Weekend Review:

The following originally appeared in “Post Obotomy Syndrome” April 26, 2015. 

Book Review: “The Communist” by Paul Kengor.

I don’t hold to traditional format in book reviews. Amazon has liberated us from that crippling structure. The Amazon review is to criticism what free verse is to poetry. Here we go.

The Barack Obama story is an American tragedy. The powers that be, the elitists and the elite including 99% of the news media, decided Barack Obama would be our president. They would participate in myth making and attack anyone who challenged their fairy tales. There would be duping and intentional self-duping. There would be mass celebration of bad times to come.

With the pledge of media Omerta enforced, a few Indexed writers stepped up to tell the world about Barack Obama. “The Amateur” made the strong case for The Peter Principle in action. “The Great Destroyer” credited the president as an architect of destruction. “The Communist” bridges the school of Ineptitude with the school of Domestic Quisling. Like the other two books, “The Communist” was released just months before the 2012 election and it would not affect the outcome. The question remains, is this still worth reading?

“The Communist” is worth reading. Barack Obama comes across as an imprinted duck. An adolescent imprinted duck. The Konrad Lorenz in this case is a radical self-avowed Communist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis.

What is frightening about Obama is that he doesn’t quote or refer to other influences. Did he learn anything at Occidental or Columbia or Harvard? If he did, he does not mention what that might be. Whatever he needed to know he learned in high school from “Frank”. He would carry his sophomoric pride with him for the rest of his life.

The author compares Frank Marshall Davis’s influence to Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton’s forgettable mentors. They are mentioned here and there by their mentees. Barack Obama on the other hand, is obsessed with his teacher. Not only does he talk about “Frank” often, he parrots the cliches and slogans Frank Marshall Davis parroted. Obama’s verbiage can often be traced to American Communist propaganda.

If a future president has but one intellectual influence, it would be good for all of us if that influence was a man steeped in wisdom of his times and of the ages. Those of you hoping for a Plato and Socrates situation will be disappointed. Frank Marshall Davis comes across as a not particularly deep thinker consumed by bitterness.

The author is sympathetic. He refers to him as “Frank” instead of the conventionally used surname. Davis did indeed face racism throughout his life.  That in no way excuses his falling for the silliness and yes, the evil, of Communism. And fall he did. Face first with no hands extended.

Apart from the exposure of Frank Marshall Davis, Kengor focuses a lot of attention on the Communists in America. I hold the strong opinion that the lineage of Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod is disturbing. Like their meal ticket, they have never renounced Communism or spoken openly of converting or seeing the light.

I was not aware that the American Communists cheered for Hitler in the early stages of World War II.  If I knew that Hitler and Stalin were frenemies in the early stages of the war, I had forgotten it. Churchill was the devil who was resisting an ally of Papa Joe. Maybe that explains Obama’s Anglophobia.

Kengor reveals a lot of the front groups and dupes who wittingly or otherwise advanced American Communism. Their influence is everywhere these days always repackaged in deceptive terms like “social justice.” There is a larger pattern here. This is a portrait of a mass movement and the simple but embittered minds attracted to it. For this reason “The Communist” is well worth reading now and for a long time to come.

Postscript June 17, 2023: “The Communist”

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