A Communist??? What is this, 1953? Are we the Un-American Activities Committee? First he was a Muslim, now he’s a Communist? I know, I know, but please, bear with me…
I just naturally tend toward extremes, so I deliberately temper myself when I see something that strikes me as alarming. Consequently, I didn’t say a word when Hot Air posted the picture from a Fox News broadcast that showed one of Barack Obama’s campaign offices with a Cuban flag on the wall, with a stenciled image of revolutionary murderer Che` Guevara on it. Remember this?
I just figured that office would be getting a call from the Mother Ship sometime soon. Not that Obama would be all that irritated by it, but I didn’t figure it meant much besides some hard lefties were working for Obama.
I also pretty much ignored it when Politico reported that Obama had sat down with 60s radicals Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers in a local Chicago political meeting. Those are two very scary, unrepentant terrorists, but it was 1995, he met with them once, they actually had clout in the neighborhood (both teach at the University of Chicago now), and I figured there was not going to be any serious fallout to the Obama campaign. Yes, if it had been McCain and Rev. Bob Jones it would have been front-page news on the Times for 3 days at least, but the press flacks for the Democrats, we all know it, and that’s that.
Then, I noticed this addition from Hot Air. See-Dubya there received links from readers: one showing a conference in 2002, where Obama and Ayers spoke together as two members on a panel discussing “Intellectuals in a Time of Crisis,” the other showing Obama joining the Weatherman duo giving testimonials for Rashid Khalidi, an Israel-hating Columbia professor, in 2005. And Craig Kincaid at Accuracy In Media reports that Obama and Ayers both serve on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.
Showing up on the same panels a few times doesn’t make Obama and the Weathermen friends or associates, though the Woods Fund contact suggests they’re at least acquaintances. Sitting on the same panels does, however, suggest that Obama thinks like those two on more than one issue, which is why their paths are crossing. (I suppose it’s not theoretically impossible that Obama was called to balance other views, but balance isn’t often among the stated values of gatherings that invite ex-Weathermen, so I regard this as unlikely.)
I detest two, contradictory things: sleaze attacks and dishonest politicians. They’re contradictory because you have to read and study sleaze attacks to find dishonest politicians. When I receive a report of some background dishonesty, I research it, and if it’s false (most of them are), I get angry and write nasty letters back to the source. I’ve rejected several baleful mailings about Obama’s past that were manifestly sleazy, not to mention provably false.
But in the light of the incidents above, I’m now paying closer attention to a several articles I’ve run across, which appear to be both accurate and relevant:
Lisa Schiffren at National Review discusses the phenomenon of “red diaper babies” (that is, 60s children of Communist activists,) and the likelihood that Barack Obama is one of them. She does not make the case, she just describes the phenomenon: communist activists in the late 50s and early 60s choosing to marry cross-race as an attack on bourgeois society. It’s not implausible, as Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a radical activist at the University of Hawaii, having been stimulated in high school by two teachers who were reputed to have been Communists (the students referred to the hallway between their rooms as “anarchist ally”), and by a Unitarian church that sported liberal theology. See these two snippets from Tim Jones of the Chicago Tribune (here and here), that dance around the question, calling Dunham a “free thinker” and the two teachers that influenced her “members on the staff that encouraged us to think about a lot of things.” This article from the same author fills in detail, pegging the teachers as radical for the times, although by modern standards they seem like run-of-the-mill leftists.
Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media describes an important mentor of Obama’s teenage years, who was a well-known Communist poet. Obama, in his book Dreams From My Father, writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Frank Marshall Davis, identified as a member of the CPUSA by the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii, appears to have mentored young Barry from 1971 - 1979, when he left Hawaii for college. Davis’ biographer D. Kathryn Takara cites Davis’ “acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world and how he held forth on American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. Professor Gerald Horne, contributing editor to the Marxist publication Political Affairs, muses about how future generations will note the significance of the relationship between Davis and Obama.
I’m particularly interested in Obama’s period of community activism in Chicago in the 1980s. His employer was the Gamaliel Foundation. Gamaliel, an activist organization strangely merging the teachings of Marxist strategist Saul Alinsky with those of the Apostle Paul, operates with that same sense of religious destiny that we’ve noticed in both Barack and Michelle Obama’s speeches. Alinsky counseled tapping anger as a motivator for radical change; Gamaliel’s Greg Golluzzo notes Obama’s energy in applying this tactic:
Barack was in the community… talking to the people, sensing their passion, their anger and he wanted to create an opportunity for them to express that anger and resolve the problem.”
Ryan Lizza in The New Republic, cites another of Obama’s mentors, radical organizer Mike Kruglic, admiring Obama’s skill at this sort of manipulation:
He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.
Kincaid also discusses Obama’s ties with international Socialist organizations. While Obama is not a member of any of these, he accepts the backing of Democratic Socialists of America and backs initiatives championed by Socialist International. These contacts, along with those of the Party of European Socialists, lurk behind the Democratic party’s eagerness to make the United States “become good citizens of the world community.” Invariably this means for the US to cooperate with neo-Marxist initiatives as put forward in the UN. This explains Obama’s sponsoring of the Global Poverty Act, which, based on the UN’s Millennium Declaration, forces the US to commit .7% of its GNP toward foreign aid. (The US, alone among the world’s nations, may already come close to this through private charity, a phenomenon ignored by the UN’s radicals.) This will likely do for the world’s poor what Johnson’s War on Poverty did for the poor of the US — enslave them to the dole, enrich the bureaucrats who administer the programs, and waste an unimaginable amount of money, making the problem worse while driving taxation through the roof.
Where does this leave us? If all the facts cited here are accurate, here’s the complete picture:
Barack Obama was born of Communist activists, mentored by Communist writer and activist, spent his college days hanging around radical activists (this from Obama’s own book), worked as a radical community organizer learning the radical tactics of Alinsky, kept contact with radicals through the years, and today lends his political skill to the international goals of radical activists, and has radicals working on for his campaign. Oh, and he believes opposition to the aims of radical activists will fail because the radicals embody the will of God.
I’m beginning to wonder whether simply pointing to the National Journal’s assessment of Obama’s voting record as the most liberal in the US Senate is strong enough. It appears to me that Mr. Obama embodies the fondest dreams of radical socialist organizers over the years — that someday, a candidate with enough broad, personal appeal would rise to lead the United States away from its defense of individual liberty, and into whole-hearted support of World Socialism. It’s even plausible — not proved here, certainly, but plausible — that Obama has trained his entire life for this role, and that he’s literally a plant from within the world of radical Marxism to help achieve their goal of world domination by removing the opposition of Marxism’s only effective enemy — the libertarian instincts of the United States.
A fairly thorough but concise history of Obama’s political synthesis can be found here.