While a lot of attention has been paid to Anita Dunn's quotations from Chairman Mao, and there's been a lot of criticism for her praise for Mao as her "favorite political philosopher," I don't think that most people (either on the right or the left) have really had the heart to engage in a serious Maoist-style analysis of the thoughts of Spokesperson Dunn.

I realize that Dunn's remarks on Mao are getting a bit stale, and I know it's not my job to get into serious Mao mode, but when I clicked on Glenn Reynolds' link, to Megan McArdle I was just, well boldly inspired!

I thought that this must be some kind of grotesque conservative exaggeration, but no, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn really did tell a graduating high school class to emulate Mao Tse-Tung's bold and imaginative attitude during his takeover of China.

So, to hell with grotesque conservative exaggeration! It is time to boldly and imaginatively analyze the thoughts of Spokesperson Dunn according to the teachings of her favorite political philosopher, Chairman Mao!

Let's take her recent criticism of Fox News:

"Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Dunn told CNN, adding, "let's not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is." Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is "undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

In the most significant exchange on CNN, Dunn stressed that President Obama now personally views Fox as a partisan opponent, rather than a journalistic organization. "When he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point," she explained, "he is going on it to debate the opposition."

That's a big departure from how most of the Democratic establishment engages Fox. It's been a long time coming.

I refer in particular to the famous "ON THE CORRECT HANDLING OF CONTRADICTIONS AMONG THE PEOPLE" from 1957. What Mao advocated was to allow democracy for "the people," while treating enemies differently.

As Mao made clear in 1957, the idea was not new, even then:

Many people seem to think that the use of the democratic method to resolve contradictions among the people is something new. Actually it is not. Marxists have always held that the cause of the proletariat must depend on the masses of the people and that Communists must use the democratic method of persuasion and education when working among the labouring people and must on no account resort to commandism or coercion. The Chinese Communist Party faithfully adheres to this Marxist-Leninist principle. It has been our consistent view that under the people's democratic dictatorship two different methods, one dictatorial and the other democratic, should be used to resolve the two types of contradictions which differ in nature -- those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people. This idea has been explained again and again in many Party documents and in speeches by many leading comrades of our Party. In my article "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship", written in 1949, I said, "The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship." I also pointed out that in order to settle problems within the ranks of the people "the method we employ is democratic, the method of persuasion, not of compulsion". Again, in addressing the Second Session of the First National Committee of the Political Consultative Conference in June two, I said:

The people's democratic dictatorship uses two methods. Towards the enemy, it uses the method of dictatorship, that is, for as long a period of time as is necessary it does not permit them to take part in political activity and compels them to obey the law of the People's Government, to engage in labour and, through such labour, be transformed into new men. Towards the people; on the contrary, it uses the method of democracy and not of compulsion, that is, it must necessarily let them take part in political activity and does not compel them to do this or that but uses the method of democracy to educate and persuade. Such education is self-education for the people, and its basic method is criticism and self-criticism.

Thus, on many occasions we have discussed the use of the democratic method for resolving contradictions among the people; furthermore, we have in the main applied it in our work, and many cadres and many other people are familiar with it in practice. Why then do some people now feel that it is a new issue? Because, in the past, the struggle between ourselves and the enemy, both internal and external, was most acute, and contradictions among the people therefore did not attract as much attention as they do today.

Quite a few people fail to make a clear distinction between these two different types of contradictions--those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people -- and are prone to confuse: the two. It must be admitted that it is sometimes quite easy to do so. We have had instances of such confusion in our work in the past; In the course of cleaning out counter-revolutionaries good people were sometimes mistaken for bad, and such things still happen today. We are able to keep mistakes within bounds because it has been our policy to draw a sharp line between ourselves and the enemy and to rectify mistakes whenever discovered.

The Fox News clique clearly epitomizes what Mao called "the U.S. imperialists and their running dogs -- the bureaucrat-capitalists, the landlords and the Kuomintang reactionaries who represented these two classes" who it almost goes without saying "were the enemies of the people" while CNN and the friendly news agencies can be counted among what Mao called "the other classes, strata and social groups, which opposed them" all of which "came within the category of the people."

That such contradictions have to be handled differently should hardly surprise anyone who considers Mao a favorite political philosopher. Thus we see that Spokesperson Dunn's remarks about the friendly CNN and the enemy Fox are at once not only bold, but because they have been (as the Nation said) "a long time coming," they are also reassuringly traditional.

"Two different methods, one dictatorial and the other democratic!"

"Emulate the bold and imaginative attitude of Chairman Mao!"

MORE: Whoops, almost forgot my favorite music!

And for those who want more Maoist music to massacre millions, don't forget this favorite!