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The Jax Files is an interactive, quick-hitting blog devoted to any and all things Pasco, whether whole-heartedly, tangentially or merely psychologically.

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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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The Jax Files: With Tom Jackson in Pasco

Pasco County News | Breaking News

And Now For Something Completely Different

Posted Feb 10, 2009 by Tom Jackson

Updated Feb 10, 2009 at 07:44 PM

Our favorite local Big-S Socialist, peacenik and otherwise loveable guy Brian Moore of Spring Hill, has not let his loss in November’s presidential election – he was the Socialist Party’s nominee – quell his political activism. In fact, to paraphrase Al Pacino’s Lt. Col. Frank Slade, he’s just getting warmed up.

Having spent the better part of January organizing and participating in demonstrations against Israeli military action in Hamasistan – or Gaza, if you prefer the Associated Press – Moore has turned his attention to President Obama’s engagement with the national economy. Unlike conservatives and Republicans who fret over the reach and probable ineffectiveness of the evolving – but, say polls, widely deplored – Obama/Pelosi/Reid “stimulus,” Moore decries the spendapalooza as insufficiently imaginative and timid in its reach.

Ditto, Moore says, to whatever Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner comes up with.

During an interview conducted Tuesday on Houston radio station KTRH, 740AM, Moore blasted Obama and Geithner for “their naiveté and ‘blind faith in the free market principles,’ and for their ‘hypocrisy’ in now asking the U.S. workers to take ‘collective responsibility.’ ”

In an e-mail blast arising from that interview:

Moore says socialism’s solution to the economic crisis is to “nationalize” the banks, all financial institutions, and all private corporations, and to turn over “ownership, social control and management to the workers,” he said. Socialism will “de-centralize government, not rely on big government, and it will turn over control, democratically, to the workers and citizens.”

Moore criticized President Obama for his “superficial tinkering with the economy,” and “not involving any transformational change,” as the message he campaigned on so earnestly. Moore accused the new president of “catering to the very moneyed people who supported financially a major part of his political campaign.”

Moore predicted … “Sadly,” Obama’s legacy will be one of “leading the country from populism into social anarchy,” something the Socialist Party “expects, but does not desire nor embrace.”

While we are grateful for that last disclaimer, it does little to dispel the wrong-headedness of the rest of his posture. At best, Moore is idealistically romantic and a bad historian, declining to acknowledge socialism’s multiplicity of failures over time and geography. At worst, he tempts the delusional, the disconnected and the malcontent to adopt a world view in which individual achievement suffers under the indifferent, insatiable boot of the moody masses.

Now, this is no defense of the Obama policy, which amounts to grabbing power while the grabbing is good. Indee, what ails the American economy isn’t an absence of governmental dabbling, it’s an excess. And our pal Brian Moore, good-hearted but just plain wrong, wants even more.

The Jax Files shudders at the thought.