August 20, 2008
Why Obama's Red Mentor is News
Barack Obama is still an enigma because a lot of his life has been carefully hidden, as National Review's David Freddoso points out in The Case Against Barack Obama. His campaign is hypersensitive because his life is filled with awkward facts and dubious associations. Obama has declared his personal history out of bounds and scrubbed it clean. The media are obediently censoring things we need to know. The most obvious example is Obama's adolescent mentor and father figure, Frank Marshall Davis.
Frank Davis was one angry black guy, at a time when the South was still segregated and there was plenty of reason for anger. Unlike most black people at the time, however -- like the extraordinary families who raised young Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice in the Deep South -- Davis became a member of the Communist Party and glorified über-tyrant Jozef Stalin in his writing and poetry. This at a time when Stalin was ordering the deaths of tens of millions of people, and indeed enslaved millions of them in the Gulag, in forced communal farms, and in coercive factories all over the Soviet empire. Stalin was a slave-master and mass killer, as any informed person knew at that time. And Frank Davis must have known. There's a great difference between fighting racial injustice and pursuing racial vengeance, and Davis went for revenge against all of white America.
If you think Rev. Jeremiah Wright is over the top, Frank Davis was like that, just angrier. Senator Obama has long hung around with enraged radicals. Davis was apparently his first. Kids without parents often look desperately for father figures, who can have huge influence over their lives. Such, it appears, was Frank Marshall Davis for a young kid in Honolulu named Barry Obama. Obama's long line of rageful mentors and guides include Bill Ayers the Pentagon bomber, Jeremiah Wright the hate preacher, and Barack Obama Sr., a socialist-communist politician in Kenya, whose writings and letters still influenced Barack, Jr., even in his physical absence from his son's life. So we have a series of four radical mentors who shaped Obama's life. Those are just the ones we know about.
Frank Davis was a US Communist Party member during 1945-1950, when Comrade Stalin got his Bomb, courtesy of hidden communists like Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who stole the secrets from the Manhattan Project.
Those were the years when Stalin and the Communist Party were a perfect mirror image to Hitler and the Nazi Party in Europe. Thousands of unfortunates fled from the Nazis to the Soviets, or vice versa, and were still killed when they thought they had reached safe haven. Dr. Fuchs and his friends on the murderous Left gave Stalin the Bomb, right when Uncle Joe was ready to use it on his enemies -- Europe and the US -- instead of all those crummy old-fashioned ways of killing people. Some historians believe that Stalin was poisoned by his own henchmen Beria and Khrushchev, for fear that he was going to start a nuclear war. There was a limit to their bloodlust.
Being a member of the Communist Party was a big deal during those years, and it wasn't all Senator Joe McCarthy's allegations either. Obama's youthful father figure "Frank" certainly moved in interesting circles.
Frank Davis' membership in the CP-USA is not in question. It's just an inconvenient fact that's being covered up by our media. The Associated Press somehow forgot to mention Mr. Davis' fearful associations in its puff piece on him last week. Communist Party? What Communist Party? I can just hear our media stars whining over their lattes and coke: Does it matter? It was a long time ago! It's not news!
Which is exactly why the media can never be trusted. They have perverse news judgment; making headlines out of the scrapings of the barrel and wiping out all the relevant facts. As George Orwell wrote about the BBC, they are the Ministry of Truth whose real mission is to peddle Official Lies.
More and more people are sick of getting lied to every day, and the newsies are finally losing their shirts. Here's hoping they freeze.
The media tell us that the key to journalism is "good news judgment." The pros have it, but the amateurs just can't be trusted, to hide facts the way professionals are trained to do. So is it really news that Senator Obama hung around with America-hating zealots all of his life? Maybe not. Maybe Young Obama was just jivin' his radical mentors, and making them think he agreed with all their political rantin' and ravin'. As they say in Indonesia, that's the easy approach to get along with people -- tell them you agree with their head trips, whatever they are, and they'll love you forever.
That's what Obama now tells the world about his hot-headed Chicago mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah; he just let the Rev. J think he believed his race-baitin' white-hatin' hollerin' for a thousand Sundays in a row. Actually, Barack and Michelle were just sitting there, yawning and rolling their eyes, and wondering whether the sermon would ever be over. Can we go home now?
Well, at least Obama had a chance to explain away his relationship with the man who brought him to Jesus. Nobody in the media has asked him about Frank Marshall Davis.
What are the odds anyone will ask him before the November election?
If Obama lied to all the Lefties in his life it certainly worked like a charm: The Left boosted his career like a bottle rocket. He is their dream politician. Flaming Reds are still the real base of the Obama campaign. And a lifetime of lying to his friends would certainly explain the Senator's well-honed skill in tailoring the truth.
So maybe Obama has been lying to his radical buds for all these years. Or maybe not.
We'll find out after he gets elected.
It's all the news you're not fit to know.
Carl Bernstein recently wrote about Hillary Clinton's hard-Left connections in Berkeley, where she worked for a communist -- pardon me, an ‘activist' -- law firm. So Carl told us the news a couple of months ago, right after Hillary and Bill lost to Obama and it couldn't hurt the Democrats any more; but that relevant fact might have helped us understand the Clintons in 1992. So -- call it sixteen years too late. All the news you're not fit to know.
Bernstein is himself a bloody diaper baby and knows all about people covering up their political beliefs. When Woodward and Bernstein rose to fame with Watergate, Americans were not told about Bernstein's radical past either. It wasn't news. But a lot of Americans might have thought it was news to them.
As we now know, Editor Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post colluded with FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt to destroy Richard Nixon. Woodward and Bernstein were just the messenger boys. We only found out about that when Mark Felt died; for thirty years the media lied to us about Deep Throat. That's even longer than Carl Bernstein managed to cover up Hillary's radical career.
It's all part of their impeccable professional journalism.
All of which goes to make a simple point: Obama's Red mentor is news. Obama isn't the Manchurian Candidate -- at least, I don't believe so, not yet. But he has a certain very predictable mind-set that he picked up from his mentors, friends, family, teachers, whatever. That's news -- because the story of Frank Davis goes straight to the heart of every voter's questions:
Who the heck is Senator O?
Can he ever be believed?
Is he competent?
Can he be trusted with his finger on the nuclear trigger?
Or is he just a slick hustler, trying to sucker us?
We don't know the answer, and the media are not going to help us find out.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com