If I were to write an article about Obama's new slogan. FORWARD, it would have looked just like the one published in FrontPageMag.com by Daniel Greenfield. So all I had to do was illustrate it.
The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it's "Forward." The left has always been enamored of "Forwardism" or "Progressivism" which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had "Lean Forward," Mao had the Great Leap Forward, which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.
When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, "Vperod" or "Forward." The name has popped up on the mastheads of left-wing newspapers across the world. It's "Vorwarts" in Germany, "Voorwarts" in the Netherlands and "Ila al-Amam" in the Arab world. Back in New York it's "The Forward."
There are any number of left-wing political parties who have named themselves "Forward", including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.
Picking Forward as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that its meant more as an order than a suggestion. Theres a reason leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. Its not a proposal, its a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. Weve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so theres no going back.
An old Soviet era joke told the story of the wife of a Communist leader who upon hearing that her husband had developed a progressive paralysis, clapped her hands and exclaimed that at least it was progressive. That is the underlying message of Forward to voters: the country may be paralyzed, but at least its a progressive paralysis which leaves us unable to move our heads and stop leaning forward.