++Paul Mulshine delivered a blistering critique of Chris Christie's foreign policy statements of last week. Mulshine blasted Christie for his criticism of "civil Liberties extremist" who oppose the NSA's surveillance program. He goes so far as to quote Andrew Napalitano's the Fox News legal analyst who said that "being for the Fourth Amenment isn't extremism."
++But the reason for awarding Mulshine the history award is his take on "American exceptionalism". Readers of this blog know it was a term coined by Karl Marx. But Mulshine points to its modern occurrence.
++The phrase was used by Jay Lovestone,one of the founders of the American Communist Party, in a letter to Joseph Stalin in 1929. Mulshine gets Lovestone's trajectory right. he went from Communist to the Democratic Party onto the Republican Party, where he was the great-grandfather of the neocons. I knew Jay. He told me that he fled the Soviet Union when he sided with Bukharin. He feared assassination by Stalin, telling me "Stalin had a good assessment of people",referring to his own treachery.
++Jay lived into his 90s and periodically advised the Reagan Administration. It's no coincidence that Reagan endorsed "American exceptionalism" but used the term very infrequently.
++Mulshine blasts the way this term is being used by Christie to assume America should constantly police the world on the taxpayer's dime.
++But, kudos to Mulshine for discovering Jay's letter, which adds a valuable footnote to the whole debate.
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