PrintOctober 30, 2008
Barack Obama: Red Diaper Baby
By now most of the American public has heard about unrepentant Weatherman terror bomber Bill Ayers, who discovered the pen is mightier than the sword and so worked with Barack Obama to steer $150 million to their radical cronies via the Annenberg Challenge.
In March and April TV viewers were treated to a solid month of "God damn America" from Obama's pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
Are these simply isolated incidences of Obama using poor judgment in choosing his allies?
No. Barack Obama is a "red diaper baby" who has spent his formative years -- literally from the moment of his birth -- interacting with members and sympathizers of the Communist Party, USA. His mother Stanley Ann Dunham has been described by former classmates as a "fellow traveler." His grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham arranged Obama's mentorship by Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.
Key details about Ann Dunham come from interviews in The Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007 and the Seattle Times, April 8, 2008.
Done bouncing around Kansas, California and Texas in the years after World War Two, Stanley and Madelyn in 1955 picked up and relocated 2,000 miles from Texas to Seattle. The next year they relocated to Mercer Island specifically so their daughter, Obama's future mother, Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island high school.
What was special about Mercer Island High School? The Chicago Tribune explains:
"In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party."
After intense debate, Stenhouse decided not to resign from the school board according to an April 11, 1955 account in Time Magazine. While others demanded Stenhouse's resignation, the Dunhams gravitated towards his school.
Stenhouse's leftism found an echo on the faculty. The Seattle Times explains:
Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique. According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."
"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.
"She was not a standard-issue girl. You don't start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary.
Eisenhower helped re-shape the political geography of Europe. The parents of the late 1950s are those we now call "The Greatest Generation." But years later Ann Dunham's ignorance and arrogance found an echo in Obama's book "Dreams From my Father" (p 47). Obama describes himself in Indonesia as:
"...extremely well mannered when compared to other American children. She (Ann Dunham) had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad."
Obama describes his mother arguing with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. Soetoro had become an Indonesian oil company manager and wanted Ann to accompany him to various social functions with American oil company personnel. Ann refused arguing, "Those are not my people." (p 47)
As with Obama, his mother's generation of these pseudo-intellectual leftist high schoolers found a way to think of themselves as superior. How? By surrounding themselves with co-thinkers. The Seattle Times continues:
One respite was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called "anarchy alley." Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality.
Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called "mothers' marches" of parents outraged at the curriculum.Dunham thrived in the environment, Wichterman said."As much as a high-school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?" Wichterman said. "She had what I call an inquiring mind."She also showed her politics, wearing a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson. And despite flirting with atheism, she went to services at East Shore Unitarian church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue.
The Chicago Tribune found more than ‘flirtation' in comments from Dunham's friends:
"She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't.
"If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first," said Chip Wall, who described her as "a fellow traveler...."
The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunham's chosen church as "The Little Red Church on the Hill". According to its own website, East Shore Unitarian Church got that name because of, "Well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China' to the United Nations...." The fact that John Stenhouse once served as church president might also have contributed to the "red" label.
In a 2006 speech, Obama explained: "I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I."
In describing his grandparents as Baptist and Methodist, Obama was contradicting himself. Describing his grandfather in Dreams (p17), Obama wrote: "In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation...."
Like grandfather, like grandson: Barack Obama would make his "only skirmish into organized religion", joining Chicago's Trinity United Church, inspired by anti-American church leader, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He held tightly to Trinity until it endangered his presidential campaign. Then he quit. This is the sole basis of Obama's description of himself as a "Christian."
Barack Obama writes: "The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."
Atheism is not the only echo of his mother and grandparents. There is the arrogance, also. Just as Ann Dunham looked down on "dull Eisenhowerness", Obama April 6 infamously described his view of rural blue collar Americans while speaking to an audience of wealthy San Francisco donors:
"It's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Ann Dunham could not stand the dumbed-down people who "don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world." But she had a very different idea about black Americans. As Obama explains:
"Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hammer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear." (Dreams p 51)
Starting in the 1930s the Communist Party promoted opportunities for ‘inter-racial' relationships among its members. The Communists could monopolize their social ties due to the intense social pressures created by the Democrats' system of Jim Crow segregation. The social stigma against what segregationists such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore Sr. called ‘miscegenation' helped keep people in the orbit of the CPUSA. As future Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis would explain in his 1968 book "Sex Rebel: Black", CPUSA recruitment burgeoned in part due to the sexual opportunities the Communists created.
"With the Soviet Union and the United States allies in the world struggle against the Axis, it was quite respectable to join and work with many groups later labeled Communist. Black and white mingled openly; for the first time many snow broads and spade studs could meet without fear or stigma and they made the most of this opportunity." (p 115)
The Seattle Times describes Ann Dunham's attitude towards dating at all-white Mercer Island High School:
Dunham hadn't had a boyfriend in high school, according to Maxine Box, her best friend at the time. So Box and others were stunned when Dunham wrote them to say she'd married the University of Hawaii's first African student, a Kenyan named Barack Obama.
This is echoed in The Chicago Tribune:
While her girlfriends, including Box, regularly baby-sat, Stanley Ann showed no interest. "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children," Box recalled. "It wasn't a put-down, it wasn't hurtful. That's just who she was."
Things suddenly changed when Ann graduated in 1960 and the Dunhams moved to Hawaii. Young Ann quickly fell in love with and married Barack Obama Sr, a socialist from Kenya who she met in a University of Hawaii Russian language class -- and soon gave birth to Barack Jr. Seattle's leftist milieu of coffeehouse political debates in Hawaii evolved into long sessions at UH Manoa with other leftist students listening to jazz, drinking beer and debating politics and world affairs. Along with Dunham and Obama Sr were future Hawaii congressman Neil Abercrombie and others who would become leaders of the Hawaii Democratic Party.
Honolulu had just two years earlier been shaken by the Honolulu Seven Trial of Longshoremen's Union leaders and other Communist Party members ending with convictions overturned by a 1958 Supreme Court decision. But just as with John Stenhouse and Mercer Island, this didn't scare the Dunhams -- it attracted them. Upon arriving in Honolulu, they became fast friends with Frank Marshall Davis who had been a columnist for the ILWU's communist-line Honolulu Record newspaper. Davis had at one point chaired the Honolulu Seven defense committee. Davis' editor had been one of the Honolulu Seven defendants -- Koji Ariyoshi. The largest shareholder in the Record was Ed Rohrbough. Ariyoshi's memoir "From Kona to Yenan" describes how he and Rohrbough worked as US military intelligence officers hand in hand with Mao Zedong in Yenan, China during WW2. During and after the war they helped steer US policy toward the Red Chinese and against the Nationalists.
In Davis' memoir, "Livin the Blues" (p321), Davis describes the numerous highly successful people among Hawaii's very small black population and lists the positions they have risen in their various professions. He then complains:
"These and similar jobs and elective positions were obtained solely on merit. There are not enough souls here to wield political or economic power. There is no ghetto, hence no potential Black Power."
On page 323 Davis continues:
Hawaii is not for those who can be happy only in Soul City. This is no place for those who can identify only with Afro-America. "Little Harlem" is only a couple of blocks of bars, barbershops, and a soul food restaurant or two. When I arrived, the local establishment was trying to shunt black servicemen, gamblers, pimps, dope peddlers, and prostitutes into this area....
Because Smith Street was the closest Hawaii had to a black ghetto, it became a focus of work for the Communist Party in Hawaii. When attempting to lead a hostile CPUSA takeover of the NAACP in the late 1940s, Davis pointed to Smith Street as an example of segregation in Hawaii. And just as Davis described joining the CPUSA in "Sex Rebel: Black", he also described interracial group sex and voyeurism in the back room of a Smith Street bar he called the "Green Goose". (p278-80)
Obama describes Davis as playing a very intimate role in his life from age 9 to 18. When Barack returned to Honolulu from Indonesia in 1970, grandpa almost immediately took Barack to meet Davis. Davis was to serve as a father figure to the young Obama for much of his youth and adolescence. In light of the Communists' bizarre focus on Smith Street, Obama's description of meeting Davis for the first time at age 9 or 10 in 1970 or 1971 takes on new meaning:
...by the time I met Frank he must have been pushing eighty, with a big dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the conservation would turn to laments about women.
"They'll drive you to drink, boy," Frank would tell me soberly. "And if you let ‘em, they'll drive you into your grave."I was intrigued by the old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn't fully understand....
Then Obama immediately segues into a description of Smith Street:
....The same thing I felt whenever Gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars, in Honolulu's red light district."Don't tell your grandmother," he would say with a wink, and we'd walk past hard-faced, soft-bodied streetwalkers into a small, dark bar with a jukebox and a couple of pool tables. Nobody seemed to mind that Gramps was the only white man in the place, or that I was the only eleven- or twelve-year-old. Some of the men leaning across the bar would wave at us, and the bartender, a big, light-skinned woman with bare, fleshy arms, would bring a Scotch for gramps and a Coke for me. If nobody else was playing at the tables, Gramps would spot me a few balls and teach me the game, but usually I would sit at the bar, my legs dangling from the high stool, blowing bubbles into my drink and looking at the pornographic art on the walls-the phosphorescent women on animal skins, the Disney characters in compromising positions.......Our presence there felt forced, and by the time I had reached junior high school I had learned to beg off from Gramps's invitations, knowing that whatever it was I was after, whatever it was that I needed, would have to come from some other source.
In essence, when the young Obama returned from Indonesia, Gramps set about teaching him the CPUSA version of what it meant to be black. That is why Obama was introduced to Davis and that is why gramps took him to Smith Street until Obama finally stopped accepting the initiations.
This also explains Gramps' reaction when Madelyn Dunham is hassled by a black panhandler while waiting for a bus. Instead of agreeing to give his wife a ride to work, Gramps is consumed by the fear that Madelyn, (or Toot, as Obama calls her) is a racist. Gramps reports this to Obama who then goes to talk to Davis in an effort to sort it all out. (Dreams p 87-91) For Obama, the incident was so shattering that he found himself talking about it on the campaign stump several times in March, 2008 and calling his grandmother "a typical white person."
Dunham had been the Bank of Hawaii's first female vice president. The Honolulu Advertiser reported, "In March, several Bank of Hawaii co-workers told The Advertiser they were stunned by Obama's words and had never heard Dunham make comments about anyone's ethnicity."
CPUSA archivist Gerald Horne explains the mold into which young Barack was cast by his mother, grandparents, and Frank Marshall Davis:
"In his best selling memoir ‘Dreams of my Father', the author (Obama) speaks warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as "Frank" as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anticommunist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation ...."
The hunger for recruits has given the CPUSA a black fetish -- both literally and figuratively. And this fetish has in turn shaped the Communist view of society and of politics.
And so, in Obama’s eyes, socialism is “black”. And the definition of race is ideological rather than biological. And this marks the fundamental nature of the “red diaper baby” -- ideology has triumphed and established its dominion over all the natural aspects of life, even love itself
