With right wing talking heads and their celebrity guests calling the President-in-waiting a socialist or a communist because he believes in a progressive income tax, I am reminded of the days when members of the John Birch Society or other far right organization of the Cold War era thought there was a communist under every bed.

Birch Society founder Robert Welch earned a reputation as a whack job, which persists almost a quarter century after his death, for stating that President Eisenhower was a "conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy."

Dr. Martin Luther King was a frequent recipient of the communist epithet, almost always from segregationists and white supremacists. Equality, as right wing pundit Dennis Prager pointed out in just the last week, is the value that defines the political left. While Prager was simply conflating egalitarians with American Europophiles, the attempt in those days was to conflate any advocacy of equality, including racial equality, with communism.

This conflation of civil rights and communism lasted long after the issue was settled for most Americans, well into the 1980s when Senator Jesse Helms objected to declaring Dr. King's birthday a national holiday on the grounds that Dr. King was a communist. About the same time, your humble servant responded to a letter to the editor of the local newspaper which cited various laudatory remarks about Dr. King by obscure communists as proof that Dr. King was a communist. I pointed out that Lincoln was admired by no less a contemporary leftist than Karl Marx himself, and asked if that made the Great Emancipator a communist. On the other hand, even nowadays some on the far right point out what a reckless disregard for property rights the abolition of slavery was.

Barack Obama a communist? a socialist? Of course not. Nevertheless, by being accused of being one by the lunatic right, he joins good company.