany.

Is this how John Kerry is planning to convince voters in 2008 that he's the right man for the job?