Expose Obama » Frank Marshall Davis

Is the FBI Investigating Obama?

Ben — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:31:46 +0000

Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy In Media

In a front page story about a major FBI terrorism investigation, The Washington Post has reported that the targets include “Chicagoans who crossed paths with Obama when he was a young state senator and some who have been active in labor unions that supported his political rise.” The implication is that the trail could lead to the White House.

This is an unusual investigation that does not primarily involve Islamists. Instead, it is focused on elements of the old international communist networks that many people mistakenly thought had faded away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those under investigation are suspected of providing support to foreign terrorist organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Middle East, a Marxist group. The Post called them “Colombian and Palestinian groups designated by the U.S. government as terrorists.”

The investigations came into public view last September when the FBI raided the homes of several “activists,” as the Post called them. Some lived in Chicago.

One of the targets, Tom Burke, was a union organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He was so confident he would get a fair shake from the Post that he provided the paper with a photo of himself shaking hands with Barack Obama. The other apparent intention was to send a message to the President and Attorney General Eric Holder that any investigation of Burke might lead to Obama.

The Post suggested that investigations of labor union activists might jeopardize their support for Obama’s 2012 presidential run. Indeed, it could therefore threaten his re-election bid, if investigations determine that the activists did more than “cross paths” with the president.

Deep inside the article, in the 29^th paragraph, we find out that some of the “activists” are associated with a group known as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Marxist-Leninist organization. Burke is a member of the FRSO, which the Post admitted was “far Left.”

The obvious question is why Obama, as a state senator in Illinois, would ever have “crossed paths” with such people. The answer goes beyond just union support for the candidate. The “far-Left” networks that include the FRSO, the Communist Party USA, the New American Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America backed and even spawned Obama’s political career. Don’t forget that Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a fundraiser for his first run for political office. The same networks also backed CIA Director Leon Panetta’s career when he was a congressman from Santa Cruz, California. This helps explain why Obama would pick Panetta, with no intelligence background, to run the intelligence agency. They are cut from the same cloth.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, the Senate voted 100-0 in favor of Panetta’s nomination as Secretary of Defense. It was a classic case of “head in the sand” politics, ignoring not only Panetta’s long-time relationship with Communist Party member Hugh DeLacy but his record as a congressman in undercutting then-President Reagan’s pro-defense policies at every turn.

Obama and Panetta were players in the “progressive” community, which since the days of Henry Wallace, presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, has had a red tint. Obama had his own communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member under FBI investigation for 19 years, while Panetta gave DeLacy, who had traveled to China to meet with Soviet and Chinese intelligence agents, sensitive reports on U.S. military matters. Any notion that Panetta had no awareness of DeLacy’s Communist affiliation was obliterated when Panetta in 1983 inserted a tribute to DeLacy into the Congressional Record, praising his resistance to “McCarthyism.”

Former FBI agent Max Noel once told me that the Bureau used to investigate candidates for federal employment by analyzing Character, Associates, Reputation, and Loyalty to the United States. The first letters in those words make up the acronym CARL. By the standard of “A”—Associates—Panetta flunks. But so does Obama.

Four Curious Errors in Obama’s “Dreams”

Ben — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:17:39 +0000

Jack Cashill, WND.com

In the retelling of his life in the acclaimed 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama embellishes and fabricates at will. He is particularly cavalier with dates. He gets these wrong as often as he does right.

Obama does not, however, make an unusual number of errors in regards to general knowledge. Let me cite the four such errors I found and explain why they deserve our attention.

Obama misquotes the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago.” Instead of writing “Hog Butcher for the World,” he writes, “hog butcher to the world.”

In discussing radical anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, Obama misspells his first name as “Franz.”

Obama refers to the South African city of Sharpeville, the site of a notorious massacre, as “Sharpsville.”

On another occasion, Obama misspells the name of rebel slave leader Denmark Vesey as “Denmark Vescey.”

Those few critics on the left who have bothered to look at my book “Deconstructing Obama,” instinctively scoff at my thesis, namely that domestic terrorist Bill Ayers took over the book from a floundering Obama and put his own stamp on it.

One minor clue to Ayers’ involvement is that in his book “A Kind and Just Parent” Ayers misquotes the Sandburg poem in exactly the same way as Obama does, “hog butcher to the world.”

To be sure, there is much stronger evidence than this: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 55 nautical metaphors, the identical educational philosophies, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the same weary ’60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in “Dreams,” the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after “Dreams,” and more.

Leftist critics routinely ignore most of this and fix on the seemingly trivial, like the Chicago poem. “Not an uncommon slip-up,” Washington Post book editor Steven Levingston assured his readers when I first posted this online in 2009.

In his review of my book in 2011 for the same Washington Post, Craig Fehrman made the same point. Among the “flimsy examples of stylistic overlap,” Fehrman cites the fact that “Obama and Ayers both misquote a line from Carl Sandburg’s famous poem ‘Chicago.’”

When I first read this, I had to wonder whether graduate student Fehrman had actually read the book or was merely trying to suck up to book editor Levingston. I say this because I had included an explanatory note about Levingston’s criticism in “Deconstructing Obama.”

“To slip up in the same way,” I wrote in the book, “Obama and Ayers must make a series of identical choices.” For starters, they both have to refer to the poem, a natural for Ayers who grew up in Chicago in an era when students memorized poems, but not for Obama, who misquotes the poem even before he moves to Chicago.

Obama could have adapted any number of noted phrases from the poem, “City of the Big Shoulders” for instance, or “Player with Railroads.”

In “Livin’ the Blues,” Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, whose favorite poet was Sandburg, paraphrases him, referring to Chicago as that “broad-shouldered brute of a burgh.”

The Left, Duped by North Korea

Ben — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:25:06 +0000

Dr. Paul Kengor, FloydReports.com

North Korea is not an easy issue. I’ve dealt with it since the early 1990s, beginning at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I had few answers then, and I still have few today.

It also is not a partisan issue. For over 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents alike have suffered the daunting challenges posed by this belligerent dictatorship. Some responded weakly, some hawkishly, with neither party characterized by a single response. The first president to deal with North Korea, Harry Truman, a Democrat, was anything but timid, sending massive U.S. troops into a major war on the Korean peninsula, one that killed tens of thousands of American boys. It was just the start of a 60-year nightmare.

What is interesting, however, has been the long battle within the American left over North Korea. The Left has suffered two threats in particular—call them “internal:” First, there was the deception and manipulation by the communist Left, which, by its nature, refused to acknowledge it was serving the Communist Party line. Second, there was dangerous self-delusion and gullibility among some leading Democrats. As to the first, consider the instructive example of Frank Marshall Davis; on the second, consider Jimmy Carter.

As I’ve written before, Frank Marshall Davis was a mentor to Barack Obama, and an actual member of Communist Party USA. (Click here to view documents.) He did pro-Soviet propaganda work, particularly….

The Voters Strike Back

Ben — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:34:09 +0000

Dr. Paul Kengor, FloydReports.com

On November 4, 2008, something incredible happened, something that will never again allow me to predict or trust the American electorate, regardless of the great corrective that happened this Tuesday, November 2, 2010.

For one, the American voter decisively elected as president a man that the widely respected, non-partisan National Journal had named the “most liberal member of the Senate” in 2007, to the left of even Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton. As a U.S. senator, that man had co-sponsored the Freedom of Choice Act; as a state senator, he had opposed and blocked legislation to prevent healthcare to babies that survived abortions. That man also possessed remarkably disturbing radical associations and influences, which were hardly irrelevant, from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I could say more, but I don’t want to sound like I’m beating up President Obama. My point is simply that Americans don’t elect presidential candidates with records and backgrounds this extreme—but they did on November 4, 2008. And they did so with traditional Democrats and moderates leading the way, thinking they had elected “another Jack Kennedy” or a “give-‘em-hell-Harry Truman,” men bearing zero ideological resemblance to Obama, or, for that matter, to Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi.

Speaking of the latter two, that same electorate gave a gigantic majority to arguably the most left-wing Congress in the history of the republic.

Yet, most amazing, that same electorate, after voting as it did, walked out of the booth and described itself to pollsters as conservative over liberal by an overwhelming margin of two to one, 40 percent to 20 percent, as it has in every poll for two decades. That data held even throughout the start of Obama’s presidency and the peak of his popularity. A major Gallup poll conducted from January to May 2009 found more self-described conservatives than liberals not only by 40 percent to 21 percent but in all 50 states.

How could this happen? We can list the reasons: The public didn’t like John McCain. Voters were angry at George Bush and the Republicans. The economy crashed.

But it wasn’t simply negatives that prompted the public to vote as it did. First and foremost, Americans liked Obama and voted for “change,” projecting onto this appealing candidate whatever they wished. For some inexplicable reason, they didn’t understand that Obama meant “change” of the sort that he has always favored, meaning a lunge to the far Left.

One figure, from the far Left, who understood what happened is Mark Rudd, the 1960s radical communist who spearheaded Students for a Democratic Society and formed the Weather Underground with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In 2008, Rudd suddenly re-emerged, along with the likes of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, among a tight-knit group called “Progressives for Obama.” Rudd’s take on the 2008 election was dead on. He wrote:

Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn’t blow it…. But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not … scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it…. And I agree with this strategy…. Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.

It seems fair to say that Rudd believes Obama duped “centrist” and “cross-over” voters.

Indeed, Obama got those votes, and then governed in a decidedly non-centrist way. Within mere weeks, Obama, working with the Pelosi-Reid Congress, passed an $800 billion “stimulus” package, reversed the Mexico City policy, sent taxpayer dollars to fund destruction of human embryos, filled his staff with people like Anita Dunn and Van Jones, effectively nationalized General Motors, took a record deficit from George W. Bush and exploded into a $1.6 trillion nightmare, and then began moving to centralize the greatest healthcare system mankind will ever know—just for starters.

Alas, the voting public, which somehow in November 2008 couldn’t see this coming, finally caught on, with the Tea Party out in front. The political Left, rather than reach out to the Tea Party, or attempt to answer it, smeared it as a bunch of racists, fascists, Nazis, gargoyles—even as the likes of Gallup published major studies finding a perfect 50/50 split among Republicans and non-Republicans in the Tea Party.

Likewise, President Obama didn’t change course even slightly, doing a few key things to suggest he was moderate. At the least, he should’ve publicly called for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, especially once it was clear Republicans would win back the House. Bill Clinton would’ve adjusted; Obama did not. He went over the cliff with the flag flying, and has now lost the sweeping majority he needed.

And now, this Tuesday, November 2, 2010: the backlash. Call it the great corrective. America remains that conservative country by a margin of two to one, even if it doesn’t always vote that way. This Tuesday, it did.

Obama Campaigned Before Socialist Group in '96

Ben — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:23:02 +0000

John Rossomando, Big Government

Newsletters published by the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America show President Barack Obama actively participated in a 1996 rally co-sponsored by the group and held at The University of Chicago during his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate.

The president’s defenders, including Obama himself, have sought to deflect questions about his socialist connections and dismiss them as partisan hyperbole or as guilt by association ̶ regarding his connections with William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Frank Marshall Davis.

But an article in the March-April 2000 edition of the Chicago DSA’s newsletter, The New Ground, detailing its recommendations for the March 2000 Democratic primaries suggests the group considered Obama one of its own.

“When Obama participated in a 1996 U[niversity] of C[hicago] Y[oung] D[emocratic] S[ocialists] Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy,” Chicago DSA writer Robert Roman wrote, contrasting it with his group’s less enthusiastic recommendation of former Black Panther, Rep. Bobby Rush, saying he “hasn’t always been the ideal Congressman from a left perspective.”

Rush went on to defeat Obama in the Democratic congressional primary, handing the future president his first and only electoral defeat thus far.

Conservatives Slow to Admit Obama is a Marxist

Ben — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:40:43 +0000

Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media

Dinesh D’Souza says in his new book that Barack Obama is an anti-colonialist. Stanley Kurtz has a new book, Radical-in-Chief, which says Obama is a socialist. The new book Dupes by Paul Kengor tells the unvarnished truth. And that’s because he makes use of material we started releasing back in February of 2008 about Obama’s communist mentor, Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis. New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon broke that story, and we confirmed it.

I hate to say, “We told you so,” but Herb Romerstein and I held a briefing in May 0f 2008 in Washington, D.C., releasing two reports, “Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection,” and “Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection.” Then, in August of 2008, I released the 600-page FBI file on Frank Marshall Davis. The response from the media included Dana Milbank of The Washington Post making fun of us and Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report refusing to run paid advertising on the Obama-Davis connection. The liberal and conservative media had their heads in the sand. They couldn’t come to grips with the unprecedented prospect of a possible agent of influence for the international Marxist movement occupying the Oval Office.

Herb Romerstein is a veteran congressional researcher and patriot who was ridiculed by Milbank as a “relic” of the anti-communist period. The author of numerous books on Soviet espionage operations, Romerstein will be honored at a Washington, D.C. conference on October 21 that is open to the press and the public. Kengor, who dedicates his book to Romerstein, describing him as a human Cold War archive, will be speaking at the same event. One of the other topics will be why Marxists are now embracing “revolutionary Islam” to bring down America.

Stanley Kurtz says, after his book is out and two years into the Obama presidency, “I was nervous about the socialism charge myself.” The highlight of his new book is that he documents that Obama attended a series of socialist scholar conferences when he went to college. But Obama admitted to that in his book, Dreams from My Father (Page 122), published back in 1995. He wrote about going to “socialist conferences.” The issue in Dreams is why Obama covered up his relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, referring to him only as “Frank.” It is Frank who created the mindset in Obama to want to attend socialist conferences. This was the issue that could and should have been addressed by conservatives during the campaign. But too many of them were silent or nervous about what they might find. Some believed the propaganda that Obama was a moderate.

Paul Kengor says that conservatives were reluctant to face up to the truth about Obama because they didn’t want to be accused of “McCarthyism” for raising the issue of his communist connections. The 600-page Kengor book includes the excerpts of the Davis FBI files that others have shied away from. Kengor, a professor at Grove City College, is not afraid to tackle the terrible truth. We need more like him in academia.

The difference between calling Obama an anti-colonialist, a socialist, or a Marxist mentored by a top operative of the CPUSA is that one category should immediately earn you an FBI investigation.

Obama's Surrogate, Communist Father

Ben — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:04:06 +0000

Dr. Paul Kengor, The American Spectator

My friend and colleague, Dinesh D’Souza, has advanced an intriguing thesis regarding the roots of Barack Obama, arguing, in short, that to understand Obama, we must understand the anti-colonialism of his African father. Predictably, D’Souza’s thoughts have brought the wrath of the liberal choir.

I’m not going to dissect D’Souza’s argument. But I would like to add some important information: If Obama is indeed motivated by anti-colonialism, the source may be Frank Marshall Davis as much as, if not more than, Obama’s father.

I come to this via a different route from D’Souza. My new book — released the same day as D’Souza’s, coincidentally — examined the communist movement in the 20th century, and specifically how communists duped progressives and liberals. I determined, definitively, that Frank Marshall Davis was not a duped liberal but a duping communist. I show this at length, quoting Davis’s weekly columns from the CPUSA organ, the Honolulu Record, and reprinting pages from Congressional investigations and from Davis’s declassified FBI file, including a document that lists his Communist Party number: 47544.

As to their relationship, Davis was introduced to a teenage Obama in the 1970s by Obama’s leftist grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who sought a father figure for Obama. Of all people to pick, Dunham chose someone summoned before the Senate in 1956 to testify to Communist Party associations.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalled fondly how Davis advised him on women, on race, on college, on life. He shared with Obama his “hard-earned knowledge.” Numerous biographical accounts (from the Left, and highly sympathetic) describe Davis as a “mentor,” a “father” figure, and an “important influence” on Obama.

The Marxist Roots of Obama's Rage

Ben — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 08:21:58 +0000

Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy In Media

In a Washington Post op-ed based on his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Dinesh D’Souza argues against the notion that Obama is a socialist. “Some have described the president as being a conventional liberal or even a socialist,” he writes in the Post. “But liberals and socialists are typically focused on poverty and social equality; Obama rarely addresses these issues, and when he does so, it is without passion.”

But D’Souza, president of The King’s College, a Christian institution, acknowledges that Obama’s signature legislation, introduced when he was a senator, was the Global Poverty Act, which argued for the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. to the rest of the world through the United Nations. He cites my research on this controversial piece of legislation in a footnote.

In order to collect the money, Marxists like Fidel Castro have long argued for a global tax. Obama endorsed consideration of that approach at the recent U.N. meeting.

Yet D’Souza contends that the Global Poverty Act reflects the “anti-colonial paradigm” and not a Marxist view about transferring the wealth. He contends that “Anti-colonialism is the idea that the rich countries got rich by looting the poor countries….”

What D’Souza fails to grasp is that “anti-colonialism” was a tactic of the communists, in order to discredit the United States and other Western powers. Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a member of the Communist Party USA.

Davis Speaks

In the last known recorded interview with Davis, available at Washington University in St. Louis, he openly discusses his relationships with Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges, without of course disclosing their communist affiliations. He says he knew Bridges and Robeson and that Robeson urged him to go to Hawaii. In the interview Davis also ridicules one of the congressional committees that tried to get him under oath to discuss his involvement in the CPUSA. It had treated him as a “hostile” witness.

Since Davis is dead and Obama won’t speak the truth about him, Paul Kengor’s book Dupes notes that one of the important issues is “defining” the Davis influence over Obama. It is clear, from Obama’s own book, that Davis functioned as a mentor in some regard. “I was intrigued by old Frank,” Obama wrote, “with his books and whiskey breath and hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.” He said Davis gave him advice on life and college.

Obama's Communist Mentor

Ben — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:05:48 +0000

Dr. Paul Kengor, National Review

When you write a book, particularly one that requires several years of research, you tend to encounter a bunch of unexpected information. Sometimes you find things that, if reported, will undoubtedly prompt partisans to demand you explain yourself. For me, this begins that process of explaining, given that one of the major characters in my new book on American Communists, Dupes, is Frank Marshall Davis.

Allegations regarding Davis’s Communism are sure to infuriate the Left because of the influence Davis once had over our president. He was a drinking buddy of Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, and spent time with young Obama. He turns up in the president’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, shrewdly identified only as “Frank”: “I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.” Recently, a U.S. Communist-party official confirmed the relationship, bragging in a speech of the Communist Davis’s formative influence over Obama. And yet when the allegations surfaced during the 2008 campaign, they went virtually unreported in the mainstream media.

After an almost four-year-long sojourn in which I tried to ascertain whether Davis was a progressive duped by Communists, or, conversely, a Communist who duped progressives, I determined the latter. No doubt, this conclusion — which means the leader of the free world was strongly influenced by a Marxist — will bring the unholy wrath of liberals. Yet, they should brace themselves for another kind of anger. Once they read what Davis did and wrote, they might redirect their rage. In truth, Davis’s targets were mainly Democrats, and especially a Democratic icon, Harry Truman. What Davis said about Truman was unbelievably outrageous. Worse, he said it because it was the Moscow line.

Frank Marshall Davis, alleged Communist, was early influence on Barack Obama

NewsEditor — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:45:02 +0000

By Toby Harnden, UK telegraph

Obama had close ties to Frank Marshall Davis

Although identified only as Frank in Mr Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father, it has now been established that he was Frank Marshall Davis, a radical activist and journalist who had been suspected of being a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s.

Mr Davis moved to Honolulu from Chicago in 1948 with his second wife Helen Canfield, a white socialite, at the suggestion of his friend the actor Paul Robeson, who advised them that there would be more tolerance of a mixed race couple in Hawaii than on the American mainland.

A bohemian libertine who drank heavily and loved jazz, he became friends with Stanley Dunham, Mr Obama’s maternal grandfather in the 1960s. Mr Davis died in 1987 at the age of 81, five years before Mr Dunham.

“He knew Stan real well,” said Dawna Weatherly-Williams, a close friend of Mr Davis “They’d play Scrabble and drink and crack jokes and argue. Frank always won and he was always very braggadocio about it too. It was all jocular. They didn’t get polluted drunk. And Frank never really did drugs, though he and Stan would smoke pot together.”

While his mother was in Indonesia during part of his teenage years, Mr Obama lived with his white grandparents. Mrs Weatherly-Williams said that the poet was first introduced to the future Democratic presidential candidate in 1970 at the age of 10.