THE VETTING, PART I: BARACK’S LOVE SONG TO ALINSKY
Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects–but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – “Who guards the guardians?” Andrew saw himself in that role—as a guardian protecting Americans from the left’s “objective” loyal scribes.
Andrew wanted to do what the mainstream media would not. First and foremost: Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama.
Andrew did not want to re-litigate the 2008 election. Nor did he want to let Republicans off the hook. Instead, he wanted to show that the media had failed in its most basic duty: to uncover the truth, and hold those in power accountable, regardless of party.
From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president–and his rivals.
We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in preparation for today’s Big relaunch–a story that should swing the first hammer against the glass wall the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama claims that he worried after 9/11 that his name, so similar to that of Osama bin Laden, might harm his political career.
But Obama was not always so worried about misspellings and radical resemblances. He may even have cultivated them as he cast himself as Chicago’s radical champion.
In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a play titled The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, dedicated to the life and politics of the radical community organizer whose methods Obama had practiced and taught on Chicago’s South Side.
Obama was not only in the audience, but also took the stage after one performance, participating in a panel discussion that was advertised in the poster for the play.
Recently, veteran Chicago journalist Michael Miner mocked emerging conservative curiosity about the play, along with enduring suspicions about the links between Alinsky and Obama. Writing in the Chicago Reader, Miner described the poster:
Let’s take a look at this poster.
It’s red—and that right there, like the darkening water that swirls down Janet Leigh’s drain [in Psycho’s famous shower scene], is plenty suggestive. It touts a play called The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, Alinsky being the notorious community organizer from Chicago who wrote books with titles like Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. On it, fists are raised—meaning insurrection is in the air.
And down at the very bottom, crawling across the poster in small print, it mentions the panel discussions that will follow the Sunday performances. The panelists are that era’s usual “progressive” suspects: Leon Despres, Monsignor Jack Egan, Studs Terkel . . .
And state senator Barack Obama.
Miner obscured the truth. His article only reveals only a small portion of the poster. Here’s the whole poster:
And here’s the press release:
So, what’s in the play? It truly is a love song to Alinsky. In the first few minutes of the play, Alinsky plays Moses – yes, the Biblical Moses – talking to God. The play glorifies Alinsky stealing food from restaurants and organizing others to do the same, explaining, “I saw it as a practical use of social ecology: you had members of the intellectual community, the hope of the future, eating regularly for six months, staying alive till they could make their contributions to society.”
In an introspective moment, Alinsky rips America: “My country … ‘tis of whatthehell / And justice up a tree … How much can you sell / What’s in it for me.” He grins about manipulating the Christian community to back his programs. He talks in glowing terms about engaging in Chicago politics with former Mayor Kelly. He rips the McCarthy committee, mocking, “Everyone was there, when you think back – Cotton Mather, Hester Prynn, Anne Hutchinson, Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson … Brandeis, Holmes … Gene Debs and the socialists … Huey Long … Imperial Wizards of all stripes … Father Coughlin and his money machine … Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd … and a kicking chorus of sterilized reactionaries singing O Come, All Ye Faithful …”
And Alinsky talks about being the first occupier – shutting down the O’Hare Airport by occupying all the toilet stalls, using chewing gum to “tie up the city, stop all traffic, and the shopping, in the Loop, and let everyone at City Hall know attention must be paid, and maybe we should talk about it.” As Alinsky says, “Students of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your juicy fruit.”
The play finishes with Alinsky announcing he’d rather go to Hell than Heaven. Why? “More comfortable there. You see, all my life I’ve been with the Have-Nots: here you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of money, there you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of virtue. I’d be asking more questions, organizing them. They’re my kind of people – Hell would be Heaven for me.”
That’s The Love Song of Saul Alinsky. It’s radical leftist stuff, and it revels in its radical leftism.
And that’s Barack Obama, our president, on the poster.
This is who Barack Obama was. This was before Barack Obama ran for Congress in 2000—challenging former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush from the left in a daring but unsuccessful bid.
This was also the period just before Barack Obama served with Bill Ayers, from 1999 through 2002 on the board of the Woods Foundation. They gave capital to support the Midwest Academy, a leftist training institute steeped in the doctrines of — you guessed it! — Saul Alinsky, and whose alumni now dominate the Obama administration and its top political allies inside and out of Congress.
Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief, described the Midwest Academy as a “crypto-socialist organization.” Yet almost no one has heard of Midwest Academy, because the media does not want you to know that the president is a radical’s radical whose presidency itself is a love song to a socialist “community organizer.”
The reason Newt Gingrich surged in the Republican primary contest in January is that he was attempting to do the press’s job by finding out who the current occupant of the White House actually is. Millions also want to know, but the mainstream media is clearly not planning to vet the President anytime soon. Quite the opposite.
For example, Miner tries to turn Obama’s appearance on the Alinsky panel into a plus for the president:
Obama was on the panel that talked about Alinsky the last Sunday of the play’s run at the Blue Rider Theatre in Pilsen. Neither Pam Dickler, who directed the Terrapin Theatre production, nor Gary Houston, who played Alinsky, can remember a word Obama said. But he impressed them. “You never would have known he was a politician,” says Dickler. “He never said anything at all about himself. He came alone, watched the play, and during the panel discussion was entirely on point and brilliant. That evening I called my father, who’s a political junkie, and told him to watch out for this man, he’s going places.” Houston was just as taken by Obama—though he remembers him arriving in a group.
But is it a good thing to impress the sort of people who show up to laud The Love Song of Saul Alinsky? Here are the other members of the Obama panel:
Leon Despres: Despres knew Saul Alinsky for nearly 50 years, and together they established the modern concept of “community organizing.” Despres worked with secret Communist and Soviet spy Lee Pressman to support strikers at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937; the strike ended in tragedy when 14 rioting strikers were killed and many wounded in a hail of police bullets. Despres worked with another Communist Party front, the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, but eventually left because of the “Stalinism” of its leaders.
Also in 1937, Despres and his wife delivered a suitcase of “clothing” to Leon Trotsky, then hiding out from Stalin’s assassins in Mexico City. Despres and his wife not only met with the exiled Russian Communist, but Despres’s wife sat for a portrait with Trotsky pal and Marxist muralist Diego Rivera while Leon took Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo to the movies.
Quentin Young: From 1970 until at least 1992, Quentin Young was active in the Communist Party front organization, the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights – a group dedicated to outlawing government surveillance of radical organizations. He was also a member of the Young Communist League. Young, a confidante and physician to Barack Obama, is credited with having heavily influenced the President’s views on healthcare policy.
Timuel Black: An icon of the Chicago left, Black was originally denied officer training because military intelligence claimed he had secretly joined the Communist Party. Black also worked closely with the Socialist Party in the 1950s, becoming president of the local chapter of the Negro American Labor Council, a organization founded by Socialist Party leader A. Phillip Randolph.
In the early ‘60s Black was a leader of the Hyde Park Community Peace Center, where he worked alongside former radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and the aforementioned Communist Dr. Quentin Young. Black served as a contributing editor to the Hyde Park/Kenwood Voices, a newspaper run by Communist Party member David S. Canter. By 1970, Timuel Black was serving on the advisory council of the Communist Party controlled Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.
Timuel Black says he has been friends with domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, “going back to 1968, since long before I knew Barack.” In April 2002, Black, Dohrn and Democratic Socialists of America member Richard Rorty spoke together on a panel entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” The panel was the first of two in a public gathering jointly sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Bill Ayers and Barack Obama spoke together on in the second panel at that gathering. Communist academic Harold Rogers chaired Timuel Black’s unsuccessful campaign for Illinois State Representative.
Studs Terkel: A sponsor of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in 1949, which was arranged by a Communist Party USA front organization known as the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.
Roberta Lynch: A leading member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a leader of the radical Marxist New American Movement (NAM).
Are we expected to believe that “Baraka Obama” was a countervailing voice of reason on a panel of radicals?
The reason that Obama’s Alinskyite past, and his many appearances in political photography and video from the 1990s, are conspicuously missing from the national dialogue is that State Senator Barack Obama’s reinvention as a reasonable and moderate Democratic politician could not withstand scrutiny of his political life.
Because the mainstream media did not explore his roots, the American public remains largely ignorant of the degree to which Obama’s work with ACORN and his love of Alinsky were symbolic of his true political will.
If any of the candidates can resist the media, and parlay Newt’s strategy into a nomination, we’ll have the choice between an imperfect but well-known Republican and the real “Baraka” Obama, not the manufactured one the media prefers.
Maybe not, but WITHOUT it, your first proposition [just above] is out of the question, for lack of a controlling arbiter
— since you reject the “hidden hand” of the free market (all told, the nearest thing to economic democracy you’re ever going to find in this life, boychik).
We seem to have stumbled across that fact just fine WITHOUT the MSM’s help.
And how do you propose for that to be accomplished?
Still missing the forest for the trees, I see.
Wouldn’t matter whether it was one percent or .000001 percent.
“Us versus Them”
— constitutes the politics of ENVY.
You’d have a rough time trying to convince the federal govt of that little proposition.
I spent a genial 18 months or so of my life in a controlled environment as a guest of Uncle Sam — after courteously, though resolutely & impenitently, declining his gracious offer of conscription in a questionable cause.
I daresay you’d have your work cut out for you trying to throw a jacket around YoursTruly as a “well trained doberman… the palace guard… begging for [my] cut.” Hoo-hah. ROTFLMAO.
And who will bell the cat?
Who will establish the “wealth sharing” of which you speak? Wouldn’t that require a tyrant?
And if not you — then who?
(Ah, there’s the rub.)
Obviously it would have to be Someone of superior intelligence
— indeed, perhaps INFINITE intelligence?
Lots of great verbage here……all a bunch of mish mash. When you figure out how to pry major industries
out of the hands of owners and/or stockholders, come back with the answer. Until then all I see is a bunch
of tripe.
Because you don’t understand the true source of the problem you people are doomed to failure. You can’t correct a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it.
It is the American System of elite economic fascism that condemns and murders Israel. The Republicans and the Democrats represent the same economic power group – hard guy soft guy – they are pushing Israel to the same result.
Americans think what the MSM tells them to think and the MSM is owed by the economic fascists.
The solution to Israel is to reform America internally so that the people will have parties that represent them and not the superclass, and the media and industires will be owned by the the people through shared capitalism and all executives will be the voice of the people and not the propaganda of the superclass.
Just think what it would be like if the media’s stockholders were the public it reported to and if it then reported the reality of Islamic Fascism in America instead of the gilded viewpoint of the Superclass’s propaganda machine.
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Wake up and smell the fascism. Capitalism and democracy is not elite ownership nor can it ever exist under elite centralist control.
You have been sold a lie. You have been absurdly propagandized to hate the very things that will bring you freedom.
Get deprogrammed – wake up to reality.
It’s the .01 percent , not the one percent.
You are a well trained doberman of the system (the palace guard – you help the repression and beg for your cut) but you really don’t know who you are nor how you got that way.
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Don’t be silly, they don’t live on your block, they own your block and everything you have and everything you are.
The elite are not your neighbors they are you rulers, they own you. They are mass murderers and tyrants having murdered millions of their fellow people through deprivation of basic resources.
Wealth sharing is freedom from fascist and tyrants it is freedom to have a lawn and own it.
Envy! HA – no I don’t wish to be a tyrant – but the tyrants need to give back what they have stolen from humanity or else there is no humanity and no civilization just the attack dogs, the slaves and the corpses.
Wasn’t it you, Max, who — some months back — advocated “euthanasia centers”?
Harping on “the 1 percent” always betokens a politics of ENVY
— and constitutes about as much of an improvement over the politics of GREED
as the unsolicited gifts the cat leaves behind the couch
constitute an improvement over the unsolicited gifts the neighbors’s dog
leaves on your front lawn.
Missing a few cards in the deck to be able to understand eh?
Seems to be an inverse relationship between a sense of humour and political proselytizers.
lol
BTW for the uneducated (IE those whose sole source of info is the MSM) – in China revealing how the economy really works is a crime, in America and Canada they do the repression of information in different ways but the end result is the same.
but when you don’t know what you are missing then you don’t miss the freedom to speak it since you don’t even know freedom or regression exists, do you?
‘Blessed are the sockpuppets, for vacuity is the Kingdom of Heaven’. heh
It’s the reality of economic fascism making political freedom meaningless. Chinese Communism = Russian Stalinism = American Statism, not much difference.
—>
Max: Give us a hint. Just how are you planning on accomplishing the following?
“With the stock ownership going over to the workers in a capitalist system everything remains the same, except the wealth is now shared by the people who create it and the citizens of the country can actually own the media, the government and companies themselves and they can elect chairmen and executives that will serve the interests of the WHOLE company ie the workers of the company as well as the nation.”
With guns? By revolution? By government mandate? By union takeover?
Duh???? Say what????
Max says:
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
My comment is guilty of economic crimes and may see the death penalty.
You are both regurgitating mindless and hysterical elite propaganda, you have never thought rationally about this.
You are not reading very carefully, this paradigm I presented is complete new to you because it has been censored in your socialization by your puppet masters, you are not even reading it correctly. I did not say anything about communism or destroying capitalism, in fact what I suggested would restore the business motivation to the public.
As it stands now, capitalism only exists for the ,01 percent who own the wealth, the rest have become disposable worker drones (if they are lucky – if they aren’t they go to the public park to die) and have no chance to make wealth or have businesses that will make money for they have no chance to have businesses -everything is becoming owned by the superclass – including the information channels, the air, the grass, the seeds and even your bodies will shortly no longer belong to yourselves.
The lives of ordinary people are finished. In America when you are no longer of use to the superclass you are first milked of your savings (to go back to the superclass)- because all ownership is being taken form the people – then tossed aside , usually sick and old and left to die.
Wealth ownership by the masses is capitalism – wealth ownership by an elite is fascism.
With the stock ownership going over to the workers in a capitalist system everything remains the same, except the wealth is now shared by the people who create it and the citizens of the country can actually own the media, the government and companies themselves and they can elect chairmen and executives that will serve the interests of the WHOLE company ie the workers of the company as well as the nation.
Communism is wealth ownership by the state which is totalitarianism.
American economic fascism is wealth ownership by the .01 percent which is totalitarianism which is the current system in America today.
If the purpose of American citizens are to be slaves and discardable garbage for the .01 to make money and live the good life then you all might as well burn in a nuclear holocaust because your lives are worthless.
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You miss the forest for the trees, Max.
Businesses exist for the purpose of making money.
— and that’s not a dishonorable objective.
As a practical matter, however, a business that does not in some way, directly or indirectly, serve a large number of people by way of its products or services, will not be successful over time. Think about it.
And put the cork back in that brandy bottle.
It’s too early in the day. . . .
Max, you are one sick puppy. You must believe in the Communist credo: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
So, you want all companies to work for the public and not for themselves? So people should start a company, put their own money into it, put their sweat equity in as well, finally become successful, and all of this so they can then give it all to the public? Well, Mr. Dingbat, it is obvious that you’ve never been an officer or held a position of management in a company in business. So take your theories and gently place them in a wreath on Stalin’s grave. Companies large and small are involved in earning a return for those who invest their money and efforts into making them successful, and the fruits of that success belong to those whose blood, sweat, and toil have made it successful. Nobody owns ALL the wealth in this country, and nobody owns slaves in this country, so what the hell are you mumbling about? If you think that business is slavery and evil, I suggest that you don’t get involved in it, but instead go back to your occupy wall street enclave and spew more bitter grapes to others who think like you.
If a business doesn’t work for the public and the nation then they are the enemy of the nation and are committing capital offense crimes against humanity.
The stockholders should be the people who work in, not for a company.
To own slaves and a country by force ..or by owning all the wealth -there is no difference – it is fascism and totalitarianism , not business but the business of exploitive slavery , the business of evil.
Kim Segar, you are full of hatred and crap. You obviously know nothing of business. Bain bought companies that appeared to be in trouble with the aim of saving that company through better and more professional management. Bring it into profitable position and sell that company for a profit to their investors. Every company they purchased was unique in its problems. Some could be saved and grown, some, even with Bain involvement and infusion of capitol could not….and they were let to go down the drain and those employees were out of a job. Those same employees would have been out of a job had they been without Bain’s being in the picture, only quicker. Bain is responsible for saving and building many companies that have employed far more men and women than those lost to a lost cause. Entrepeneurs do not go into business to hire employees….a successful business person hires as few as are needed to help make the bottom line profitable. They are not a public charity, they answer to their stockholders who have invested. Get off your high horse and understand what you are talking about when you make a post.
It is hard for me to think America has let all the trash go this far..and still are. then to see them suport Romney, a shadow of obama. unreal….IF Santorum does not win, we are done..and those who think he can’t beat obama is dead wrong, instead the want the plastic guy who thinks he replaced the Jews..and most of his kind are 33 degree masons..hello
Romney..how do you think he got rich ? he would invest in business. laying off many and hiring his own bunch. making it grow rich and then grabbing his investment money out and letting them fail..think Enron for one..
Green is Marxist red!
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