We've Been Had an excellent read

By Mark Hendrickson

Book review: We've Been Had: How Obama and the Radicals Conned Middle Class America by James R. Keena

Full disclosure/confession: I was not eager to read We've Been Had. That was simply because I had grown very weary of its subject matter, one Barack Obama.

I am so glad that I overcame my initial resistance and read this excellent book. It is comprehensively researched, masterfully organized, fluently written, and pleasantly free of shrillness. I had feared a rant, but on the whole, the book is written in a comfortable, almost conversational tone. Only in the last chapter, the call to action entitled "Meet Your Future," do the gloves come off and the tone becomes combative rather than professorial.

We've Been Had is an amazingly breezy read for an encyclopedic study (76 pages of endnotes in support of about 270 pages of text) of the President of the United States and the various influences that have shaped his character and values.

Author James R. Keena, creator of the pro-liberty website Pathlessland.net and a mover and shaker in the Tea Party movement, has produced a book that will be an indispensable reference book for future generations' research into Obama. Keena's insights are keen and dot-connecting. Here are some examples:

From Obama's own Dreams from My Father: "Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment..." I've thought Obama is strangely emotionless, coldly and relentlessly pushing his Big Government agenda, so it is oddly validating to find that the president speaks of himself in similar terms. (p. 39)

Dr. John C. Drew, a lapsed Marxist who knew Obama in 1980, claimed that Obama was enough of a Marxist then to praise the Soviet Union, the land of gulags and "people's democracy." (p. 94)

Citing Jerome Corsi's book The Obama Nation, Keena reports Obama's perhaps illegal meddling in Kenyan politics in which he (apparently with the financial support of the American taxpayer via his position as a U.S. Senator) actively worked on behalf of a rather unsavory character who had communist sympathies and at least a superficial connection with an al Qaeda ally. (pp. 129-30)

The details of Obama's close working relationship with Antoin Rezko (he of the 16 felony convictions) are fleshed out in Chapter 7

Chapter 8-Meet ACORN-is even more illuminating. Many of us have a sense of how corrupt ACORN had become, but Keen does a superb job of placing ACORN in the historical context of a decades-long radical strategy to subvert and collapse our political system. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

We've Been Had should be shared especially with young Americans, political independents, and swing voters so that they understand the ideological underpinnings and radical political agenda of Obama and his fellow "progressives."