BRYAN CRANSTON’S PRO–TRUMBO MUMBO-JUMBO: Cranston, formerly the star of Breaking Bad, promoting his new film portraying Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (he of the legendary cranial and moral inversions during the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression pact) performs a few historical loop-the-loops of his own, as Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write:

At the Daily Beast, Marlow Stern interviewed Cranston and announced the Hollywood Ten that he belonged to was a “fraternity of communist sympathizers crucified by the House Un-American Activities Committee for their political beliefs.”

Perhaps it was Stern who prompted Cranston to descend into the inanity that the Soviet communists were fascists, not communists: “This communist regime under Stalin was unbelievably cruel and vicious. But the truth is they weren’t communists. Stalin wasn’t a communist. He was a fascist dictator. But the name ‘communism’ stuck to that.”

And with this, Communism apologists come full circle. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote last year:

Stalin championed the idea that all of his political opponents should be dubbed fascists, including many of his fellow Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated), and much of the Red Army’s officer corps (whom he had executed), and countless Ukrainians (whom he had liquidated). Stalin insisted that even mentioning the man-made – i.e., Stalin-made — Ukranian famine was evidence you were an agent of the Nazis.

Under Stalin’s “theory of social fascism,” any socialist, social-democratic, or progressive group or party not loyal to him had to be called fascist. Hence, for a while Moscow insisted that FDR and even Norman Thomas (head of the Socialist Party of America) were fascists.

Ultimately, Communist propagandists and their allied intellectuals would reflexively blame fascism for everything, regardless of the facts. That’s what prompted George Orwell to remark that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

I’m not at all sure that Stalin would have appreciated being described as a “fascist,” but I’ll bet he would have approved the secular taqiyya behind it, to borrow the phrase from Roger Simon’s post earlier today on Mr. Obama’s obfuscations to dilute attacks against another totalitarian religion.