RED SCARE. At the flagship of the American liberal conspiracy, Bill Kristol opens his column on Obama, entitled "The Mask Slips":

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania...

The temptation to stop there is great, and you might as well succumb; there's no need to parse Kristol's innuendo because it has already been mainstreamed. Senator Joe Lieberman on a Fox News Radio program:

NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question...

We could stick around for Lieberman's softer summation (he'd "hesitate" to call Obama a Marxist; doesn't say how long), but again, why bother? While Lieberman weakly back-pedals, the smaller Republican operatives put their pedals to the metal ("That [Obama would] fall on the philosophy of Karl Marx should come as no surprise. His wife, his preacher, and his friend Bill Ayers all already believe it...").

Now the accusations of Marxism are being amplified by a guy who calls himself Confederate Yankee. Again, we could just leave it at that even if he weren't already familiar with his lousy writing: No particular restatement of slurs could match the bold stroke of having someone who still mourns the War of Northern Aggression accuse Obama of supporting an alien political philosophy, association with "cranks," "warped views of religion, the Constitution, and America," and being "blind to our better nature as a nation."

Of course you could read them all verbatim, as I have, just to make sure you haven't misunderstood them. You can even read, in hopes of getting a broader perspective of conservative opinion, the more moderate among them, like Stephen Bainbridge, who says that Obama's merely a socialist. In the end you'll be stuck in the same place, that is, in the 1950s, reliving the days when mainstream Democratic candidates could count on being called Communists.