- Klein, Aaron with Brenda J. Elliott.
The Manchurian President.
New York: WND Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-935071-87-7.
-
The provocative title of this book is a reference to Richard
Condon's classic 1959 Cold War thriller,
The Manchurian Candidate,
in which a Korean War veteran, brainwashed by the Chinese
while a prisoner of war in North Korea, returns as a
sleeper agent, programmed to perform political assassinations
on behalf of his Red controllers. The climax comes as a
plot unfolds to elect a presidential candidate who will
conduct a “palace coup”, turning the country
over to the conspirators. The present book, on the other
hand, notwithstanding its title, makes no claim that its
subject, Barack Obama, has been brainwashed in any way,
nor that there is any kind of covert plot to enact an agenda
damaging to the United States, nor is any evidence presented
which might support such assertions. Consequently, I believe
the title is sensationalistic and in the end counterproductive.
But what about the book?
Well, I'd argue that there is no reason to occupy oneself
with conspiracy theories or murky evidence of possible
radical connections in Obama's past, when you need only
read the man's own words in his 1995 autobiography,
Dreams from My Father,
describing his time at Occidental College:
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.
The more politically active black students. The foreign students.
The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and the structural feminists and
punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather
jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz
Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.
The sentence fragments.
Now, certainly, many people have expressed radical
thoughts in their college days, but most, writing
an autobiography fifteen years later, having graduated from
Harvard Law School and practiced law, might be inclined to
note that they'd “got better”; to my knowledge,
Obama makes no such assertion. Further, describing his
first job in the private sector, also in Dreams,
he writes:
Eventually, a consulting house to multinational
corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like
a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan
office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters
machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the
globe.
Now bear in mind that this is Obama on Obama, in a book
published the same year he decided to enter Illinois
politics, running for a state senate seat. Why would a
politician feigning moderation in order to gain power, thence
to push a radical agenda, explicitly brag of his radical
credentials and background?
Well, he doesn't because he's been an overt hard left radical with
a multitude of connections to leftist, socialist,
communist, and militant figures all of his life, from the
first Sunday school he attended in Hawaii to the circle
of advisers he brought into government following his election
as president. The evidence of this has been in plain sight
ever since Obama came onto the public scene, and he has never
made an effort to cover it up or deny it. The only reason it
is not widely known is that the legacy media did not choose
to pursue it.
This book documents Obama's radical leftist history and
connections, but it does so in such a clumsy and tedious
manner that you may find it difficult to slog through. The
hard left in the decades of Obama's rise to prominence is
very much like that of the 1930s through 1950s: a multitude
of groups with platitudinous names concealing their agenda,
staffed by a cast of characters whose names pop up again and
again as you tease out the details, and with sources of funding
which disappear into a cloud of smoke as you try to pin them
down. In fact, the “new new left” (or “contemporary
progressive movement”, as they'd doubtless prefer) looks
and works almost precisely like what we used to call “communist
front organisations” back in the day. The only difference is
that they aren't funded by the KGB, seek Soviet domination, or
report to masters in Moscow—at least as far as we know….
Obama's entire career has been embedded in such a tangled
web of radical causes, individuals, and groups that following
any one of them is like pulling up a weed whose roots extend
in all directions, tangling with other weeds, which in turn
are connected every which way. What we have is not a list of
associations, but rather a network, and a network is a
difficult thing to describe in the linear narrative
of a book. In the present case, the authors get all tangled
up in the mess, and the result is a book which is repetitive,
tedious, and on occasions so infuriating that it was mostly a
desire not to clean up the mess and pay the repair cost
which kept me from hurling it through a window. If they'd
mentioned just one more time that Bill Ayers
was a former Weatherman terrorist, I think I might have
lost that window.
Each chapter starts out with a theme, but as the web of connections
spreads, we get into material and individuals covered elsewhere,
and there is little discipline in simply cross-referencing
them or trusting the reader to recall their earlier mention.
And when there are cross-references, they are heavy handed.
For example at the start of chapter 12, they write: “Two
of the architects of that campaign, and veterans of Obama's
U.S. senatorial campaign—David Axelrod and
Valerie Jarrett—were discussed by the authors in detail
in Chapter 10 of this book.” Hello, is there an editor
in the house? Who other than “the authors” would
have discussed them, and where else than in “this book”?
And shouldn't an attentive reader be likely to recall two
prominent public figures discussed “in detail”
just two chapters before?
The publisher's description promises much, including “Obama's
mysterious college years unearthed”, but very little new
information is delivered, and most of the book is based on
secondary sources, including blog postings the credibility of
which the reader is left to judge. Now, I did not find much to
quibble about, but neither did I encounter much material I did
not already know, and I've not obsessively followed Obama. I
suppose that people who exclusively get their information from the
legacy media might be shocked by what they read here, but most of
it has been widely mentioned since Obama came onto the radar
screen in 2007. The enigmatic lacunæ in Obama's paper
trail (SAT and LSAT scores, college and law school transcripts,
etc.) are mentioned here, but remain mysterious.
If you're interested in this topic, I'd recommend giving this book
a miss and instead starting with the
Barack
Obama page on
David Horowitz's
Discover the Networks
site, following the links outward from there. Horowitz literally
knows the radical left from inside and out: the son of two members of the
Communist Party of the United States, he was a founder of the New Left
and editor of Ramparts magazine. Later, repelled by the
murderous thuggery of the Black Panthers, he began to re-think his
convictions and has since become a vocal opponent of the Left. His
book,
Radical Son (March 2007),
is an excellent introduction to the Old and New Left, and
provides insight into the structure and operation of the leftists
behind and within the Obama administration.
June 2010 