Barack Obama’s Marxist tapestry

Barack Obama has taken exquisite care to mask his personal ideology. What he says is anything but consistent. He is so reticent on this score that — if not for his pronounced narcissism — we might conclude he is modest.

Yet, despite the ideological stealth, who Obama hangs (and has hung) with — mentors, managers and sidekicks — reveals the real deal. In sharp contrast to Obama’s policy meandering, his mentor/ staffer/ pal pattern is consistent. Like plotting points on a map, paste these faces on a wall and a decidedly Marxist tapestry emerges.

The ease with which Obama throws human obstacles under the bus is also informative. In the time-honored Marxist tradition, Obama seems motivated by nothing so much as his own access to power. When Rev. Wright became a drag, he had to go. Yet, anyone who thinks Wright’s influence went under the bus with his face may be in for a surprise.

Lance Fairchok writes in American Thinker:

Barack Obama has a thing for Marxists. He befriends them, listens to their counsel, and he even hires them to work in his campaign. … President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who led a revolution there in 1979, says Barack Obama’s presidential bid is a “revolutionary” phenomenon, and Americans are “laying the foundations for a revolutionary change.” A captured computer revealed that an unknown person chatted with Marxist FARC guerrillas on Obama’s behalf (they believed), stating he would be the next President and US policy towards Columbia would change. Frank Marshall Davis, a dear Obama friend and mentor was as a member of the Communist Party USA. Barack Obama just seems to attract Marxists.

Change, yes. But “laying the foundation for revolutionary change” isn’t exactly what I had in mind for the next American president. If Fairchok and American Thinker aren’t enough, here’s an editorial from Investor’s Business Daily. Pay close attention to the person of James Cone.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright … and his fellow travelers think they have in Obama the perfect candidate to remake America into a self-loathing dispenser of apologetic largess to victim groups at home and Marxist regimes abroad.

Key among these is reverend-turned-professor James Cone, who believes merging Marxism with the Gospel will liberate African-Americans from the supposed economic slavery of “white” capitalism. “Together,” he says, “black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society.”

Cone is the mentor of Obama’s mentor, Wright. Wright adopted Cone’s “black liberation theology” as his church’s core doctrine. …

Cone’s books are required reading at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama has worshiped for the past 20 years. …

Assuming BO wanted to work with other members of that congregation, what are the chances that during those twenty years, Obama did not read James Cone? Can anyone carry on a conversation — let alone a twenty-year relationship — with Jeremiah Wright without reading Cone?

Cone writes that “black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy” and all its institutions.

Trinity demands its members pledge allegiance instead to “black institutions” and “black leadership,” and patronize black-only businesses. Obama himself has said America’s institutions are “broken” and need to be “fixed.”

Obama has recently tried to distance himself from his crackpot pastor, but he hasn’t disavowed any part of the Marxist pseudo faith that embodies everything Wright has preached. He refuses to respond to even written questions about Cone and black liberation theology. [emphasis added.]

Obama threw Wright overboard, not Wright’s ideology. Zimbabwe, here we come. At any point in Obama’s history, Marxists have been hanging around Barack. Daniel Ortega, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Hugo Chavez, and James Cone. Or he has been hanging around them.

Take Obama campaign advisor, Princeton University professor Cornel West. Note well, Obama sought out this relationship; it is neither casual nor accidental. As Matthew Vadum writes at CandaFreePress:

West hails democracy as a concept but at the same time calls himself a “progressive socialist,” and has written that “Marxist thought is an indispensable tradition for freedom fighters.”

West is so committed to his through-the-looking-glass version of democracy that he supports Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who wants to overthrow the elected government of neighboring Colombia [which, despite its faults is nevertheless] a real-life democracy.

When West visited Venezuela in 2006, he praised the government of leftist Chavez which has nationalized industries, jailed and murdered its opponents, and threatened the United States: “We in the United States have so many lies about President Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution.” West said he visited Chavez’s Venezuela “to see the democratic awakening taking place.” By “democratic awakening,” West meant the transformation of Venezuela into a socialist state.

Barack Obama markets himself to the non-curious as an agent of fluffy, non-concept change. But his real brand of “change” shows up in who he chooses to run with. Since Professor West is a handpicked Obama campaign advisor, it is fair to say West’s is the direction in which Obama would take the United States.

Another “today” face in Barack’s Marxist tapestry is young Sam Graham-Felsen who runs the Obama campaign blog. We can safely assume Obama vetted applicants and that he knows their political history, especially one as colorful Graham-Felsen. Fairchok continues:

If the people [Obama] surrounds himself with are any indication of his core beliefs, a higher capital gains tax to punish the rich … may be only the beginning. Obama’s official campaign blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, a former writer for the leftist Nation magazine and a contributor to the Socialist Viewpoint, is certainly a believer in class warfare.

… Sam is an admirer of anti-American academic Noam Chomsky, a hypocrite and fraud masquerading as a political philosopher. Mr. Chomsky … is fond of visiting dictators and terrorists and giving speeches blaming all the worlds’ ills on America. … Chomsky was an ardent supporter of Pol Pot, and to this day denies a holocaust occurred in Cambodia (1.67 million died). He is unrepentant about the horrors his vile ideology encouraged and supports Hamas and Hezbollah with the same willful blindness today.

When Obama sees the handwriting on the wall he removes a face. Or a page from the website. Worldnet Daily reports:

In the same week the Obama campaign quietly removed from its official website a page managed by a fundraiser tied to the Islamic terrorist group Hamas, its official blogger has come under attack as a “hardcore Marxist” for hanging a Communist Party flag in his Harvard campus apartment and publishing in a self-professed ‘revolutionary Marxist’ journal.

Sam Graham-Felsen, a journalist-on-leave from The Nation, joined Obama for America in March 2007 where he works for the New Media department as the official blogger, daily presenting the campaign’s public face. Now he’s under fire for his reputed Marxist sympathies from bloggers at Common Ills on the left and Little Green Footballs on the right.

Graham-Felsen, according to a 2003 article in the Harvard Crimson, adorned one corner of his shared student apartment with “a Communist Party flag … bought on their trip to Russia the summer after sophomore year.”

The revelation echoes an earlier public relations problem in February when a Houston Fox TV affiliate captured images of a volunteer in an Obama campaign office working in front of a flag featuring the image of Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary who became Fidel Castro’s executioner after the communist takeover in Cuba.

At that time, the Obama campaign issued a statement calling the flag “inappropriate” and noting that the office where it was displayed was funded by “volunteers” and was not the official campaign headquarters.

Graham-Felsen, however, is not a volunteer, but a staff member according to information published on the Huffington Post taken from the Obama for America campaign 2007 second quarter report.”

As a trophy of a summer trip, a flag displayed in an apartment would be no big deal. But when it is in keeping with extreme positions Graham-Felsen has argued in print, the flag signals something more serious.

As a community organizer in Chicago, Obama signed on to sell the kind of change promoted by another name you’ll want to remember, Saul Alinsky, another Marxist and Obama mentor-once-removed. That change was not about “bringing people together.” It was about tearing them apart. Obama’s job as a “community organizer” was about making people dissatisfied with the status quo and making them hate those who had more. It was about creating a community mindset of revolution. Back to Fairchok:

…As a confirmed atheist, Alinsky believed that the here and now is all there is, and therefore had no qualms about assorted versions of morality in the pursuit of worldly power. He didn’t coddle his radical acolytes or encourage their bourgeois distinctions between good and evil when it came to transferring power from the Haves to the Have Nots. …

Marketing the kind of change Obama has — not had — in mind was his entire motive for joining Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. Once signed on, lo and behold, the Rev and Barack were such a pair that Obama hung in there with Jeremiah for twenty years . . . until the glare of presidential politics made it untenable to continue the dance in public. This is all about Black Nationalism and that is why the Reverend Jeremiah Wright held Obama’s allegiance for two full decades.

When Obama first undertook his agitating work in Chicago’s South Side poor neighborhoods, he was un-churched. Yet his office was in a Church and most of the folks he needed to agitate and organize were Church people — pastors and congregants — who took their churches and their church-going very seriously. So, this became a problem for the young agnostic … Again and again, he was asked by pastors and church ladies, “Where do you go to Church, young man?” It was a question he dodged for a while, but finally he relented and joined a church.

Not just any church, but a huge black nationalist church with a pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who unabashedly preaches a “black” [highly political] gospel.

We’ve have seen the videos and heard the screaming rants of Jeremiah Wright. We’ve seen the rhapsodic response of his congregation. This is the sort of “bringing together” that Obama endorsed by his sizable donations, his attendance, his marriage and his children’s baptisms, for twenty long years.

The unity of the Wright-Obama position is not evidenced merely by Obama’s attendance and his generous donations. As Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum report, Wright and Obama functioned as a team. It was Obama’s full time job to “rub the sores raw,” and to generate the anger that Wright exacerbated each Sunday:

Mike Kruglik, formerly one of Obama’s fellow organizers, hailed Obama for his persuasive powers:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fi re Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards… With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.” (New Republic, March 19, 2007).

Agitation is what Chicago-born Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), the father of community organizing, called “rubbing raw the sores of discontent.”

No wonder it was so hard for Obama to break with this “mentor;” he had a lot less trouble throwing his white grandmother under the bus. Together, the Rev and BO were furthering the work of Saul Alinsky, carried to the next Chicago generation by none other than a future nominee for President of the United States.

Following the model of Alinsky, Obama was “organizing” the blacks in South Chicago for a specific purpose. Unity on a grand scale with other races or economic classes was not the object of his efforts any more than a healing unity was ever the object of Reverend Wright’s hate-filled speeches. Agitation was; it is part of the job description.

While BO has, for the moment, distanced himself from the Reverend, that separation is clearly for the purposes of the campaign. It is not because of any disagreement with the Reverend’s beliefs, which are clearly the same as Barack (and Michelle) Obama’s. Any other explanation would leave all those other Marxists on Obama’s wall glancing furtively at one another, waiting their turn to be explained away. (One report suggests Wright’s retirement may not be all that permanent, but what the hey, it was long enough to assure Obama the nomination.)

The largest donations to Rev. Wright’s church were made in 2005 and 2006. By then, Obama had fourteen or fifteen years to figure out whether he agreed with the Rev. He’d had the same number of years to read James Cone’s book, about which Jeremiah Wright was adamant, and in which you’ll find everything Jeremiah Wright teaches, albeit with less fire. Hence, any excuse Obama has floated about “not knowing” what Wright was about holds no water.

Speaking from a combination of vanity, venality and immaturity, the alleged adults in Barack’s campaign cynically (and we hope foolishly) expect us to believe, as Fairchok writes,

that a campaign staff filled with Marxists and radicals does not reflect the candidate. …The change Obama will bring will not be the change America needs or expects. It will be the change of naive adolescents, which think Noam Chomsky wise.

When Daniel Ortega declares that Obama is “laying the foundations for a revolutionary change,” shouldn’t we take him at his word? All faces hanging together in Barack Obama’s wide tapestry of Marxism.