Culture » September 8, 2010
‘The Manchurian President’: Chicago’s Commie Liberal Puppet
The paranoid style of American politics is alive and well.
The liberal elite’s goal: Create enough chaos and internal dissension within the United States to impose martial law and round up patriotic conservative Americans—and their guns.
America is in the midst of a 21st-century witch hunt. A loose-knit network of right-wing ideological strategists, Republican Party operatives and media demagogues generate the odious smears. Their goal is to stymie the Obama administration’s policy initiatives, capture Congress in November and unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. This propagandizing echoes the scapegoating of liberals, union and community organizers, peace activists, gay people, Jews and people of color during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.
Anti-Obama rhetoric also mimics 1960s slurs dubbing Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. a dupe of a communist conspiracy – claims circulated by groups like the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, the white supremacist “Citizens’ Councils” and the Ku Klux Klan. Billboards and flyers with this revelation appeared across the South, and postcards were distributed nationwide.
The underlying message is that liberals are either tools or agents of the plot to build collectivism and global governance. Such claims, once used to label President Franklin D. Roosevelt a fascist, and have resurfaced against Obama, who is tagged as Hitler and Stalin. Such sloganeering is a classic trope that distorts a complex idea into a short metaphor full of rich cultural or political baggage.
Into this guilt-by-association cesspool swims Aaron Klein, who fancies himself a shark of an investigative journalist but is really just another bottom-feeder. Klein, a senior staff reporter for the hard-right conspiracist World Net Daily, worked with Internet crank Brenda J. Elliott (therealbarackobama.wordpress.com) to write the new book The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and other Anti-American Extremists.
Similarly gawdy anti-Obama books include: Newt Gingrich’s To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, Sean Hannity’s Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda and Brad O’Leary’s The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values. Slightly more histrionic are: Jerome R. Corsi’s The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, and Floyd Brown and Lee Troxler’s Obama Unmasked: Did Slick Hollywood Handlers Create the Perfect Candidate?
According to The Manchurian President, Obama was groomed for office by a nest of socialists, communists and other dangerous radicals based in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood that includes the University of Chicago.
Klein writes, “[Brenda Elliot and I] began to realize the scope of Obama’s radical associates and mentors … We realized we were piecing together an intricate puzzle that revealed a man with an agenda far more radical and dangerous than he portrays – a politician backed by groups and individuals who seek to drastically alter the U.S. system or destroy it altogether.”
The book identifies Marilyn Katz, a well-known anti-war activist and public-relations consultant, as part of Obama’s Chicago cabal. The writers spend “a lot of time mapping” an alleged subversive network of Obama operatives, Katz says.
The authors portray Obama “as some kind of robotic guy run by a nest of vipers,” says Katz. Obama “is a moderate politically – a gatherer, not a splitter. He excels in everything he does. They can’t attack him directly based on his race or his credentials,” so they map out “‘who-knows-who?’”
Anti-Obama smears utilize guilt-by-association, innuendo and hype. The Manchurian President also fingers labor organizer and long-time leftist activist Carl Davidson as one of Obama’s co-conspirators. Davidson founded the Chicago chapter of the New Party in the 1990s, which Klein and Elliot call a “self-described … ‘socialist democratic’ organization.”
The text describing the New Party’s “socialist democratic” leaning cites a USA Today article, but the footnote trails to a partisan blog – RedState.com, which proclaims USA Today reported on November 16, 1992, that the New Party was “self-described [as] ‘socialist democratic.’” USA Today actually reported “the New Party [was] a self-described ‘social democratic’ organization based on the idea of local autonomy and a combination of campaign work with non-electoral cultural and educational activities.”
The Manchurian President breathlessly reports that in “an interview conducted by Aaron Klein … Davidson strongly suggests Obama was an actual member” of the New Party. Davidson, however, says he told Klein that “Obama was never seriously a member of the New Party, I never saw him sign a membership form,” and there is no record that he did. “It’s just a crock.”
“We helped him out on his campaign for state senate in 1996, and later he thanked us. That was it. The whole idea of Obama as our Manchurian Candidate is ludicrous,” says Davidson.
A conspiracy that never dies
The political right has long built elaborate conspiracy theories about leftist subversion.
In the early 1950s, John Beaty’s The Iron Curtain Over America blamed the international communist conspiracy on a Jewish plot. After the Vietnam war, a story surfaced that politicians and high-ranking military officials, in league with the CIA, never really wanted victory. In other words, the treacherous liberal elite stabbed our boys in the back. Their goal: Create enough chaos and internal dissent within the United States to impose martial law and round up patriotic conservative Americans – and their guns. The hard-right, anti-communist John Birch Society spread this conspiracy theory across America – a narrative that endures to this day in right-wing media.
Similar fictions featuring Obama resurfaced in early July, reports sociologist Jerry Lembcke. “I was surprised it has taken this long with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for these right-wing storylines to bubble to the surface. Now we are right back into this ‘who lost the war?’ culture that the nation experienced after the war in Vietnam.”
Lembcke has been tracing the right-wing myth of liberal treachery for more than a decade in a series of books. In The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, Lembcke reported that stories about GIs being spit on as they returned from service in Vietnam were fabricated to explain that Vietnam had not been a military loss, but a betrayal by liberal elites and radical anti-war activists. In CNN’s Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam’s Last Great Myth, Lembcke traced a yarn that the U.S. government had murdered AWOL GI’s hiding in North Vietnam. Lembcke’s new book, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, explores the scapegoating of Jane Fonda that emerged years after her 1972 visit to North Vietnam on an anti-war mission.
“The power of a political trope,” he says, “works for and on people who are unaware of where it comes from. Very few Americans will connect these claims about Obama and socialism to the old JBS [John Birch Society] betrayal theory and right-wing conspiracism [about Vietnam].”
Populism, demonization and scapegoating combine to generate witch hunts. In the ’60s, New York Times reporter Cabell Phillips noted that in the right-wing conspiracy storyline, “liberalism is equated with socialism and socialism with communism.” Thus it was necessary to oppose “most welfare legislation, [and] many programs for international cooperation such as foreign aid. … Such activities are depicted as playing into the hands of the Communists, and sometimes stemming from Communist subversion.”
Hard times yield a hard right. Indeed, the Republicans appear set to adopt the liberal treachery motif as a campaign tool in the upcoming election.
Progressives must energetically defend Obama against pathological smears and racist attacks – while we kick his butt to live up to his campaign promises.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, at www.PublicEye.org.
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Reader Comments
Every known immediate family member, mentor, or associate of Obama before he came to prominence in 2004 was a radical or Marxist (family on both sides, Davis, Alinsky), virulent racist (Wright, Farrakhan), terrorist (Ayers, Dohrn), criminal (Rezko), or thug Chicago politician (all of them).
Obama advocated “spread the wealth” (his words) and advocated changing the Constitution of the United States of America to reflect a Marxist “spread the wealth” philosophy. Obama had the leftmost voting record in the Senate during his brief way-stop. And in true Marxist style, Obama is trying to destroy the wealth and the creators of wealth in the USA. Obama and the nomenklatura will themselves not lack for wealth, but everyone else will be reduced to the equality of Marxist poverty.
These are facts. If Obama or ITT does not like these facts, Obama did this to himself; it was not done to him by somebody trying to smear him.
Posted by scorp on Sep 11, 2010 at 1:19 PM
to “scorp” and his kind, the idea of spreading the wealth has to do with making sure the american people make a living wage so they can be the consumers the corporations need!
these corporate FACISTS would have you think that the corporations have nothing to do with our economy, this is why they see nothing wrong with out soucing work and give ther upper tier employees outragous bonuses, they outsource so they can afford to give these bonuses, exactly how does this help the economy in any way?
corporations that outsource need to be taxed extremely until the bring the work back to our shores, there is nothing commie or socialist about this concept, this is the basis of capitalism!
The Corporations way of looking at THIS SITUATION IS FACIST,
corporate facism is just another form of terrorism, they bancrupt the country while their corporate heads make the biggest bonuses they have ever made, and then they tell the government that they can’t afford to pay their fair share!
they have told the government that they can’t be held responsable for the mess they make or they will have to leave the country with the money they STOLE through misrepresentation, telling the people and the government that they have to have their way or they’ll destroy the economy even more, this is TERRORISM folks!
they currently use the republican party as their spokesmen to explain to the people that we need to let them have their way or we all will lose everything we have! Exactly how does this form of BLACKMAIL go unpunished, the only answer is thaty those that back these corporate entities are facists with a facist mandate to destroy our constitution and our way of life!
Posted by David Young on Sep 11, 2010 at 4:15 PM
David -
“Living wages” are to be had when people have jobs. What you call fascists are more accurately identified as employers. Employers are people who make enough to pay living wages.
The more you tax an item the less of that item can be afforded. Obama insists on taxing employers, and he will get less employers as a result, and you will get less jobs and less wages.
Reagan proved the above proposition when he brought us sharply out of the Carter Catastrophe and Bush proved it again when he brought us sharply out of the Bubba Bubble Collapse. And people such as yourself are victims of mass voluntary amnesia when you deliberately forget that it was President Kennedy who realized and acted on the idea that reducing taxes creates more employers creates more employees creates more living wages creates higher tax revenues.
I think you should confine yourself to communicating with David Sirota and his ilk in an ideation of the ill-informed.
Posted by scorp on Sep 12, 2010 at 9:13 PM
I think that when Mr. Young spoke of ‘corporations’ he was about the large conglomerates, who are capable of employing tens of thousands of Americans. Instead, they’re enhancing their overseas operations. Many of them are doing this by using U.S. bailout money. Why? Greed, of course. Not profit. What many people don’t understand is that there is a huge difference between the two.
Our large banks and lending institutions were not satisfied by providing services at reasonable profits. Greed took over. When they were handing over mortgages to families that they knew were unqualified, they never asked themselves if they should do this. They only knew that they could. Once they got the signature on the dotted line, they walked away with smiling faces and filled pockets.
I believe that something sinister went on during the Bush Administration, and when the whole story finally comes to light, half of the people of America will be shocked. This entire economic situation we’re facing, I believe, was by design. The middle-class has all but disappeared, as intended.
Ronald Reagan, I always said, was a nice guy who got mixed up with the wrong crowd. By the time his trickle was half way down, it had dried up.
George W. Bush was an out-of touch clown who had no idea of what the responsibilities of a president involved. He was like a kid playing with matches in a 1,875,714,000,000 acre field.
In other words, both did as they were told.
Posted by Eugene Connolly on Sep 13, 2010 at 10:28 AM
Eugene -
Well, duh. After ten years of stagnation and high unemployment, the EU passed the Lisbon Accords in year 2000, in which the EU pledged to match USA productivity and growth within ten years, i.e.,by now. For eight years after Lisbon, nothing happened and the Euros made zero progress toward their goal. But a couple of years ago the Euros took a sharp rightward tack electing Merkel, Berlusconi, and Sarkozy, cut taxes and made other market reforms and the EU economic outlook actually improved.
But at the same time, the USA, of all people, embraced Obama and his favorite economist/idiot, Krugman, who wants us to be more like Europe, that is, less productive with more unemployment. So now we have substantially switched positions with Europe: the Euros are the low-cost, low-tax producers and we have become the high-cost, high-tax producers. I understand that Germany is now fully recovered from the recent downturn, while we continue to stagnate in unproductivity and unemployment. Maybe we ought to become signatories to the Lisbon Accords.
Oh, I doubt that, and if so, so what? You can take your millions and invest in a high tax area with costly regulations if you want to, but most people are not that stupid. Areas like Illinois, Michigan, California, and, more and more, the USA. Not smart, but go for it.
Well, you have the Dishonest Democratic Narrative (DDN) down pat, but your knowledge of history is abyssmal. Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that required “banks and lending institutions” to give loans to qualified borrowers. No problem. Clinton adopted the policy of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank that all home buyers were qualified, whether they could pay their loans or not. Problem.
All your “banks and lending institutions” were subject to penalty if they did not make the loans to which you refer. Besides, Fan and Fred had an implied government-backed guarantee to honor those loans. Some of those loans were fraudulent dating back to 1993, when Fred and Fan began mixing prime loans with sub-prime and Alt-A loans, and selling them as prime investment grade bonds. Senators Dodd and Obama and Representative Frank were the top three recipients of campaign contributions from Fan and Fred while this fraud against the taxpayer was going on. President Bush and Senators McCain and Hagel tried to reform Fan and Fred but were blocked in the senate, primarily by Dodd, and in the house, primarily by Frank. Obama did nothing in the senate during his brief visit except to collect cmpaign contributions.
Fan’s and Fred’s implied government-backed guarantee became an actual guarantee about the time the fraud was discovered and the Democrats’ Unaffordable Housing Project collapsed. But Dodd and Frank kept Fan and Fred in operation because the Democrats did not want to shut down their tax-payer funded ATM machine.
The Democrats are sleazy lying bastards. If you need to know anything else, I will be here unless I am not.
Posted by scorp on Sep 13, 2010 at 5:57 PM
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