I used to know a guy who grew up in the Yugoslavian ghetto of North Jersey, with a childhood spent with only limited contact with anyone outside that community.  He desperately wanted to become a conservative activist and was constantly coming up with complicated schemes, large parts of which involved contacting and placating a (nonexistent) hierarchy that was constantly watching, knew all things, and held the ultimate veto on just about everything.  When it was explained to him that this was unnecessary, he'd say, "Uh...okay..." and fall silent, only to come up with a similar scheme in short order. It wasn't long before I realized that this was exactly how things worked in Tito's Yugoslavia, and, though raised in the U.S., he'd been exposed to and internalized it to the nth degree.  He was living in a mental communist dictatorship and always would be. This came to mind as I was reading about Rashida Tlaib's...(Read Full Post)