Kenneth D. Gartrell

By: Kenneth D. Gartrell

One way to evaluate the validity of the book Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi is to consider it and all the significant comments and reviews on Amazon, side by side with the recent “40-page” Obama campaign response. Such an analysis reveals that the controversy over the book is fueled by (and confused by) our timid unwillingness to go to the main point of this election – which is that the Obama candidacy is in fact not about race, or any single issue such as Iraq, oil or abortion. It is rather a much bigger issue that affects all the other issues.

Namely, our dilemma is nothing less than a referendum on Marxism and Communism in America and once that is acknowledged, the whole kaleidoscope of current political issues at the eye of the Corsi controversy takes focus and we are left wishing that Ronald Reagan was still here, just because we know he would go to the south side of Chicago and say, “Mr. Obama, tear down this wall.”

THE MAIN POINT

The main point about Barack Obama and the Corsi book is that, based on his comprehensive stated social and economic positions, Obama is objectively the first fully committed Marxist and Communist to run for the Presidency of the United States. He is the standard-bearer for all of the failed socialist programs and all the ongoing efforts to enslave the American people in a system of central government planning. He promotes and represents by proxy a host of policies anathema to free markets and supportive of systems or social organizations leading prospectively to genocide of the underprivileged and euthanasia of the old and the sick.

It is time to stand on principal and, with a clear mind on all sides, face the facts of this election. We are living in a world where Communism has failed worldwide, but the aftershocks in our own country have not yet been resolved. The valuable thing about the Corsi book is that it is doing a great service in crystallizing the debate. The passion and frenzy around the book tells us unequivocally what is at stake.

Americans overall need to understand and correctly evaluate whether they would like to go back to the 20th Century and organize their society on the basis of a model which has failed everywhere in the world it has been tried. The Corsi book frames the issues well – whether on purpose or whether accidentally, it hardly matters. The one thing that cannot be denied about the book is that it is significant: a New York Times number one best seller that the New York Times hates!

Regrettably we are not, as a society, currently focused well enough on political economics, nor are we vigilant enough yet to know quickly what we are faced with in this election. We are also still restrained and intimidated by fears of a vestigial paranoia about “Red Baiting” received from the Cold War era.

THE REBUTTAL

The Obama campaign response to the Corsi book is tepid, confused, seemingly desperate, and an even more misleading rhetorical reaction than the book could be accused of. It fails to dispose of the more serious central issues in the book, but it does crystallize the central issues and allow a critical evaluation of Corsi’s actual substantive contribution.

Regardless of certain relatively trivial disputed facts, the main thrusts of Obama Nation hold up to scrutiny when the focus is on Barack Obama’s Marxist/Communist political and economic philosophy; including the critical path of how he arrived at it in the course of his life and based primarily on the accounts in his own autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and his more recent book, The Audacity of Hope.

The Obama response claims to disqualify Corsi’s work on three grounds. First, it refers to dismissive media scrutiny. Second, it takes on a long list of reputed lies with counter facts. Third and finally, it takes on Corsi’s reputation in terms of other non-related works, non-related opinions and “controversial” language.

Corsi has three central, interrelated contentions which he presents in the just perfectly wrong logical order to be understood:

1. Obama is a pure politician who is willing to do and say anything to be elected and to enrich himself.

2. Obama chooses his personal and political affiliations instrumentally and solely for the reasons of gathering political power – all of which he is willing to abandon as needed for political expedience the moment a hint of a political challenge arises, and

3. Obama is a radical “liberal” who espouses an openly Marxist agenda and who approaches the formulation and implementation of his political agenda in a manner consistent with the methods and ideas of Communism.

Reasonable literary speculation suggests Corsi was pressed for time and did not take the time to reverse his deductive argument and present it as a clear inductive argument – a common fault in long distance writing. This leads to a lot of patching statements in the text and some of the present groping and confusion is as likely as not because Corsi was afraid of being labeled a “Red Baiter” and he took the long way around to make the point of where Obama stands and why. His book arrives deductively at the right conclusion, but the thesis would have been clearer and the facts would have been organized better, had he just begun with the current Obama economic positions and then argued his case inductively.

Media Scrutiny

The media scrutiny cited in the Obama rebuttal brinks on the laughable. The commentary is uniformly taken from sources such as the NY Times, LA Times and other media outlets who are notoriously themselves providing unapologetic political support for the Obama campaign. Some of these “news” organizations are failing so badly in the capital markets that they seem to be running for the job of Pravda or Izvestia in an Obama administration.

None of the citations to “mainstream” media provide specific and/or material refutations. Almost all of the comments are sweeping and unsupported claims, replete with very angry name-calling and demagoguery.

Curiously, there is less apparent “journalism” in the reviews than in the Corsi book. By a comfortable margin, Corsi has clearly done a much better job than, let’s see…. an article made up let’s say by Mike Barnacle for the Boston Globe or by a typical no-name New York Times reporter lusting for a Pulitzer Prize with a fictional story? There is not one material substantive comment in all the media references in the Obama rebuttal.

Specific Lies

Thirty of the forty pages in the Obama response go tit for tat on certain supposed lies in Obama Nation. In general, this effort is an embarrassment to Obama. In many cases, disputes are made on trivial considerations, almost all of which are unimportant to the central theses of the book. There are many hyperbolic statements in the book, but none of them are a mystery and none of them escape an intelligent reader. They are not worth disputing, because they actually have not added any weight to the argument in the book anyway. These are just the kind of things that Obama claims immunity for in his campaign speeches as “overheated rhetoric,” and they do not persuade any rational thinking reader looking seriously at the issues and in search of a coherent picture of the real Barack Obama.

Another large class of “lies” is the group of factual assertions by Corsi that are dismissed with some clever half-truths or twisted facts offered by the rebuttal. The documents claim, for example, that Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn are upstanding members of the Chicago political “establishment.” That may be in fact true because Ayers is the son of a very wealthy man, but it does not at all refute Corsi’s contention that they are politically offensive radical Communists who have unapologetically promoted treason and the violent overthrow of the US Government. It suggests that the truth is one thing…. a political tin-ear is another.

Corsi has a general version of the truth that likely tells us about the reality of the Obama campaign positions. The Obama version only begs the question as to “what the meaning of the word is…is.”

Most of the remainder of the 30 above-mentioned pages deals with facts in dispute. The version of the facts as given by the Obama campaign is simply no more credible than Corsi’s version. The question, for example, of Obama’s support for Israel is a “jump ball.” Corsi says Obama is not a supporter of Israel. Obama says he is… but then, Obama himself has said one day he is and the next day he is not. Some aspects of Corsi’s reasoning add to the basis for believing that Obama’s position can be fairly disputed. Regardless of the many protestations offered by the Obama campaign to the effect that Obama is a committed backer of Israel, the contentions just don’t add up to a factual certainty.

On the whole, the effort to discredit Corsi on the ground and on the facts just fails. It would have been much better to identify the central conclusions of Corsi’s book and refute the central factual issues. As it stands, this incoherent and inchoate mixed approach conjures Hamlet’s, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks!”

Overall Credibility

The last few pages of the Obama rebuttal seek to discredit Corsi on grounds of other works, speech and language. These seven or so pages all are hardly worth a response.

The pages are nothing more than moral equivocation and dissembling by the Obama campaign. Critical readers want to know what this book says and they want to address the validity of its contents based on its central theses and the material reasons for these opinions given in the book. The rest is irrelevant and simply not applicable to the issues at hand. Among other things, we have no idea what the context of Corsi’s statements outside this book has been.

The only way to find out is to spend needless hours evaluating other irrelevant books by Corsi. No reasonable finder of fact would do that. No court of law in the United States would, in fact and for example, admit such assertions in any legal test of Obama Nation. They would be summarily dismissed on the basis of the Hearsay Rule in civil procedure. Obama is a lawyer… he and his campaign know this. Nevertheless, they seem very desperate to change the subject in this debate.

It is also laughable that the last couple of pages attack Corsi for what is perceived as politically incorrect speech. This all can be easily dismissed. Corsi does not call anyone “sweetie,” and he says nothing more offensive than Obama’s own gaffs when he criticizes Americans for their limited French, their lack of interest in Spanish and their “bitterness while clinging to guns and religion.”

It does not matter who Obama’s father was or where his father was educated. These facts can be disputed for no effect. Everyone agrees he was a polygamist and a self destructive drunk – so what?

It does matter that the life story of Barack Obama shows the generally undisputed and overwhelming influence of Communism and Marxist thinking on his philosophy and policy outlook today. Corsi explicates a plausible understanding of how the ideas of notorious Communists Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Franz Fanon, Frank Parker Davis and Saul Alinsky all shaped the world view of Obama.

Corsi also develops a coherent summary of the main facts we already know about the significant and long-term associations between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, Trinity Church of Christ, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn and Tony Rezko. All of these contemporaneous and material associations are consistent with the story of Obama’s intellectual development and present body of policy positions.

CODA

When the smoke clears, now it appears we may start to shift to the central question of the meaning of Marxist/Communism. To what degree do we want to elect Obama and give the radical left coalition a mandate for Communism to proceed in the United States after millions of lives were given in the 20th Century precisely to rid the world of it?

Unfit For Publication

Also of Note: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez: Two of a kind?

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