Yes, I'm gonna go with "rest in peace" for the late Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.), former Democratic Socialists of America vice chair and one of the most extreme left-wing Democratic congressmen.  He was actually a nice guy.  What's more, his congressional staff I'd deal with as a reporter back in the old days were exceptionally nice and helpful.  I remember dealing with Keith Carson and Ying Lee Kelley and think their pleasantness was a reflection of the kind of operation Dellums ran.

So give him this: he wasn't a jerk.  He wasn't a mental case who thought all Republicans had cooties.  Unlike a lot of far leftists, Dellums treated others, even on the right, with respect.  This guy, quoted in the New York Times obit, frames it pretty well:"I disagree with him utterly and completely," Baker Spring, a military analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, told USA Today.  "But he's upfront, open and honest, not in the least vindictive about the way he pursues his legislative agenda."  Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a very Republican guy, said he actually liked Dellums.  Dellums was also known as someone who could keep a secret; one of the tropes on Capitol Hill I heard in those old days was that Dellums had an impeccable record of never leaking classified information as chief of the House Armed Services Committee.  He was a guy who could be trusted with America's secrets, at least around the swamp, not playing the swamp games we see now.

The problem is that Dellums's civility concealed a strategic-minded general's mentality for the big game of turning the U.S. into a socialist state.

A social worker with an interest in boosting domestic spending, he joined the House Armed Services Committee – not to support U.S. defense, but to drain money from it for domestic programs while he was a power in Congress.  After 13 terms in Congress, he took a job from Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, supposedly to help lobby to lift sanctions.  Veselnitskaya, recall, was the one hired by Fusion GPS; got a suspicious visa; hobnobbed with Washington's rich and powerful; and just happened to try to entrap Donald J. Trump, Jr. in that infamous "Trump Tower" meeting.  Dellums always did have a soft spot for the Russians, supporting every single one of their aims through their last days of the Cold War, and then...helping them again.

His political leg up was pretty similar to that of his fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

In 1970, backed by a coalition of minorities, students and labor, he upset Representative Jeffery Cohelan, a more conventional liberal, in the Democratic primary for the Oakland-Berkeley seat in Congress, and easily defeated a Republican in the general election.  The district was redrawn twice, but his margins of victory reached up to 77 percent of the vote.

Naturally, he was a Bernie Sanders guy and a member of DSA likely well before Bernie was.  He really did hang around with the communists and do the Soviet Union's bidding back in the day.  The Democratic Socialists of America back in his day were the Communist Party for those who didn't want the stigma of being in the CPUSA.  It was the lefty group you joined if you still wanted to be eligible for a security clearance, and, by the way, the two groups worked closely together.  Many pro-Putin Russians, in the aftermath, are also pro-Bernie Sanders.  They've told me that themselves.

In 1977, Dellums took a trip to see his hero, Fidel Castro, coming back gushing about all the supposed "achievements" of socialism in what was undoubtedly a Potemkin tour for useful idiots.  Castro had seen a lot of those – Sanders also among them.

He hung out and became associated with Soviet front groups such as the innocuously named Institute for Policy Studies.  He was palsy with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.  He was associated with the Soviet-sponsored "World Peace Council."  He also had ties with the communist-linked United for Peace and Justice.  Any time a Sovietly correct "peace" group would show up, Dellums was in the middle of it.  Naturally, real traitors, such as CIA turncoat-turned-Castro agent Philip Agee, adored Dellums.

Dellums had a founding role in CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador, according to Trevor Loudon's invaluable map of the left, KeyWiki, working closely to enable El Salvador's communist thugs with congressional office space, something they mocked as working from "the belly of the beast."  Bet Ron was proud of that.  Today, Salvadorans flee their country as a horror show, particularly since one of the guerrillas named, Schafik Handal, had one of his sub-guerrillas eventually run the country.

He did everything he could to stop the great Ronald Reagan from enacting his greatest legacy, which was triggering the fall of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War.  In that, Dellums could always be found on the other side.

When U.S. troops invaded Grenada in 1983, to oust a bloody Cuban-sponsored communist dictator, the documents they found had Dellums's name all over them, advising the communists how to thwart the U.S.  He was never held accountable for that.  Here's one beaut off the KeyWiki site, written by one of Dellums's aides: Ron has become truly committed to Grenada. . .and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong...He really admires you as a...leader with courage and foresight, principles and integrity...The only other person I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.

Dellums also voted to cut off aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in 1988.  Those were the people resisting the nightmare communist regime of Daniel Ortega, a guy who's still in power today as a dictator and who's shot hundreds of protesters in the streets in the past few weeks.  The socialist hell-hole there speaks for itself.  After that, in 1989, he made himself a member of what came to be known as "the congressional pink caucus" for excusing Ortega's atrocities in the name of socialism even then.

Naturally, he voted to cut off bank loans to the increasingly free market-transforming Chile, which was reeling from the socialist bankruptcy of the communist Castro-controlled regime of Salvador Allende.  Castro's "baby" (which is what Allende Chiel was) always came first, and these acts were some of the first that spread the "black legend" about the Pinochet military government, which places it as the ultimate evil in the vision of the left, less for its harsh military elements than for its true free-market turn.

For old time's sake, near the end of his term, or maybe when he was out, in 1998, he signed a lefty group letter to urge a cutoff of military aid to Colombia, a favor the FARC Marxist narco-terrorists who were on the verge of taking over the country surely appreciated.

After that, he joined the swamp as a lobbyist and went to work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer who mysteriously got a visa to come in to meet and entrap young Donald Trump, Jr. and then go meet with Glenn Simpson's Fusion GPS the next day.  Just Dellums's presence in this operation suggests some Russian-progressive collusion in the name of Getting Trump.

Screaming in the streets and acting crazy with the other leftists was never Dellums's style.

Dellums continued his strategizing through his significant mentoring of other leftists, some of them the crazy kind and many of them the face of the far leftward shift of the Democrats today.  Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Sen. Kamala Harris, Rep. Barbara Lee (who succeeded Dellums in Congress) – all claim Dellums as their mentor.  Without him, they wouldn't be around, apparently.

Here's what a 2007 Potrero Hill Democratic Club newsletter had to say about Harris and the Dellums machine:

President Eisen next introduced our honored guest speaker, Kamala Harris.  Ms. Harris is a career prosecutor with an impressive background, from her Berkeley childhood through her tenure as San Francisco's first female District Attorney (elected in 2003).  She told us her civil rights activist parents raised her to be socially conscious from an early age.  She graduated from Howard University (Most Distinguished Alumna) and got her law degree from Hastings College of Law.  Her first job in law enforcement was as Deputy DA in Alameda County, a post she held for 8 years.  In that capacity she worked closely with Ron Dellums and expressed gratitude for his wise mentorship.

This is hardly a legacy to cheer about.  What's more, it's just the icing on the cake to a long record of opposing U.S. interests at every turn; voting for anything that would make the U.S. a failure; and supporting the most failed, inhuman, horrid, flee-for-your-lives communist regimes on the face of the Earth.  That's some record, Ron.

Rest in peace, but a good thing for the country that he's gone.