Barack Obama and the Anti-Anti-Communists

Paul Kengor's got a pentrating piece on Barack Obama's communist ties, at the American Thinker, "Return of the Dupes and the Anti-Anti-Communists":

Since literally the founding of the American Communist Party in 1919, the extreme left - specifically, the communists -- have relied upon genuine liberals to be dupes, or suckers, to help further their cause. Here's how it typically worked: the communists would engage in some sort of work or agenda, very focused, and which they would be prepared to publicly deny. Anyone who has done any work with or on communists, from New York City to Moscow, can speak at length about how they operated with deceit. As Vladimir Lenin had said, in a favorite quote cited often by Ronald Reagan, the only morality that communists recognized was that which furthered their interests.

At some point as the communists pursued their intentions, someone or some group - usually conservatives or moderate Republicans - would catch on and blow the whistle. When the alarm was sounded, the communists typically would flat-out lie about whatever they were doing: claiming not to be guilty of the charges, but rather victims of right-wing paranoia. For this, they relied upon gullible liberals - non-communist liberals - to join them in attacking their accusers on the right.

These liberals, particularly after the McCarthy period, came to detest the anti-communists on the right. These liberals were not pro-communist but anti-anti-communist. They saw the anti-communists as Neanderthals, and still do, even though the anti-communists were absolutely right about the 20th century slaughter otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism. This ongoing anti-anti-communism is immediately evident in a quick conversation with your typical liberal in the press or academia. When I lecture at universities around the country, rattling off facts about the literally unparalleled communist destruction in the 20th century - easily over 100 million people died under communism from about 1917-79 - the young people are riveted, clearly having never heard any of this in the classroom, whereas their professors roll their eyes, as if the ghost of Joe McCarthy had flown into the room and leapt inside of my body....

Why do I mention this now? Because the entire process is being repeated once again before our eyes, except now it's worse, given that the modern left is so outrageously uninformed, having been trained -- by the mainstream media, Hollywood, liberal historians, and the academy -- to reflexively dismiss any charge of communism as illegitimate McCarthyism, even when the charge is not only accurate but, importantly, exposes how the communists have literally schemed to undermine yet another genuine liberal cause.

I will start from the beginning:

A couple of weeks ago in Washington, Herb Romerstein and Cliff Kincaid, two veteran investigators of American communism, held a press conference on Capitol Hill to announce the release of two new reports on Barack Obama's radical past, or, more specifically, his association with extremist elements from the American left -- yet more evidence of a frightening pattern of associations by Obama throughout his distant and recent life, from Bill Ayers to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, all of which at the least shows bad judgment. At the press conference, they discussed Romerstein's report on Frank Marshall Davis, an influential figure in Obama's early life, whom Obama refers to only as "Frank" (albeit affectionately) in his autobiography Dreams From My Father. Davis was a communist, a member of CPUSA. Romerstein developed that fact very carefully in his report, which contained at least a half dozen exhibits and other forms of reliable documentation -- a fact that itself is news, since many (on the gullible left) still like to question whether Davis was a Party member ....

... what did Romerstein find on Frank Marshall Davis? He showed not only that Davis was a communist, but -- listen up, liberals -- how Davis and his comrades worked to undermine genuine liberal causes because of their lock-step subservience to the Comintern and the USSR. Modern liberals need to understand, for example, how the American communist movement, including men like Davis, flip-flopped on issues as grave as Nazism and World War II based entirely on whether Hitler was signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin or invading Stalin's Soviet Union. The disgusting about-face by CPUSA on this matter was unforgivable. And what a shame that liberal college professors don't teach this to their students. Liberals also need to know how their friends inside government were used by communists who sought victory for Mao Tse-Tung in China in 1949, which would lead to the single greatest concentration of corpses in human history: 60-70 million dead Chinese from 1957 to 1969.

Where does Obama meet Davis? -- in Hawaii. Similar to Obama, who moved from Kansas to Honolulu to Chicago, Frank Marshall Davis went from Kansas to Chicago to Honolulu. Obama freely admits to learning and taking advice from Davis, which surely was nothing like the "Midwestern values" that Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) claimed he learned in Kansas. While most Americans by the late 1970s and early 1980s were at last convinced that détente with the Soviets was a sham, and that the USSR was an Evil Empire that needed to be dissolved, Obama almost certainly was learning exactly the opposite -- moving totally against what Ronald Reagan described as the "tide of history," a "freedom tide" that would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."

Instead, as Obama writes in Dreams From My Father, he was hanging out with the "Marxist professors," attending "socialist conferences," and "discuss[ing] neocolonialism." Rather than learning about the American exceptionalism that would seek to bring freedom to the USSR and Eastern Europe, Obama was hearing about the glory of the Bolshevik experiment. This was the wrong side of history.

Enter Dana Milbank

Jumping into this unfolding drama is Dana Milbank, the columnist for the Washington Post. Milbank was apparently one of the few mainstream journalists to attend the Romerstein press conference on Capitol Hill, according to the reporting of columnist Bill Steigerwald, a good reporter who was also there. Steigerwald noted that it quickly became apparent that Milbank was basically there to mock the event. In response, Milbank could write about it in the Post, and his fellow liberals could enjoy a chuckle at the expense of the latest exhibit of right-wing anti-communist cavemen.

Milbank didn't disappoint. He described the press conference as a new Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, as the 2008 version of the 2004 Swift Boat veterans, and described Romerstein as "a living relic from the House Committee on Un-American Activities." The whole thing, reported Milbank, sounded "like a UFO convention." He even pooh-poohed the quite legitimate, quite telling point that Obama's past affiliations are so "dodgy" (Milbank's word) that he would have difficulty getting a government security clearance. Indeed, he would-and that's a big deal for a man who could be our next president.

To be fair, Milbank, while at the press conference, did ask the pertinent question: Was Romerstein trying to argue that Obama is a communist? What's the point of this if Obama is not a communist, right?

Well, yes and no. He has not, to anyone's knowledge, ever been a member of the Communist Party. On the other hand, his friends have been members. And there is a clear long-running association in this man's life with the most radical of the far left: on the religion side, there is Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger, on the political side, there is the likes of William Ayers and, yes, Frank Marshall Davis, to name only a few. And remarkably, Obama cites some of these people as mentors, and even draws from their messages in conceiving the title of the bestselling book that made everyone gaga over Obama in the first place - here I'm referring to Audacity of Hope, which is based on a Rev. Wright sermon.

These associations actually should tell us a lot, as should Obama's struggle to deal with them only once the public learns their full extent. It all points to a truly troubling reality: regardless of whether the man is a communist, his politics are remarkably radical, and have been for a very long and recent time - and that's a crucial consideration as America considers voting for him.

That's an extremely interesting story, and I want to reiterate that last point: Whether or not Obama's communist, throughout his life he's run with the radical crowd.

The information just keep coming in on Obama's oppositional political ideology, but of course just to point these things out gets me slured as a "chicken little" in the comments.

Frankly, it's people like Kengor and everyday regular bloggers who are powerfully grounded in reality. An Obama administration's going to shift American politics to the extrem left of the spectrum. How far depends on a wide-range of factors, but the country will see undeniably significant - er, radical - change upon the accession of a Barack Obama presidential administration.