In Boston, the Red Sox-Blue Jays game was rained out.
An imprint of Simon and Schuster, run my Mary Matalin, has published a book "The Obama Nation", which is apparently just as chock full of lies as the author's previous book, Unfit for Command, which was one of the weapons used to try to discredit John Kerry. According to the fact checking that has been done so far, it appears nearly every word in the book is a lie, including, as the old joke goes, "and" and "the".
http://mediamatters.org/items/200808150015?f=i_latest
as this "election" season slogs on I am getting very tired of all of this stuff...
ReplyDeleteThe Republicans are a bad bunch but the Dems are no better. Want an example of the virtuous Dem party? Check out the state of Cuyahoga County politics...these clowns have been running the show (their way) for years and Cleveland is about to go down the toilet because of all the corruption....
this is why I am a registered apathetic
According to the fairly level-headed snopes and factcheck
ReplyDeletehttp://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/swift.asp
http://www.factcheck.org/article231.html
the jury is really out as to who is right: the swift boaters, or John Kerry and his supporters. I guess the one you choose to believe depends on the political party you side with.
I do wonder about "Obamanation". The idea that the Frank guy, a raving Stalinist-fascist lunatic who was a Soviet agent, was Obama's mentor is kind of troubling, but it was a long time ago.
Obama's own "anti smear site" seems to be hung up on the trivia of "Obamanation" such as getting a wedding date wrong, instead of the more substantive and (if true) damning allegations in the book.
I don't see how you can view it that way.
ReplyDeleteAfter rereading both sites' material on the Swift Boaters, the essence of their claims-that Kerry's service record is false, inflated or otherwise less than honest-is bogus. Similar to the Kennedy assassination-all the evidence points in one direction. Jumping up and down and saying "See! There are problems! There are gaps!" isn't evidence.
And the errors in "Obama Nation" are far from trivial. The citizenship smear is wrong, the drug smear is wrong, the Muslim smear is wrong...how many do you need before you lose faith in the author?
And Frank Marshall Davis? PUHleeze. First of all, do you blame a black man born in 1905 for being a Communist? They were one of the few groups fighting for integration at that time. It's not like capitalism worked all that well during the first couple of decades of the last century-and I'm sure it was even worse for black people.
And secondly, calling him Obama's
"mentor" is grossly deceptive. Yes, he knew him, but if you read his book, he treats him the way you treat your grandfather's crazy best friend-you yes him to death when he's in front of you, and then you laugh about him when he leaves the room.
If you seriously believe Barack Obama is a Communist, then you're out of your mind.
I have not found evidence of a single thing in either one of Corsi's books that stands up to scrutiny.
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ReplyDelete"First of all, do you blame a black man born in 1905 for being a Communist?"
ReplyDeleteIf in fact "Frank" doggedly stuck with the Soviet Union's party in the 1950's, that would have made him either a terribly evil man (like anyone who would willingly be in the American Nazi Party) or a colossally clueless one. By the 1950's, all of Stalin's atrocities and really huge mass murders were known.
What you say applies to someone in the 1930s, when true idealists joined the Communist Party in full ignorance of what was going on in in the U.S.S.R.
But by the 1950s, only the hardcore Stalinists remained in the party: a small nasty hard core. Was "Frank" one of them? All the decent people had fled the party by then.
"If you seriously believe Barack Obama is a Communist, then you're out of your mind."
I don't. I trust that he has distanced himself from these individuals and their legacy. And as I said, "Frank" was a long time ago.
I won't read this book for the same reason I don't give much creedence to the political insights of Michael Moore. Rock-hard partisans always hate the othr party, and will play fast and loose with stuff to make their case.
It's like, isn't it a waste of time when the news networks ask a Democrat, and then a Republican what they think of a presidential speech or debate when it is over? It is the least newsworthy thing of all: the Republican will always gush over the Republican president/debater, and the Democrat will always gush over the Democrat president/debater, and they will of course bash the other party guy's speech.
I've read Obama's second book. I might read McCain's if I come across it, possibly. But that will be it for political books for me
That's a fair cop, as they say on Monty Python.
ReplyDeleteThe "balance" fraud is one of the biggest hypocrisies the media has going. "Well, we asked both sides! That's balance, right?" If someone says something that is blatantly untrue, they should be called on it.
I'm not sure how much we knew about Stalin's crimes in the 1950s, exactly-IE I'm sure we know more now-but I think your point is fair. I have read a number of times accounts of poverty-based Communists, I guess you could call them, who fell away from belief at exactly that point.
http://tinyurl.com/56f6qs
I read a great novel a few months ago, "The Company" by Robert Littell. It was also a cable miniseries, but I never saw it. It is a history of the CIA, using real people, but fictionalized, of course. The part you might particularly enjoy is the depth of character he gets into with the Communists and their crimes.
Plus, even if Stalin didn't do those things, it would be easy for true believers to argue that it was just CIA disinformation.
ReplyDeleteRemember when everyone thought the CIA was so powerful that they were behind everything that happened?
"Plus, even if Stalin didn't do those things, it would be easy for true believers to argue that it was just CIA disinformation."
ReplyDeleteJust as true believers of a slightly different stripe argue that the Holocust against the Jews is nothing more than a fabrication of misinformation.
In the case of Stalin and Mao, comparison to Hitler is not pointless or meaningless, as both killed even more than Hitler did.
True, true.
ReplyDeleteBut before the Wall fell, in the mid 1950s, I could imagine a true believer saying, "Oh, that couldn't be. The CIA made that up."