With midterm elections only six weeks away, some interesting numbers:

In a CBS News poll from last month, a remarkable 58 percent of Democratic respondents had a positive view of socialism, with only 18 percent viewing it negatively (perhaps the codgers who actually remember that thing called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). That number goes up to 71 percent for Democrats with a college degree or more, thus raising some interesting thoughts about what our colleges are teaching and the possibility that an inverse relationship has come to exist between intelligence on the one hand and educational credentials on the other.

Only 32 percent of Democrats in the CBS poll had a positive view of capitalism. Even allowing for some confusion over what the term "socialism" means and the likelihood that the phrase "free enterprise" might evoke a better response than the pejorative "capitalism," this a remarkable result, and one suggesting that for the first time in our nation's history we have a major socialist political party.

Few saw this coming when the Berlin Wall fell.

That 72 percent of Republicans in the CBS survey view capitalism favorably and 74 percent socialism negatively at least tells us that one of our parties doesn't suffer from historical amnesia and economic illiteracy.

Democrats' turn toward socialism is good news for........

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