So What Does a Communist Smell Like?

Just when you thought the neocons couldn't get any nuttier, with Brian Lilley of Fox News North calling the Ottawa Press Gallery Communist sympathisers, and Tea Party's Ben Shapiro believing that Sesame Street was a pinko indoctrination of children; Toronto City Councilor, Giorgio Mammoliti, is on a hunt for Communists, who according to him, would be anyone opposing Mayor Rob Ford's budget cuts.

He's started a Facebook page: Save the City. Support the Ford Administration, which has just over a thousand "red hunters". (I wonder if the Ford Motor Co. knows that they are using their logo?)

If you want to know how to hunt down a Communist though, apparently they give off an odour of vodka and borscht. Who knows?

But Mammoliti swears that he'll sniff them out.

"... I will be monitoring their comments,” he said, “and if I get a smell of communism, they’re off the page.” Asked by a laughing reporter how he would smell communism, Mammoliti laughed and said, “Only Mammoliti has that keen sense of smell.”

Clearly the only sense he still has that's working.

What is the endgame for these people? Do they really hope to recreate a "red scare"?

When the Neoconservatives claimed that they wanted to take us back to the 1950s, they weren't kidding. Joseph McCarthy lives again.

What next, book burning?

Of course, Ford plans to close down the libraries in Toronto, which will give Mammoliti's nose a rest. Far too many subversive texts.

This red baiter also claims to support only those who truly work for a living. Don Cherry told Fox News North that university professors had never worked a day in their lives.

So who else would be on the list of non-workers?

Teachers? Social workers? Nurses?

When Tony Clement was in the Mike Harris government he attacked nurses with a vengeance. Stockwell Day did the same when with Ralph Klein in Alberta.

Do YOU have a real job?

It's funny, when I wrote of my ordeal at a Harper rally in Kingston during the last campaign, when I was finally able to get to my car, I noticed that on the front seat I had a copy of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, that I had just picked up at a library sale.

I also own a copy of Das Kapital.

Can I expect a hard rap on the door? Someone sniffing me when I walk down the street?

I think these people are going to "crazy" themselves out. At least I hope so.

In the U.S. people are already turning off the Tea Party nonsense, since their obvious involvement with the "debt crisis" fiasco.

And we see what is happening in the UK, in reaction to their austerity budget, against the backdrop of a multi-million dollar royal wedding.

The future is looking bleak.