Obama and the disturbing influence of Frank Marshall Davis
Much has been written about the fact that Frank Marshall Davis was a mentor to the young Barack Obama. But Davis was an unusual role model for a boy; not only may he have been a sometime pedophile, according to a book he wrote under a pseudonym, but he was also a Communist. Some have even speculated that Davis was Obama’s biological father, a fantasy for which I can find no evidence whatsoever and have dismissed as unlikely in the extreme.
I have also dismissed it as irrelevant. Because the truth is that Davis was already influential enough in Obama’s life without needing to be an actual blood relative. Living in Hawaii, he was a good friend of Obama’s grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham, the man who actually was a father figure to Obama, because he and his wife raised the young boy. Not only that, but Davis—who was a black man—was designated by his buddy, Obama’s grandfather (referred to as “gramps” in Obama’s memoir), as a guide for the very young Barack to instruct him on how to be an African-American man.
What a strange choice Davis was! Even forgetting the Communism and the possible pedophilia; Obama presents Davis as a seedy and dissipated figure [excerpt is from Dreams From My Father]:
…by the time I met Frank [Obama was around nine years old] he must have been pushing eighty, with a big dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the conservation would turn to laments about women.
“They’ll drive you to drink, boy,” Frank would tell me soberly. “And if you let ”˜em, they’ll drive you into your grave.”
I was intrigued by the old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t fully understand….
No wonder Obama felt uncomfortable; in family therapy lingo, we’d say that both of the old men in Obama’s life—the two father-figures for the fatherless boy, “gramps” and Davis—had what’s known as a “boundary problem.” In other words, their behavior was inappropriate for a young boy to be witnessing. It’s not for nothing that Obama says he felt “vaguely uncomfortable” around them; most children would have felt that way.
Although Obama writes about Davis in his memoir, he only refers to him by the name “Frank.” This is interesting; whom was he protecting by not giving the man’s full name? After all, Davis was already deceased when the memoir was written in the 90s (it was published in 1995), and Obama’s grandfather had died in 1992.
Obama couldn’t leave out such an important father-figure as “Frank.” And he was quite candid about the seediness of his life and character. What he omits, as far as I can tell (disclaimer: I’ve only read excerpts from Dreams From My Father and therefore I’m not familiar with the entire work), is Davis’s Communism.
It is difficult to imagine that the man did not speak about this aspect of his life with Obama. He certainly didn’t seem to be the type to hold back for propriety’s sake—the word “frank” describes him as an adjective, as well as being his first name. So the omission would have to be Obama’s. How much Davis’s Communist ideology influenced Obama is unknown, and Obama isn’t telling.
But whatever the truth of Davis’s ideological influence on Obama, his relation to Obama was certainly profound in the psychological sense. The evidence for that is in Obama’s own words—and I’m not just talking about the prose in Dreams From My Father. Obama also wrote a poem in college called “Pop” that appears to be about Davis.
Some people have assumed this poem is about Obama’s grandfather because of the title, but there is little question in my mind that the subject is actually Davis. The description in the poem dovetails perfectly with the description in the book (poet, whiskey), and the black glasses at the end match this photo of Davis giving a public reading.
Take a look; it is quite a disturbing document on many levels:
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and brokenӬ
In, sprinkled with ashesӬ
Pop switches channels, takes anotherӬ
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asksӬ
What to do with me, a green young manӬ
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, sinceӬ
Things have been easy for me; Ӭ
I stare hard at his face, a stareӬ
That deflects off his brow; Ӭ
I’m sure he’s unaware of his”¨
Dark, watery eyes, thatӬ
Glance in different directions,Ӭ
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,Ӭ
Fail to pass.ӬI listen, nod,Ӭ
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale, Ӭ
Beige T-shirt, yelling,Ӭ
Yelling in his ears, that hangӬ
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies…”¨
But I don’t care anymore, cause”¨
He took too damn long, and fromӬ
Under my seat, I pull out the
”¨Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing, ”¨
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his faceӬ
To mine, as he grows small,Ӭ
A spot in my brain, somethingӬ
That may be squeezed out, like a Ӭ
Watermelon seed betweenӬ
Two fingers.Ӭ
Pop takes another shot, neat,Ӭ
Points out the same amberӬ
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and”¨
Makes me smell his smell, comingӬ
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poemӬ
He wrote before his mother died,Ӭ
Stands, shouts, and asksӬ
For a hug, as I shrink, my Ӭ
Arms barely reaching aroundӬ
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
ӬI see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses”¨
And know he’s laughing too.
The lines that begin “points out the same amber stain…Makes me smell his smell, coming/”¨
From me” may be describing outright sexual abuse. But perhaps not; we don’t know, and we’ll never know. But there is no question that the poem is describing a boundary violation on several levels: this child feels invaded—perhaps even taken over—by this man, and is fighting against that sensation.
That is the subject matter of the poem, which Obama composed while in college. It seems—as do so many poems written in adolescence and young adulthood—to be an attempt to work out in poetry a deep psychological wound and an ongoing dilemma, something that probably could not be talked about as frankly (there’s that word again) in an ordinary and prosaic way. When, years later, Obama got around to writing his prose version in Dreams From My Father, it is apparent that he was already hiding the truth, and softening the depth of the violation he had felt.
The poem describes a boundary violation that is both physical and mental. The physical is obvious: he is forced to hug the man who repels him, and as he does so he feels himself shrinking. But the violation is mental, too; earlier in the poem, Obama has described “Pop” as a person who has actually gotten into his brain, and whom he wishes to eliminate from it:
as he grows small,Ӭ
A spot in my brain, somethingӬ
That may be squeezed out, like a Ӭ
Watermelon seed betweenӬ
Two fingers.
This mental and emotional usurption of the young Obama is echoed in the last image of the poem, in which the boy sees his own tiny image framed in “Pop’s” eyeglasses.”¨ The poem describes a struggle against an attempt at identity takeover, a rejection of being reduced to a reflection in the eyes of the stronger, older, more experienced mentor, who has tried to make Obama over in his own image:
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses”¨…
The sight is chilling to Obama, who is trying to break free. One wonders if he ever fully succeeded.
[ADDENDUM: Those who argue that this poem is about Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, would have to explain the following lines in light of the fact that Dunham’s mother (Obama’s great-grandmother) died when Dunham (Obama’s grandfather) was only 8 years old:
…he switches channels, recites an old poem”¨
He wrote before his mother died,
It simply does not make sense if “Pop” is about Obama’s grandfather.]
neo-neocon: Lacking your experience in the field of therapy, I will have to defer to you on this. One thought that did occur to me came from line about this Davis fellow instructing Obama in how to be an African-American man. If there were “boundary violations,” then would not Obama face the problem of reconciling this with the “good” of being an African-American man? In other words, could there not be an element of self-loathing in the image of himself he created per these “instructions?” And could not that tend to explain his obvious anger problem? Real kettle of fish, ain’t he?
“I need to find a role model for my grandson. I’m thinking…a communist pedophile seething with racial grievances. Perfect! A liberal trifecta.”
Whatever was his grandfather thinking? He could hardly have found a worse role model on the island of Oahu.
Am the only one who suspects a history of mental illness in the Dunham family? Obama’s mom was clearly a flake from the get-go. And a father who names his daughter “Stanley” because he wanted a son seems to this layman to need to clock some serious couch time.
That’s a bizarre and disturbing poem for a nineteen year-old to write.
I don’t know how much we will ever know, really, about Obama, but I suspect he is the strangest man to become president we’ve had in a century.
I’ve looked at this poem about a half a dozen times since last fall and each time it gets weirder and weirder. Something’s happening and it isn’t at all clear, but whatever is happening is, as they like to day, on the deep down low.
And it is low-down.
You inserted an editorial comment in the quoted material from “Dreams From My Father” to the effect that Obama was around nine years old when he first met Frank Davis. In the quoted material, Obama says that at the time he first met him, Frank Davis “must have been pushing eighty.” Obama was born in 1961, so you are saying he first met Davis in 1970. Davis was born in 1905, so in 1970, he was only 65. A fifteen-year gap.
Now, from the anecdotal record of Davis’s life and lifestyle, he must have spent some pretty hard years, the kind of life that would age a man real quick. But still, most folks at 65 don’t look like they’re pushing 80.
After Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1991, he entered into a contract which eventually led to the publication of “Dreams From My Father” in 1995. So, this 30-year-old graduate of the top law school in the nation writes a biography – a first-hand account of his life – which means he knows all the facts and/or can easily check all the facts. Seems odd, doesn’t it, that the author of a biography would be off by fifteen years?
Cap’n Rusty, that is odd. Having said that, though, the young are often wildly off in their estimates of their elders’ ages.
When I started my first faculty position an undergraduate asked me a question (of the “did you vote for Truman?” ilk) that made clear he presumed I was in my mid-fifties.
I was 29.
Occam said – “the young are often wildly off in their estimates of their elders’ ages”.
Quite true.
But don’t underestimate how wildly off they can be (even ‘educated’ ones) about history.
Cap’n Rusty: That is indeed odd. I was quoting from something I had read for the estimate of Obama’s age on meeting Davis (I forget the source right now). I didn’t figure it out myself—but of course there is a huge disparity. Davis did not turn 80 until 1985, long after Obama met him. In fact, according to Obama’s Wiki profile, Obama returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii at around ten or so. It is clearly around that time that he would have met Davis, or perhaps in his early teens at the latest. At any rate, Davis would only have been in his 60s. I guess you are right; he must have looked older. And Obama didn’t need to do any fact-checking because “Frank” was never identified as Davis in the book.
Occam’s Beard: As far as mental illness goes, I don’t know. But there is this terrible tragedy in the life story of Obama’s father:
At age 8, Stanley [Dunham] discovered his mother’s body after she had committed suicide. Following his mother’s suicide, his father abandoned the family and Stanley and his brother, Ralph, were sent to live with his maternal grandparents in El Dorado, Kansas.
Note the recurrent theme of maternal and paternal abandonment (and being raised by grandparents) that was also played out in Obama’s life, with different details.
Occam:
I agree that “the young” are often wildly off in their estimates of their elders’ ages. However, this was no ordinary youth. One would think that a 30-year-old who had recenlty served as President of the Harvard Law Review, a summa grad of the nation’s top law school, preparing a biography with which he inteded to launch an ambitious political career, would not have been so negligent as to estimate a fact that was so easily verifiable. Neo and others are far more versed in matters psychological than I; perhaps such negligence is symptomatic of something deeper? Maybe when you know everything, you don’t have to do any fact-checking.
When (in a former life) I was an associate, I’d have been called on the carpet at my firm for the same offense. And I’d hate to have made an obvious mistake like that in a brief submitted to any court; opposing counsel would have had a field day.
Cap’n Rusty: Please see my comment addressed to you—also, remember that Obama was trying (at least in part) to hide Davis’s identity in his book rather than reveal it.
Whats up with the “neat” in two lines after the guy takes a drink??? Weird.
I think “80” in this context is used more like a generic description of someone old and wore out.
Why did young “Bary” have to be taught how to be an “African American man?”
Did I miss out on something? Nobody ever taught me to “be a white man” while I was growing up.
I too think the “80” is not meant to be accurate, but I could be wrong.
A young boy abandoned multiple times, deliberately or unintentionally, by family. Clues of possible childhood abuse.
A similar childhood:
“After Muhammad’s mother died, Abu Lahab” ( his uncle) “rejected the vulnerable boy a second time. The six-year-old Muhammad was forced into the arms of a slave. Can you imagine the pain, the envy, the rage? His father’s brother was heir to the religious scam of the hajj, the Ramadhan fair, and the tax. He was custodian of the Ka’aba, Allah’s House. Muhammad had nothing. He cried out to his uncle, begged his uncle to protect him, shelter him, feed him. But no.
“Two more miserable years passed before Muhammad’s grandfather, Abdul Muttalib, finally acknowledged the destitute child. But even then, this was disturbing, for Ishaq said that Abdul Muttalib “would make him sit beside him on his bed and would stroke him with his hand. He was extremely fond of him and used to constantly pet him.”
“Grandpa died a couple of years later, and prophet-to-be was handed off to Abu Talib, another uncle. Like Abu Lahab, he was his father’s brother. Muhammad was not yet ten years old, and by either death or choice he had been rejected or abandoned by his mother twice, his father, a Bedouin woman, a slave, uncle Abu Lahab twice, and then by grandpa Muttalib. Just the suspicion that uncle Talib would reject him brought the forty-five-year-old man to tears. Muhammad had a horrible life and a tormented childhood. It’s not hard to see why he was so insecure, why he was filled with rage, why his Qur’an reflected his animosity, and why uncle Abu Lahab became the focus of his pain – the one man singled out by name for condemnation. While the con was promoted by Khadija, much of the motivation for Islam can be laid at uncle Lahab’s feet.”
Craig Winn: “Prophet of Doom”
Hitler’s childhood was also similarly gloomy. In many cases, abused become abusers.
Steve H: I’m not sure whether this is what you mean, but to take a drink “neat” is to drink it without ice or other dilution.
Roderick Reilly: I think the idea of giving Obama some exposure to black male culture in the form of an older African-American male mentor is completely understandable. After all, his own father was gone, and he was being raised by white people. I know from my own knowledge of white parents who have adopted black children, or children from any other background such as Asian, there is often an effort often made to get the child to be familiar with his/her “roots.” The problem in Obama’s case was the choice of mentor, not the idea itself, I think.
All of this “instructing” by Davis, this almost “taking Barack under his wing,” so to speak, has an almost “fatherly” tinge to it. Couple that with the apparent abandonment of Obama by Obama, Sr. and the reference to Davis as “Pop,” along with the tendency of Obama’s mother to be something of a far-left groupie, and this could lead to the possibility that Davis, in fact, was Obama’s biological father. This would certainly explain the reluctance to release his birth certificate. And also would explain much of the poem discussed above. Of course, I’m tossing this out without checking to see if the timelines of Davis and Obama’s mother, and their respective locations, would have allowed conception. And perhaps I just need to have a long lie-down. Who knows?
there is no question that the poem is describing a boundary violation on several levels: this child feels invaded–perhaps even taken over–by this man, and is fighting against that sensation.
Another thing that can make a child feel ‘funny’ is when people around him are trying to ‘make’ them. Like a mother who fantasizes that her son will be a doctor, and then when talking to those, introduces them as what they will be. In a kind of making of a mold in which the child feels compelled to fit into. However there is a interesting difference, the mother (barring other things assumed), loves her child, and the child loves the mother or parents and so there is a certain dynamic going on. These people didn’t love the child, they were using the child.
The practice of grooming is not so alien to those that move in higher circles as it is in lower ones. It twas early grooming that released my potential to be able to attend Bronx Science. It was grooming and the assistance of others revealing a version of how the world works in a different way is what we are really discussing here.
Today we don’t imagine it. but in higher circles it is not uncommon for the parents to be ‘strict’ in certain ways in which they give the child a huge leg up in behavior and world view. There is the false process that most follow in cargo form, and there is the harder process, where you get introduced to famous people, and you learn, and move in circles while your friends are playing scully.
These people though don’t love the child and do not have the best interests of the child at heart. They are following a long term plan in which they have lots of others helping and so making the farcical and far out completely believable and doable. (The part the average person doesn’t get about these upper level political cliques. Where a average person would find something incredulous, these people long ago had incredulous proved in some way or ways)
One has to remember that everyone in this group around the child believe in certain things that the average person does not, nor would act upon. These true believers were not unconnected.
In fact, in a way, having access to such people as davis, and ayers, and other true believers high in the vetted way, would later create a validity to everything, including worldview. I would guarantee that there are many others whom Obama got to only meet for one night or one event, and that purpose is all they served. Even more so if this happens in each country or state he lives in and follows him around.
Its grooming. Like princes, and others, the grooming can be positive, and just widens horizons, and changes views, and things, but does not mold the person other than what good comes of the wider and more varied experience. Then there is bad grooming, where the child is made into something, and maybe never knows what that is. the Cambodians are an extreme example, school systems teaching badly are another example, and so would be the overbearing mother that didn’t just bias, but actually forced and never would let up or accept any other outcome.
What I find interesting is that we know of all kinds of grooming methods and things we do, and yet we cant imagine that this can take any form, and that the form it takes may not be positive. Prima Ballerina’s start way to early to do so completely of their own volition. But the difference between good and bad grooming, in this case, has to do with the freedom to walk away from it.
I could walk away when I was a child, and did. No repercussions. However the darker side is the side that doesn’t let them walk away. The side that makes life easy for them if they keep following the line. The side like negative wealthy parents play. Where they fund and are nice if you are complying, but they are distant and cold, and withdraw all the candy if you don’t. again I am referring to the sick version.
There are hints at it in the poem, with the difference between the types being not so hidden.
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
He is definitely referring to Frank. But he is also pointing out a common thing among people of the south which I have heard many times (even though I am not from the south at all). “What am I going to do with you boy?” it’s common talk among family groups who trade their children or have problem children that move around. Its for common usage too, but in these families, it’s a shaming thing. A burdening of the child. Make the child feel he owes you something. and what does Obama owe him? Its in the next sentence…
Obama is resisting seeing the world the way frank wants him to. Franks career may have all been fake because he was a connected communist, their gift to him may have been to promote him like a post turtle. And when they were done with him, he faded into obscurity and drunkenness. So what would such a man who supports the cause would think of arts, and greats, and the whole thing? It’s a flim flam. A fake, a sham, a potemkin village, a movie scene. He was the bitter pill. All they had to do was leave the boy with him to have his ideals destroyed and then be given a direction.
The last line is how they keep him in that line, ike the sick version of the wealthy parent who completely controls their childs lives through removal of that easy.
Not only does poor Obama have to listen to the tales of a broken world, and collusion, manipulation and such… from a drunk man… but from a drunken man who never shuts up, a man who is so profoundly unhappy and who believes all the propaganda of who is to blame. There is a very important scene… he is drunk… watery eyes.. he is paranoid, glancing in different directions.. he starts jokes and stories and leaves them unfinished.
He drones on… why are you unhappy, and so Obama gets tired as he doesn’t understand. But if you want to pre load a child… that’s enough… later, when the child is more grown, he will find the story familiar. Like a new rock and roll song which copies a bit from old ones, so that its at once new and exciting, and old and familiar at the same time.
The most problematic part I see is the part after the watermelon seed. The drunk man takes another shot.. And points to the same stain. Why is Obama and this man in their underwear? And the most notable thing is “Makes me smell his smell, coming From me”
Mel and Rusty, you both raise good points. It’s astonishing how ignorant kids can be of history; not just dates, but even just chronological order (Korean War before or after Spanish-American War? Jump ball!). And I too would have expected some basic fact checking in a book, as opposed to casual conversation, assuming my interlocutor did not mean to obscure facts to hide the identities of the guilty.
Neo, I hadn’t known about the suicide of Obama’s maternal great-grandmother, or the abandonment of his maternal grandfather by his maternal great-grandfather. Those are indeed tragic, but (again to my untrained eyes) not inconsistent with my conjecture that the family has a history of emotional problems.
I also can’t help but wonder what motivated Dunham to choose Davis, of all people. Surely Davis, at least when in his cups, must have gone on invective-filled rants about white people and capitalism. (Davis may even have given grandad some glimmer of his pedophilic tendencies/history.) Given all that, what could conceivably motivate grandad to choose as his grandson’s mentor someone who could have been the posterboy for mental health awareness month?
and obama is starting to show his real nature…
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/20871.html
But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”
“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
what could conceivably motivate grandad to choose as his grandson’s mentor someone who could have been the posterboy for mental health awareness month?
he was told to
and he was a true believer
“what could conceivably motivate grandad to choose as his grandson’s mentor someone who could have been the posterboy for mental health awareness month?” That he was the boy’s biological father, that’s what.
You are wrong. Davis was not a pedophile, and there is no evidence that either Obama or his grandfather even knew about Davis’s involvement with the CPUSA decades earlier.
The pornography disinformation against Frank Marshall Davis is just as heinous as the political disinformation. Further, it suggests that those making such false accusations may be projecting their own libidinous psychological disorders onto Davis.
Frank Marshall Davis wrote a pornographic novel under the pseudonym Bob Greene, one chapter of which is devoted to the protagonist and his wife having sex with a thirteen year old girl, according to a British website (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/2601914/Frank-Marshall-Davis-alleged-Communist-was-early-influence-on-Barack-Obama.html) on 24 August. According to the British website, “Mr. Davis (writing as Greene) explains that although he has “changed names and identities…all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences.”
In a same day report citing the British website, “Accuracy In Media” (AIM) reported that Edgar Tidwell, an “expert in the life and writing of Davis” confirms that Frank Marshall Davis wrote “Sex Rebel: Black” as a semi-autobiographical novel. Despite Tidwell’s expert opinion that the novel was SEMI-autobiographical, AIM’s Cliff Kincaid escalated accusations against Davis by first claiming he was a sex pervert (http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-red-mentor-was-a-pervert/) in their 24 August report. (Kincaid falsely attributed the “pervert” claim to the British website.) On 14 October, AIM again escalated the charges by claiming Davis was an “admitted child molester” (http://www.aim.org/aim-column/was-a-communist-obamas-sex-teacher/).
There are at least four distinct disclaimers that indemnify Frank Marshall Davis from literal attribution of this novel:
a. According to dictionary.com, “identity” means “condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is: a case of mistaken identity.” Changing name AND identities means changing names AND other “condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is,” which may include biographical data such as age.
b. “Taken from actual experiences” does not mean they are accurate representations of actual experiences. It only means they are based on actual experiences.
c. Edgar Tidwell, the expert on the life and writing of Frank Marshall Davis, says the book is “semiautobiographical,” which (according to dictionary.com) means “1. pertaining to or being a fictionalized account of an author’s own life. 2. pertaining to or being a work of fiction strongly influenced by events in an author’s life.”
d. Further, scandalous memoirs such as “Sex Rebel: Black (Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet)” have been a literary genre for centuries. According to Wikipedia, such fictional novels are allegedly factual, but are largely invented. The title, alone, qualifies it as a “scandalous memoir.”
In an honest evaluation, any of these disclaimers should protect the author from literal interpretation. The combination of all four should provide absolute protection from any culpability. Unfortunately, Davis’s accusers are dishonest. Like Mike Nifong, the disgraced ex-D.A. in the Duke lacrosse case, their campaign to demonize their target ignores exculpatory evidence in their reckless rush to judgment. In order to smear Barack Obama through guilt-by-association with Frank Marshall Davis, they are virtually lynching Davis by grossly misrepresenting his character and influence. Such misrepresentation may be symptomatic of the accuser’s own psychological disorder, indicated by projection of the accuser’s own pedophilic fantasies onto the author.
In “Sex Rebel,” Davis’s Bob Greene (not unlike Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert) hesitates at a pubescent girl’s sexual invitation, but foolishly relents. Like “Lolita,” Davis’s faux foreword is written by a Ph.D impersonator who details the psychological significance of the memoir. Like Nabokov, Davis wanted to write under a pseudonym to shield his reputation, but felt compelled to reveal his authorship. As a result, however, Davis has been posthumously accused of pedophilia, while “Lolita” is “considered by many to be one of the finest novels written in the 20th century.” In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest English language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library,” despite also being initially dismissed as pornography, according to Wikipedia.
This deliberate misrepresentation is only the latest in a long series of falsehoods by AIM professional prevaricators. Their “specific misrepresentation” is documented at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gGxdvX. I invite any person of integrity to refute my evidence against any of these AIM lies. If AIM had authentic evidence of Davis’s radical influence, they would not need to fabricate such evidence.
For objective articles on this issue, please see http://wxxxnews.blogspot.com/2008/10/sex-rebel-black.html and http://iamthelizardqueen.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/the-national-enquirer-wingnuttery-and-autobiographies/#comment-5904
Artfldr: Since both Obama and Davis are in Hawaii, I take the word “shorts” to refer not to underwear or undershorts but to regular shorts. But I agree that the image is very strange, and part of the hint of sexual abuse that pervades the poem. At the very least, it points once again to an identification and a merging that the older man wants to emphasize, to the disgust of the child.
I read somewhere that Obama’s grandfather told him about his grandmother’s encounter with the threatening beggar and that he ended the story by saying the beggar was black. As I read the description, it seemed that grandfather was trying to cast grandmother as a racist. I also read that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather wrote to his grandmother disapproving of the relationship between Obama’s parents because he didn’t want the family to be tainted by whites. (I can’t remember the source and my recall may be a bit fuzzy.) Anyway, it sounds like there may have been some conflicts about race within the family that made the Frank role model even more confusing for Obama. Add to that, his mother’s disdain for the Americans she met in Indonesia, and it’s hard to find any secure base in Obama’s childhood, except perhaps education.
Kaleokualoha: I wrote “sometime pedophile” because the text of Davis’s memoir mentions the one incident. But it is very chilling. The following is from the article that I linked in my post:
In a surviving portion of an autobiographical manuscript, Mr Davis confirms that he was the author of Sex Rebel: Black after a reader had noticed the “similarities in style and phraseology” between the pornographic work and his poetry.
“I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine.” In the introduction to Sex Rebel, Mr Davis (writing as Greene) explains that although he has “changed names and identities…all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences”.
He stated that “under certain circumstances I am bisexual” and that he was “ a voyeur and an exhibitionist”…
The book, which closely tracks Mr Davis’s life in Chicago and Hawaii and the fact that his first wife was black and his second white, describes in lurid detail a series of shockingly sordid sexual encounters, often involving group sex.
One chapter concerns the seduction by Mr Davis and his first wife of a 13-year-old girl called Anne. Mr Davis wrote that it was the girl who had suggested he had sex with her. “I’m not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I’d rather not bed a babe under 20.
“But there are exceptions. I didn’t want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life.”
I have studied the subject of child molestation, and I can tell you that that last paragraph is exactly and precisely the usual explanation such molesters give for their acts.
But, as I wrote, the subject of whether Davis actually molested Obama is not the point of this point. I do not know the answer. But it is clear from the poem that he deeply invaded his boundaries in a highly inappropriate manner. And whatever happened, the responsibility is entirely Davis’s and Obama is entirely innocent.
I have no idea whether Davis mentioned his Communist sympathies, as I also say in the post. But since he seemed to be a person who let it all hang out, as it were, and spoke inappropriately of personal sexual matters to the young Obama—as well as talking about race and class and America and poor and rich, more appropriate subjects—I find it almost unbelievable that he would not have spoken about socialism in glowing terms, whether or not he directly revealed his own Communist affiliation.
I think I have made all of this clear in my post.
By the way, the first link you provide is a dead link. The second is to a page that contains such Davis apologia as the following:
The allegation of child molesting is out of line. This is in reference to one episode (in Chapter 7) with “Anne,a sexually mature girl of thirteen who herself proposes the match-up to Davis’ wife, pleading “Next to God, I love your husband best. Please let me.” Together they handle the affair with the utmost of gentleness and respect. In fact he never penetrates her with his member, out of consideration for her fragility, but assists with an assortment of candles, cucumbers…”
This, once again, is an excellent description of the sexual abuse of a child, pure and simple. It is utterly irrelevant that the girl is past puberty, and it is also irrelevant that genital penetration did not occur. This link, meant to be exculpatory, only solidifies the charge of child abuse against Davis.
The third link you provide contains no new information whatsoever.
Use the first link without the ending period:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gGxdvX
Fictional character Bob Greene writes in the introduction, not Frank Davis. The introduction, the comments by the invented Ph.D, and the rest of it, are a work of fiction. Even if there was a character such as Bob Greene, his memoir, by definition, would be allegedly true but largely invented. The introduction is Bob Greenes allegation of veracity.
To attribute any details of this work of fiction to Davis’s life is intellectually dishonest.
“But it is clear from the poem that he deeply invaded his boundaries in a highly inappropriate manner.”
Do you have any evidence, or is it just specious speculation, that “Pop” is Davis?
Neo, I am puzzled by the mirror passage
and wonder what you make of it? What place has the mirror in Frank’s home? Why “saving”, that is, saving for what?
I find myself wondering whether this entire passage may not represent a timeshift, from a time of memory [- so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies…
 -], to the time of the author’s writing [I don’t care anymore, he took too long], and the mirror to be used, not for self reflection, but for cutting cocaine, his own substitute for whiskey? If this conjecture withstands analysis, it seems clear to me that the very next passage is an immediate timeshift back to memory [Pop takes another shot, neat, …]
I’ve no particular confidence in this reading, save that it can explain that “Why a mirror, what’s up with that” question I stumbled over. Anyhow, thanks to anyone who can help to clear my puzzle up.
Does “Dreams” contain any reference to Obama visiting Davis alone, except right before heading off to college? He didn’t visit Davis at all for three years before that. His grandfather brought him by before the 3-year break.
Stphnd: I was puzzled by the mirror as well.
Sorry, Kaleokualoha, but you’re on the proverbial sticky wicket. It is reasonable to presume that someone who writes at length on a theme has chosen it because its significance to him.
The curious thing about this is that Hawaii has very few blacks per se. I graduated from Punahou too, and don’t recall seeing…any, actually. Not a one, anywhere in Honolulu. There must’ve been some, somewhere, but so few as not to register.
Last, this close relationship with Davis makes even more plausible the notion that Davis hooked Obama up with a hard left network.
Kaleokualoha,
The evidence is in the poem. I described that evidence in my post. I also described the evidence that Davis’s memoir is mostly autobiographical.
Obviously, you are out to absolve Davis of guilt. Just as obviously, nothing can be proven about his guilt or innocence—there is no “evidence” worthy of a court of law. Short of Obama’s testimony under oath, such evidence will never appear.
But if you read all the relevant texts, including and especially Obama’s highly revealing poem, and put them together with the known facts of Davis’s life, the evidence becomes quite compelling that Davis inappropriately violated Obama’s boundaries in several ways, and that the young Obama was deeply troubled by his relationship with Davis.
On a partisan note, with a Democrat, even testimony under oath is of dubious validity. See Clinton, Bill.
Don’t you think that it would have been nice for someone in our MSM to have disclosed to us that Obama was perhaps a little twisted, and perhaps a lot more than a little twisted, and may have had quite a closet full of bones rattling around in there, before the voters had to make their decision as to whether to entrust him with the power that makes him, in effect, the most powerful person on Earth, with great power—for good or ill–over the direction of all of our futures?
It seems to me that an admitted pan-sexual–in fact he must have been proud of it, for Davis to have taken the time to have written “Sex Rebel: Black” and to have gotten it published–might have a hard time resisting a young, attractive, confused child that he had been granted privileged access to. There is after all, the fact of what Davis and his wife did with the 13 year old girl an over trusting acquaintance had left with him and his wife for them to watch over and care for for a few days; look what happened. Would Davis’ treatment of Obama have been any different?
“It is difficult to imagine that the man did not speak about this aspect of his life with Obama. He certainly didn’t seem to be the type to hold back for propriety’s sake–the word “frank” describes him as an adjective, as well as being his first name. So the omission would have to be Obama’s. How much Davis’s Communist ideology influenced Obama is unknown, and Obama purposely isn’t telling.”
Frank Marshall Davis had no “communist ideology.” Edgar Tidwell, whom AIM’s Cliff Kincaid cites as “an expert on the life and writings of Davis,” dismisses misrepresentation of Davis’s influence in one simple paragraph:
“Although my research indicates that Davis joined the CPUSA as a “closet member” during World War II, there is no evidence that he was a Stalinist, or even a Party member before WWII. Further, to those attempting to make the specious stand for the concrete, there is no evidence that he instructed Barack Obama in communist ideology. Frank Marshall Davis did NOT believe in overthrowing the USA. He was committed to what the nation professed to be. For him, communism was primarily an intellectual vehicle to achieve a political end-a possible tool for gaining the constitutional freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL Americans” (see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/Kaleokualoha ).
“There is after all, the fact of what Davis and his wife did with the 13 year old girl an over trusting acquaintance had left with him and his wife for them to watch over and care for for a few days; look what happened.”
There is no such “fact,” any more than there is a “fact” of Nabokov sleeping with Lolita or Swift encountering Lilliputians. Once again, a “memoir is allegedly factual but largely invented.” Those who spread such disinformation are either unaware of the nature of memoirs, or aware but nevertheless misrepresent fiction as fact in furtherance of their own agendas.
Once more, Kaleokualoha, the quotes you offer about Davis’ Communism only further prove my point.
And of course, as I am getting very tired of saying, there is no way to absolutely prove that Davis’s memoir about the 13-year-old girl is true. But if you put all the evidence together you get a fairly clear picture of: (1) a man who wrote pornography (2) that pornography was written as a supposed “memoir” under an assumed name, rather than as a work of fiction under his own name or an assumed one (3) that work closely tracked to certain objective facts of Davis’s own life, such as his marriages and where he lived at different points (4) by Obama’s own description of Davis in Obama’s book, there was something very creepy and inappropriate about the man’s behavior with Obama (the same, by the way, is true of Obama’s grandfather), and (5) Obama’s poem, which describes Davis to a T and fits very well with the description in Obama’s book, is of an even creepier character than the “Frank” of Obama’s book.
What’s more, Obama describes his own sense of deep violation at the hands of the “Pop” of the poem. And since Obama is not a poet, and since he wrote the poem in his formative years as a college student, we can safely assume (although of course we can never prove) that the situation it describes is autobiographical.
These are logical conclusions, far more logical than the idea that all these things are mere coincidences.
I am highly familiar with the work of Nabokov, including Lolita, and also with many of the statements Nabokov made about the act of creative imagination that went into what he always claimed was a work of complete fiction. There is also nothing remotely autobiographical in the details of Lolita if matched up with Nabokov’s life. There is no analogy to Davis’s pseudonymous “memoir”—which not only has such matchups with Davis’s life, but is also basically a work of hard-core pornography rather than a work of literature.
Oh, one other thing. Memoirs are not “allegedly factual but largely invented.” Memoirs are stylized autobiographical works that sometimes compress and change details of time and space for artistic purposes, but are largely factual and mostly not invented. That’s what makes them memoirs rather than works of fiction.
From my very first reading of Obama’s family background, including the tutelage of Frank Marshall Davis, I thought the entire network Barack was ensconced inside of was deranged. A grandfather who gave his daughter a male name because he was disappointed she was a baby girl. Sick. Sick. Sick.
Obama, Sr. abandoning the boy so early. Barack’s mother checking out of his life when he was sent back to Hawai’i… The creepy Davis.
On one level I feel sorry for Barack. As a human being who can see pain in others’ lives. But it is clear he never did psychotherapy or serious introspection, probably because of his narcissism and personality disorder. Those people are the least likely to seek help for their emotional issues.
Marxism and physicalist reductionism, leading to moral relativism is bound to foster amorality and chaos among our kids. And we have been seeing these results for some decades now. On a personal note, a lot of the Leftists I’ve known have been strange and sometimes terrible parents. And in the education system from K through university the hostility for traditional values and a rightly ordered family life has had predictable results.
Obama has sublimated his anger and confusion into the wrong channels. And we are all going to reap disaster for it.
FredHjr:
“A Boy Named Sue”
My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn’t leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don’t blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me “Sue.”
Well, he must o’ thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a’ lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I’d get red
And some guy’d laugh and I’d bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named “Sue.”
Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I’d roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made a vow to the moon and stars
That I’d search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man who gave me that awful name.
Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July
And I just hit town and my throat was dry,
I thought I’d stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
There at a table, dealing stud,
Sat the dirty, mangy dog that named me “Sue.”
Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother’d had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: “My name is ‘Sue!’ How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!”
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
But I busted a chair right across his teeth
And we crashed through the wall and into the street
Kicking and a’ gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.
I tell ya, I’ve fought tougher men
But I really can’t remember when,
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,
He stood there lookin’ at me and I saw him smile.
And he said: “Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong.”
He said: “Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I’m the son-of-a-bitch that named you “Sue.'”
I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!
I stand corrected. Only scandalous memoirs, not all memoirs, are allegedly factual but largely invented, according to Wikipedia. They became popular in the 18th century. “Sex Rebel: Black” is undoubtedly a scandalous memoir.
Once again, you seem to be conveniently dismissing the expert opinion of English Professor Tidwell, who says the book is semiautobiographical: “1. pertaining to or being a fictionalized account of an author’s own life. 2. pertaining to or being a work of fiction strongly influenced by events in an author’s life.”
Why does the term “fictionalized account” seem so hard to accept? Because it does not fit into the agenda of demonizing Davis? Or, perhaps, do you believe that you have acquired more expertise than Professor Tidwell regarding Davis?
Does being forced to hug Pop, or the mirror Obama had underneath his chair, fit Davis “to a T”? These seem inconsistent with with your conclusion, so they are dismissed? Jumping to conclusions seems to be quite fashionable in Right-Wing Fantasyland (see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gG59cf).
Stacking the evidence, while ignoring expert opinions, is intellectually dishonest. Although it is not as fun, perhaps we should follow the suggestion of CSI: “follow the evidence” instead.
BTW: Davis was a pro forma “Communist.” He never accepted collectivism, nor did he preach its virtues to anyone else. He joined the CPUSA because membership had its privileges.
Neo,
I just went over to youtube to play that Johnny Cash tune. It’s still good now as it was when I was a kid and first heard it on the radio.
Anyway, I think a lot of Stanley Ann Dunham’s rage at capitalism and religion was a misdirected anger. And I think her parents were conspirators in molding her that way. They cultivated her socialist instincts and then sought out a school on Mercer Island to enable her to take it to another level.
Lord Almighty. What Americans do not seem to know about this incredibly dysfunctional family…
“Creepy Davis”? I beg to differ! It is a pity so many people have fallen to AIM’s disinformation campaign.
Cliff Kincaid and his colleagues have accused Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987) of being a Stalinist, a lifetime member of the Communist Party, and “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” Kincaid heads “Accuracy In Media” (A.I.M.), an organization dedicated to “fairness, balance and accuracy in news reporting.” Kincaid and his colleagues are all honorable men.
Having asked Kincaid to substantiate some of his accusations, and having received no reply, one can only conclude that Kincaid must be preoccupied with more important questions, because Kincaid is an honorable man.
Although the ironically named “Accuracy In Media” has yet to substantiate that Davis actually mentored Obama (a claim specifically rejected by the Obama campaign), such a relationship could have provided a bi-racial teenager with the key to success in mainstream America. To minimize criticism and maximize their potential, bi-racial African-Americans must walk a narrow identity path between group expectations. Davis was uniquely qualified to show the way. He may have significantly facilitated Obama’s vision of an inclusive society.
Davis may have advised Obama that to succeed in mainstream America, African-Americans must consider worst-case scenarios without wearing a chip on their shoulders, even though this normally requires judgment borne through actual experience. They must learn to give others (such as Cliff Kincaid) the benefit of the doubt. Success within mainstream America requires that abusive behavior should be attributed to bias only when there is no other plausible explanation.
Growing up in explicitly racist America, Davis learned never to immediately trust anybody white, but professional and personal familiarity nevertheless produced many warm interracial relationships. While one could plausibly argue that such stereotype activation is inherently racist, the recent expansion of “racist” to include such thought processes (as opposed to differential treatment) renders virtually everyone similarly culpable.
Although his experience with Jim Crow may have “incurably” limited his expectations of contemporary America, he shared Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind society. He unequivocally rejected racism, and worked tirelessly in support of equal rights for all Americans. He recognized that although victims of racism may have a reason to hate their oppressors, such reasons do not become rights — a distinction often lost on his critics. Collective responsibility is a double-edged sword.
Davis’s crusty radicalism may have perfectly counterbalanced Hawaii’s laid-back lifestyle for an African-American teenager destined for greatness. He provided coherent insight on African-American history, politics, and culture vis-é -vis mainstream America. Davis recognized the folly of cultural nationalism, including Black Separatist movements, long before meeting Obama. Obama’s grandfather may not have recognized the true value of his gift.
Although he may have used CPUSA periodicals as a publishing tool in the 1930’s and 1940’s, along with contemporaries Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, he rejected communist ideology in general and specifically attacked Stalin. He supported a fully integrated mixed economy, because neither laissez—faire capitalism nor collectivism provide the greatest benefit for the greatest number. He also had a libertarian streak that may have made Ron Paul proud.
Davis retired from activism by the 1970’s. His civil rights agenda had become the law of the land. He wrote little. Even if he had remained prolific, the burgeoning black publishing world obviated CPUSA periodical support for African-American writers. Further, the barbarity of communist regimes discredited the CPUSA and Marxist ideology. Newly divorced, he entered his golden years with glee.
As an honorable man, Kincaid must be unaware that by the 1970’s, the twin forces of Hawaiian and hippie cultures had mellowed Davis to the point that “Stalinist” charges are especially absurd. By the early 1970’s, Davis had become a virtual teddy bear, a permanent fixture of the Koa Cottages in the “Waikiki Jungle,” noted for its counterculture residents. Davis was known as a kindly old man, usually sitting on his porch a few steps from Kuhio Avenue, waving at all that passed. Although he had little money, he was always willing to share with those in deeper need.
As an honorable man, Cliff Kincaid must also be unaware that his portrayal of a raving Stalinist could not be further from the truth. Davis deeply loved the United States, despite his occasional flirtation with radical ideology. He recognized, perhaps belatedly, that the United States offers a unique combination of economic opportunity and personal freedom, thus providing sufficient strength and moral authority to champion human rights worldwide. If he HAD been so lucky, Barack Obama could not have found a finer mentor anywhere.
I’m sorry, Kaleokualoha, but your last post destroys any credibility you had remaining with me. By all accounts, Davis was a straight-up, full-on, in-your-face, no apologies communist. Your own quote proves it:
Kaleokualoha, Davis was a communist.
So are you.
Kaleokualoha is the one full of shit here. Davis was a Communist before, during, and after WWII. I find it hard to believe that he would not have imparted his collectivist ideals to young Barack. To hold otherwise strains credulity.
In Hawai’ian your name means “voice of love.” Now, as a former Marxist myself I have to say that Communism is not love at all. Marx claimed that socialism would create “a New Moral Man.” It did not. In fact, quite the opposite happened. Socialist countries and formerly socialist countries are filled with sociopaths and people who are not anchored to a moral and spiritual tradition. When I was a young, aspiring Marxist intellectual I was often subjected to subtle, snarky remarks from socialists because I was a Roman Catholic. Hostility to God, to Jesus, and to spiritual traditions that teach us to live selflessly.
It’s interesting how opponents of Obama have interpreted his relationship with Davis so differently. Those who claim that Davis indoctrinated Obama in communist ideology, such as A.I.M., may insist they had a close relationship, “almost like a son.” Others, however, may claim Obama felt violated. Both are exaggerations.
From Wikipedia:
“Disinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately . . . Unlike traditional propaganda and Big Lie techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.”
Obama’s true opinion is clearly revealed to those untainted by bias. It was reprinted in the Obama campaign reply to Corsi’s book:
[QUOTE]
LIE: “But the key role Frank Marshall Davis plays in the autobiography is not to provide Obama with words from his poems as a voice for Obama’s black rage. Instead Davis is the mentor Obama seeks for wisdom and advice, for instance when he has a crisis with his grandmother that was so traumatic Obama still mentions it today.” [p 87]
REALITY: OBAMA MEMOIR CHARACTERIZED FRANK DAVIS MARSHALL AS A FIGURE FROM HIS YOUTH WHO “FELL SHORT” AND WHOSE VIEW OF RACE WAS “INCURABLE”
Obama Wrote Of Frank As Someone Who “Fell Short” Of The “Lofty Standards” Of “Martin And Malcolm, Dubois And Mandela.” “Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men–Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew– Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq– fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own–my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 96]
Obama Wrote That “The relationship between black and white, the meaning of escape, would never be quite the same for me as it
had been for Frank, or for the Old Man, or even for Roy.” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 277]
Obama Recounted Frank’s Diatribe About What Would Happen To Him In College And Then Described Frank As “Incurable” And Living In The “Sixties Time Warp That Hawaii Had Created.”
““What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet into European shoes. Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head…’Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same…It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.” [Dreams From My Father, Pg. 96-97]
[END QUOTE]
Frank Marshall Davis was a product of his generation. It is unfortunate that he did not live long enough to see Obama become President, because Frank Marshall Davis was my father.
Kaleokualoha,
I have never claimed that Davis was a Stalinist; I have no information on that subject, nor is it relevant to what I am claiming, which is that Obama’s own words indict the man in terms of boundary violations and smarminess, and that the picture Obama paints fits quite nicely with the Davis memoir.
You are setting up straw man arguments with the Stalinist-or-no-Stalinist business. It has nothing to do with what I’ve written.
And, Stalinist or no, the overwhelming mass of evidence is that Davis was a Communist. I claim that Obama’s own words indicate that Davis was also a mentor. How much of his Communist and far Left worldview he imparted to Obama we simply cannot know, but it is logical to think he did impart some of it in his mentor role. He was chosen as a mentor by Obama’s family. And, by the way, “mentor” does not imply perfection, nor is it inconsistent with falling short in many ways.
This is the last time I will engage you in this repetitive conversation. You have become a troll.
But I will add that English Professor Tidwell has absolutely no way of knowing how much of Davis’s book is truth and how much is fiction, unless he was wiring Davis’s home and following him with a hidden camera for the last few decades of the man’s life. And I would remind you of my description of a memoir:
Memoirs are stylized autobiographical works that sometimes compress and change details of time and space for artistic purposes, but are largely factual and mostly not invented. That’s what makes them memoirs rather than works of fiction.
“I find it hard to believe that he would not have imparted his collectivist ideals to young Barack. To hold otherwise strains credulity.”
You can choose to listen to the expert advice of Professor Edgar Tidwell, cited by AIM as an expert on Davisw, or you can form an uninformed opinion.
AIM’s disinformation campaign claimed that he was a “lifelong member of the CPUSA” and a Stalinist. In reality, he was not even a collectivist.
Frank Marshall Davis rejected collectivism. He was a capitalist. He owned two paper companies, and sold advertising specialties, in Hawaii. He joined the CPUSA because of the professional and social opportunities it presented. He joined the CPUSA during WWII, just as the United States joined the Soviet Union during WWII, not because they shared the delusion of a communist utopia. Each was a marriage of convenience.
He joined because membership had its privileges, such as professional and social opportunities. He considered membership in the CPUSA as a “vehicle and tool” because, according to “The New Red Negro” (cited by AIM’s Cliff Kincaid as a source):
“ONLY the Communist left had any significant institutional impact on African-American writing during the 1930s and 1940s. This support was crucial as the institutions that had maintained the New Negro Renaissance faded. And for better or for worse, the leading CPUSA functionaries involved in “Negro work” took a direct interest in African-American cultural production in a manner that was unusual, if not unique.
Vilifying a writer for continuing to publish in CPUSA-supported publications, when they provided his only available institutional support, is completely unfair. Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Frank Marshall Davis all took advantage of this institutional support.
Further, as The New Red Negro makes clear, there was no monolithic Stalinist doctrine within the CPUSA: “This is not to say that the impact of the Communist Left on African-American writers in the 1930’s and 1940’s flowed from absolute unity of ideology and practical application of that ideology. As mentioned before, the CPUSA itself, despite the claims of both the party leadership and its most ardent detractors, contained various, often conflicting tendencies. This conflicts appeared within top leadership, where Earl Browder and William Z. Foster and their supporters were frequently at odds. They also surfaced in the regional leadership of important districts that were occasionally, and in the case of southern California frequently, in opposition to the national leadership. Finally, at the rank-and-file level, when leadership debates broke out into the open (as they did in 1929, 1956-1946, and 1956), the were replayed in almost every CPUSA unit, often serving as the vehicle for the expression of a wide range of “unorthodox” political beliefs (ranging from social democratic to anarcho-syndicalist.”
“A huge proportion of African-American poets (and writers and intellectuals generally) remained engaged with the Communist Left and cultural institutions from at least the early 1930’s until at least the early 1950’s. With the partial exception of the period from the German invasion of the Soviet Union to the end of the Second World War, the CPUSA placed the issue of race and the fight against Jim Crow near the center of all its work.”
The bottom line is that communist ties were the NORM for African American poets and civil right activists during that period. Such ties did not mean that they internalized Marxist values, much less Stalinist values, even if they were aware of the distinction. To them, the CPUSA provided safe harbor from the ravages of Jim Crow America.
For those who question whether anyone would join the CPUSA without internalizing collectivist values, examples abound in more recent developments. Russians and Chinese joined their respective Communist parties because membership was important to professional advancement. Mikhail Gorbachev rejected these values in dismantling the Soviet Union. Leaders of the PRC’s capitalist boom are nevertheless pro forma Party members.
Even today people join some organizations, such as churches and the YMCA, without internalizing their core values because membership has its advantages. I believe everyone will agree that many so-called “Christians” have not internalized Christian values. Some could argue that Stalinism perverted the core values of Marxism, just as the Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests perverted the core values of Christianity.
BTW: For those who resort to ad hominem attacks instead of debating the issues themselves, I am in no way a communist. My blog makes it clear that I totally reject collectivist principles.
I am a retired Air Force Intelligence Officer, with specific training in Deception Analysis by the CIA. It has served me well in navigating the body of lies regarding Frank Marshall Davis
“They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.”
Well, he learned his lessons very well, but there’s probably even more to the story, if you buy Jack Cashill’s allegations concerning the possible/probable ghost writing by Ayers.
I want to say something in defense of all children. In the mid to late Eighties I became interested in the work of the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller. From both an intellectual and a very personal and practical standpoint, I was interested in her work.
I gained a lot of insight into myself while I was a Jesuit seminarian and after I left the seminary. Children who have suffered some kind of wound, trauma, neglect, or patterns of those things, especially sensitive and bright children, grow up with a hunger FOR AN EXPLANATION of the world. They are driven to seek an understanding for why and how human beings behave as they do. The greater harm can occur if they are attracted to ideologies without spiritual depth or emotional healing. And I think Barack Obama is a man who was funneled into an ideological hothouse by the adults in his life. And he neglected the spiritual and emotional needs that so cried out for healing and repair.
I have no idea of the horrors that Frank Marshall Davis was exposed to as a child. I read that he nearly died from being lynched when he was five years old. Now that is some kind of pain and fear. But I doubt that was the only thing that was done to him by the adults in his life. And he sought his solace in ideology, poetry, and pornography.
In my case, the emotional problems of my mother and her family affected me in very significant ways, but it was balanced by a lot of love from other people. Still, I wanted to understand the world. I cannot go into all the details and the story is way too long and stretches out over many years. But I did have a religious experience of my own pain merging in with the pity and compassion I felt for poor and rejected people, and saw in that a calling to religious life and priesthood. I embraced both Christianity and Marxism and sought to find ways, intellectually, to overcome what I thought were the trenchant critiques of it from thinkers I respected. The end of that journey took me to a break with Marxism right about the time I was resolving some issues through therapy. This is actually not an uncommon thing for both academics and those in formation in religious communities.
So, however I have enmity for Obama’s ideological leanings, on a human level I actually do feel some pity for the man. But I had so many other breaks and good turns from being exposed to so many good people that the grace of God rescued me. But I could only end up at that moment because I kept my mind and my heart open and was willing to keep looking inward and outward. I do not sense that Obama ever was so lucky or inclined.
Kaleokualoha:
Your arguments about Davis joining the Communist Party as an African-American, and comparing that act to Chinese or Russians joining Communist parties in their respective countries for the purpose of career advancement, is a weak one. While it is true that it was very common for African-American artists and writers of his time to have Communist sympathies, there was nothing like the sort of coercion and social pressure to join that exists in Communist countries. Davis’s own writing for the Honolulu Reporter, a far Left publication, indicated far Left views, as well. And of course, Communist membership and sympathies would ordinarily be hidden and masked as “progressivism.”
Your assertion that Davis was a capitalist because he owned businesses is highly unconvincing. My own uncle, who was a forthrightly pro-Soviet Communist but never joined the Party, as well as all the other Communists I’ve known (and I’ve known very many), fully participated in the capitalist system and reaped its benefits.
It is also very interesting that Obama found another mentor in Reverend Wright, a man whose views in many ways resembled Davis’s, albeit from a faith-based perspective. And it is also of note that Obama has had a unusually large number of “progressive” contacts for his entire public life.
It is his prerogative to do so, by the way. But I wish he would have been more upfront about it, so that the American people would have had a chance to get to know his true Left leanings before they elected him.
Ah yes, Bill Ayers, just a guy in the neighborhood. And Obama never heard a single one of Wright’s most racist and hateful sermons.
Spare us your bullshit, and Marxist prevarication, insofar as those differ.
I say again:
Kaleokualoha, Davis was a communist.
So are you.
Marxists can play the capitalist game very, very well. Case in point, the Canadian expat Maurice Strong living in Beijing. He comes from a family of famous Communists. He also is a billionaire and has had many successful businesses and ventures, mainly in the energy field. Right now, in China, he is financially involved in the Chinese companies manufacturing automobiles.
Mr. Strong said of himself that he is “a socialist in ideology, and a capitalist in methodology.”
Doing a bit of Googling, I have discovered that “Kaleokualoha” appears to be the commenter’s middle name, and his full name is Mark Kaleokualoha Davis—Frank Marshall Davis’s son.
This would certainly explain his understandably strong desire to defend his father here, and on many other blogs that mention the man in relation to Obama.
Here is some extended biographical information for Frank Marshall Davis:
…married Helen Canfield (divorced, 1970); children: Lynn, Beth, Jeanne, Jill, Mark.
Cashill ends: “The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness — a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores — but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets.”
Then of course there is (still) the birth certificate issue, for which exists a reasonable level of doubt concerning it’s credibility (regardless of the court rulings or derision from various “Nirther” critics), until the “long form” vault record is verifiably released to the public. If Obama was legitimately interested in “transparency” and demonstrating good faith to the American public who only want to feel they haven’t been deliberately cheated by a fraud, opening these items for public scrutiny would be no problem, especially post-election; Unless of course he is in fact a moslem communist posing as a Christian Democrat, the “Manchurian Candidate” now in the very real process of betraying America, at a breakneck pace, as well as Israel; After doing everything possible to undermine the liberation of Iraq, the Kurds, Iranian dissidents, Saudi regime victims, and a host of others who need America to stand up for what is right. It’s the truth. No lies!
It has been my experience that many – although not all – Leftists practice deception and feel it is o.k. to do this. I never did. I was never o.k. with it, and I did get into disagreements with Communist/Marxist activists because I refused to to call myself anything other than a Marxist.
There is a deep pattern of deception over on that side. Obama has been deceptive. His family and their associations have been deceptive – with each other and with other people. The lack of forthright honesty is frightening.
I would comment personally to Kaleokualoha that I actually find your loyalty and defense of your father not only fascinating, but admirable; To an extent, people do focus, with at least the intent of intellectual honesty, on what they want to, though the left-wing, especially dedicated communists (and Islamists) are notorious for brazen deceit… But at the end of the day this is not a story so much about your father, as a story about the significant background concerning the now far left-wing Democrat Party agenda, led by Obama, and which may be arguably tantamount to treason, but is certainly betrayal.
wow
Ironically, the 13-year old that Davis is thought to have defiled is named “Anne”…
Stanley ANN Dunham?
wow.
In looking over the thread, I went to the AIM website, and discovered Kaleokualoha’s Artfldgr-long defenses of his father, before I got to the comment where someone had Googled and found it out. I will not go over Kaleokualoha’s prevarications in defense of his father. Others have already done it. I particularly liked “He joined the CPUSA because membership had its privileges.” But Neo already took care of that.
K’s defense of his father reminds me of other “red diaper babies” whose parents were committed to the “cause” and who paid for it. Such as Tony Hiss’s dogged defense of his father Alger, in spite of the research of the last 30 years which indicates that Chambers and Tricky Dick were spot-on in calling Alger a Commie spy. Such as Chesa Boudin, raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn while his Weathermen parents were in prison, who later spent time in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Such as Michael and Robert Meeropol, who spent years trying to prove that their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent of the atomic spying for which they were executed.
Such dogged defense shows loyalty to his father, a trait one can commend.
I liked Artfldgr’s speculations.
While I didn’t devote a lot of time to it, I had long felt uncomfortable about Davis’s mentoring Obama. No accident that he later said that in college he ” sought out Marxists…leftists..”
I don’t consider it coincidence that this topic has resulted in so many comments.
I would speculate that there is a relationship between the suicide of Stanley Dunham’s mother and his wanting a son instead of a daughter. Children who have a parent who commit suicide are afraid that there is some “suicide gene,” some bad seed, that will be passed on. This fear is especially stronger with regard to having children the same sex as the parent who committed suicide. That, I speculate, is why Stanley Dunham wanted a son. He was afraid that like his mother, his daughter could commit suicide.
There seems a bigger and more disturbing picture than Barak and any dysfunctions he may suffer from. That being the dysfunction in so many Americans that absolutely NEEDED such a man to be their leader. We’re talking needed him to a point that even his membership of 20 years in a racist church DID NOT MATTER.
This is not even about politics. Its about people insisting on a moral code that only condemns those who suggest such a thing as a moral code.
YOU WROTE “Doing a bit of Googling, I have discovered that “Kaleokualoha” appears to be the commenter’s middle name, and his full name is Mark Kaleokualoha Davis–Frank Marshall Davis’s son.”
RESPONSE: No googling was necessary, because I invited you to my blog with my first post, where I clearly stated that I am the son of Frank Marshall Davis. It was my error, however, in permitting the errant “.” that rendered that link inactive. My
apologies.
Please consider, however, that the entire “mentorship” meme was part of the disinformation campaign that exaggerated my father’s influence over Obama. Once again, I invite any person of integrity to refute any of the “specific misrepresentation” that formed the core of this campaign (see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gGxdvX).
If that is too much reading, then please consider just one issue in AIM’s disinformation campaign: the 1949 Honolulu NAACP issue where AIM posts flagrantly misrepresented the Congressional testimony of NAACP rookie Edward Berman. Cliff Kincaid had the audacity (LOVE that word!) to post a verbatim transcript of the testimony (http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/hawaii-obama.pdf), and then published four different misrepresentations of that same testimony!
His misrepresentation ranged from claiming that the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins directly criticized my father, to claiming that my father tried to take over the NAACP itself! For a detailed analysis of these falsehoods, please see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gG5kN7
An honest evaluation requires assessment of all evidence, both incriminating and exculpatory. One item of exculpatory evidence can outweigh a bushel of circumstantial evidence, as Mike Nifong should have known. Hopefully, an unbiased evaluation of Obama’s poem will reach the same conclusion when considering the “hug” and “mirror” issues.
My father was no angel, and I am not a troll. All I’m asking for is a fair evaluation of the evidence.
So, through all that, you are saying, Mark, that you didn’t put the bullet in the furnace and you want people to stop talking about your father?
Fascinating discussion.
I was brought here by a link from Protein Wisdom. I’m wondering how much thought has been given to the notion that Frank Marshall Davis is the true father of Barack Obama. I’ve always wondered at how BHO resembles his mother to a great degree, yet there is not the slightest resemblance to his “father” BHO Sr.
Also, Obama has hooded eyes yet neither his mother nor “father” do. Furthermore, in the poem being discussed here, Obama writes:
“I was intrigued by the old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
I’ve just been searching Google Images for fotos that show clearly Obama’s hooded eyes but can’t find any good matches; however I’m sure others here have noticed the same thing. Just open these four photos in tabs side by side and you can clearly see that there is much more resemblance between Davis and Obama than between Obama Jr. and Sr. –
http://tinyurl.com/d2ek5r
http://tinyurl.com/d5ewwh
http://tinyurl.com/dbotgk
http://tinyurl.com/db27xg
Other than the eyes, they both Pres Obama and Davis have longer heads and similar puffy or droopy cheeks, whereas Barack Sr. has neither. If you were shown a picture of Pres Obama and his mother, and asked whether the father of Barack was Davis or Barack Sr.- which would you choose. What if the 13 year old “Anne” that Davis has admitted to raping is really Ann Dunham, and the marriage with Barack Sr. was a sham to cover that.
As far as I’m concerned, we know so little about this man that anything is open to conjecture
Fine, we understand Obama better for all this. But what are we going to actually do about it?
Nothing.
But we understand why we’re being screwed. I guess that makes us all feel better.
This is an amazing post. I can only add my agreement with Neo’s observations. It seems clear that a young BHO was seduced by an older man.
Neo is correct to note that we cannot really say whether he was molested. I would agree that the scene described in the poem has the ring of truth. Of course, it could be fictionalized, but it sounds like a teenager trying to come to terms with a sexual trauma, but not really understanding how much of it he is describing.
The notion, suggested by one commenter, that Obama’s mother was the Ann who was molested by Davis, makes the whole situation almost melodramatic. But again that does not make it untrue.
The larger issue is the mental seduction, the notion that an older man took over the mind of a child and used it as a vehicle to disseminate his ideas.
Again, I think that Neo is right about this, if only because Obama has gotten to where he is through seduction. As Neo said in the previous post, he did not get there through experience.
Obama has excelled in seducing crowds of people, in seducing the media barons, both conservative and liberal. His is not a politics of negotiation or reconciliation, but a politics of seduction where those who turn away from his siren song are treated very harshly indeed.
Perhaps he is repeating a childhood trauma… who knows?… but I think it more reasonable to say that if Obama’s great talent is seduction, he had to have learned it somewhere.
It is worth nothing that seduction does not appeal to reason; in fact, it usually attempts to silence the voice of reason, the better to lure them to follow the Pied Piper blindly off a cliff.
We can see the dual seduction at work in the case of Chris Matthews, who famously said that Obama’s first speech on race sent a tingle down his leg. At the least this shows that for true believers Obama’s speech appealed to something visceral, not rational.
And why not add that Obama’s thrall to Jeremiah Wright might well replicate his thrall to Frank Davis. Listening to Wright Obama was entranced; he lost his ability to make a rational judgment.
The problem is that he expects everyone else to do the same. This means that he does not see his experience as exceptional, but as the norm, roughly the way that Alice Miller tended to imagine that all children have been molested.
The clues were all there, and the MSM deliberately turned their cameras away from them, or dug a hole and buried them, or, if they couldn’t do that, they dismissed them, because they would ruin the narrative they were fabricating for Obama that would get him elected. It seems to me that any prudent, rational person, if they were able to see the totality of the record, looking at Obama and his family, the major influences in his life, and his close friends, would quickly run the other way, and would certainly not want Obama to get anywhere near the Presidency.
The absent black Muslim father who Obama idolized, a Luo tribesman from Kenya, a failed Socialist and alcoholic, with eventually also had 3 other African wives, who abandoned his white wife and Obama, and who Obama only saw once after the age of 2, when his father came to Hawaii for one week long visit. The leftist, iconoclastic white mother who then married a second Muslim, took Obama off to Indonesia, where he was educated as a Muslim for a time, then dumped Obama, at age 10, on his white grandparents in Hawaii after she divorced her second husband, and then, essentially abandoned Obama during the rest of her life, which, except for the occasional visit, she spent overseas doing “field work”. The hardworking grandmother who kept it all together–the “racist” “typical white person,” Obama used as a political prop in his campaign, the grandfather, “Gramps,” a not very successful furniture salesman, who used to take the child Obama along when he frequented the bars in Honolulu’s red light district, introduced him to his drinking and pot smoking buddy, Frank Marshall Davis, and who from what he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” Obama had little respect for.
Then, there was the mentor of Obama’s teen age years, an “angry black man,” hard drinking, pot smoking newspaperman, Communist Party member, and admitted pervert and pedophile, Frank Marshal Davis. In college, Obama was, as was Bill Ayers, a friend of leftist Jew hater Edward Said, author of the book, “Orientalism” that helped so powerfully to destroy our traditional school of experts on Islam, the “Orientalists,” who after hundreds of years of accumulated study of Islam, thought very little good about it, and this is likely where Obama first met Ayers. Then, as a disciple of the manipulative, amoral methods of Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules For Radicals,” Obama taught and used those methods for four years as a “community organizer.” It was during his time as an “organizer,” too, that Obama started his 20 years of close association with the Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright (who Obama used to call his “very close friend,” “mentor,” and “spiritual and political advisor” until Wright’s sermons and statements became widely known) and his Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama heard a weekly dose of hatred for Whites, Jews and Israel and conspiracy theories, and where Obama was told that “White greed rules a world in need,” as he listed to Wright’s Marxist “Black Liberation Theology” whose creator, Union Theological Seminary’s Professor James H. Cone, wrote:
“Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.”
(Quoted in William R Jones, “Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology”, in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed Cornel West and Eddie Glaube.)
Then back from 10 years on the lam came unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers and his blood thirsty wife Bernadine Dohrn, who made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, both, to quote Ayers, “Guilty as sin and free as a bird,” with 26 or perhaps 30 Weathermen bombings and several innocent civilians and policemen killed to their credit–friends of Obama and supporters–who held the party and fund raiser that launched Obama’s career in Chicago politics; Ayers’ father’s fortune (past Chairman of the Board of Con Edison) and vast influence as the “Godfather” of Chicago politics were, I’m sure, very helpful to Obama, too.
For four years Obama was the Director of the Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, which was supposed to improve Chicago’s abysmal school system; lawyer Michelle, later Michelle Obama, had a hand in landing the totally inexperienced 34 year old Obama this job, which Chicago Challenge founder Bill Ayers hired Obama for. At the Challenge, Obama and Ayers worked very closely together, pouring over $110 million dollars into far left advocacy groups like hard Left Moaist Mike Klonsky’s “Freedom Schools,” and groups pushing Black identity politics, while stiff-arming any proposals directed strictly at improving math or reading skills in Chicago’s abysmal school system. After it was all over everyone concerned, as well as outside experts, agreed it was a total failure.
Then came Tony Rezko, Rashid Khalidi and on and on.
I find it very hard to believe that, if the whole picture would have been presented, that Obama would be President today.
thanks for the link…
you write:
“a fantasy for which I can find no evidence whatsoever and have dismissed as unlikely in the extreme.”
here’s the evidence – such as it is:
1 – they resemble each other
2 – obama resembles fmd’s other son, mark
3 – in the poem you sited and linked to at my blog obama refers to fmd as “Pop”
4 – stanley ann and her parents selected fmd as a mentor for bho when stanley ann split hawaii and abandoned bho; WHY!? (Did she feel more comfortable abandoning her son because she knew – in addition to her parents – his “Pop” was there?)
5 – might the fmd longstanding and deep connections to chicago explain why stanley ann sought a job as an au pair there, and why obama went there after columbia? (the reasons obama has given over time differ widely, and they differ from the version which given by his first boss there at the DNC convention in denver. are they hiding the fact that fmd arranged it?)
6 – obama junior looks nothing like obama senior.
7 – bho SR came from a large and close knit family. we have read over and over many MANY times of other muslim men who have “kidnapped” their 1/2 muslim children and taken them back to ‘the old country”. why didn’t bho SR do this? it indicates a severe lack of interest in his son.
if one assumes that frank marshall davis was in fact BHO JR’s father, then EVERYTHING is explained.
it is the simplest explanation for all these facts.
it passes occam’s razor.
though speculative and unproven it is far from unlikely in the extreme.
BHO JR has never released his medical records.
WHY!?
could it be because they would reveal his blood-type and might prove that BHO SR is not his father?
i think so.
only fmd paternity explains EVERYTHING.
why would stanley ann and fmd have covered this up?
he was married (to a white heiress from chicago), she wasn’t – and she wanted his baby. they enlisted BHO SR – who got permanent residency as a result of going along with the sham.
i think BHO JR found out the truth around the time he wrote the poem.
they all decided to have him keep the BHO JR identity to take advantage of his exotic background: as BHO JR he would get special treatment; as “FMD JR” he might get blackballed as a red, or treated like just another left-wing african-american.
BHO JR’s choice to join the black liberation theology church in chicago was based on their socialistic teachings and their political connections to the black community – and not Jesus or being “born again”.
everything in BHO JR’s entire life (since – i believe – he probably found out FMD was his father has been dedicated to the socialism FMD was committed to.
IOW: IT IS REALLY THE DREAMS OF HIS REAL FATHER, FRANK MARSHAL DAVIS – THAT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA JUNIOR HAS BEEN DEVOTED TO.
all the best!
Since there may be somewhat reasonable conjecture for suggesting that FMD was Obama’s bio father, I wonder what thoughts commenters here have concerning the allegations that Obama was actually born in a Kenyan hospital, then flown asap to Hawaii. Why would “Ann” have gone to such elaborate extents as traveling to Kenya to represent Mr. Obama Sr. as the father, and to qualitatively embrace a contrived “family” there?
For more information on Frank Marshall Davis, his membership in the Communist Party and his activities for it see (http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2323).
Apparently Obama’s paternal grandmother was proudly telling all the journalists who would listen–and they were mostly British–that she was in the delivery room in a hospital in Kenya to witness Obama’s birth, that is until Obama & Co. shut her up (see http://tinyurl.com/c7f4rg).
Wolla Dalbo,
Re. your above remarks, I concur completely.
If the truth had been more widely disseminated by the mainstream media, this cat would not be in the White House now. Only the Far Left, the Soft Left, and some truly stupid people in the Middle Muddle would have voted for him.
On the other hand, John McCain isn’t exactly a conservative. But at least he would have a Presidential veto to control a profligate Congress.
Perfected Democrat,
Without access to Obama’s records, we will never know the truth about his birth. IMO Frank Marshall Davis is not his biological father.
The fact that he and Soros’ paid lawyers have spent a lot of money to keep all of Obama’s records locked tightly as if they were highly classified secrets, and that the judiciary is more than happy to go along with this, tells me that this country is in deep trouble. And it isn’t primarily from Obama.
We the people, our elected representatives, and the legal profession are all complicit in the destruction of the United States of America.
I ask not be placed in the group you just mentioned above, Fredhjr.
I admit the end game appears for the entire planet to go socialist. I suppose the train of thought is there will be no more war if no one has anything to fight for.
For that to occur, the U.S. must be destroyed. The only way for that to happen is from the inside. Nothing new there. Someone has sold over half our population on the fact that we are evil, we are the problem, because an even smaller population of our fellow Americans can’t frigging make it in a free society. So many millions are perfectly willing to have put their very own children and grand children in financial chains. Including Obama, and every idiot that works inside the beltway. I didn’t vote for that. Anybody else in here vote for that?
I wonder what people will think, no matter who they voted for, if or when some day there is fighting in the streets in this country, such as we watch on TV at night while eating our evening meal. Since the civil war, it’s always been “over there”, wherever “over there” has been. Even after September 11.
I don’t know what Obama’s original, long form birth certificate might contain.
Perhaps it is something as simple as the fact that his original given name was Muhammad, not an unlikely choice for the son of a Muslim–but a certain candidacy killer.
But Obama’s birth place is only the first obstacle to him qualifying as a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires.
Because, following the logic and the law and regulations cited in lawyer Philip Berg’s Supreme Court lawsuit, that the Court refused to hear:
Obama could have been born in Kenya and his birth very quickly registered thereafter as a live birth in Hawaii, which from what I have seen, the Hawaiian regulations then in effect would allow for, but, even if born in Hawaii, there would still be problems, because given his biological father’s Kenyan, later British Commonwealth nationality and his mother’s age of 17 and her American residency history at the time of Obama’s birth, this particular factual situation, under the laws and regulations then in effect, would have had the result, Berg argued, of his American mother’s citizenship not passing to Obama.
Moreover, there is the additional problem of Obama and his mother–now married to her second husband, a Muslim citizen of Indonesia, both mother and child now living in Indonesia, and the actions taken by his step-father, that would seem to have satisfied Indonesian authorities that Obama, now named Barry Soetoro, was an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim, and could therefore register and attend grade school Indonesia. Coming back to the U.S. at 10 years of age, Obama, Berg argued, would either have to have been issued a Certificate as a “nationalized citizen” not the same thing as a “natural born citizen” or would have been deemed a citizen of Indonesia, and would have had to reclaim American citizenship sometime before he turned 18 by going to an Embassy, filling out paperwork and pledging allegiance to the U.S. to again become a “naturalized U.S. citizen”; all of which would have generated lots of paperwork.
Additionally, there is the curious fact that Obama was able to travel to Pakistan at a time when the hard line Muslim government then in power banned visits by non-Muslims.
All in all, questions and circumstances, official documents, laws and regulations that should have been thoroughly examined and explored but weren’t, due to the legal battle waged by Obama, the DNC and FEC, the cowardice of the MSM, and the Supreme Court, who have collectively told us that no American citizen has to right to challenge the citizenship credentials of any candidate for President, and that the organizations whose duty it was to verify that Obama met the Constitutionally required “natural born citizenship requirement” i.e. the DNC and FEC, have no such responsibility; nobody does.
What never ceases to crack me up is the fact that time after time throughout history, it is the governments of nations, not their peoples, that is the problem.
I see no resemblance between Frank Marshall Davis and Obama, and no reason to postulate a blood relation, as I said earlier. As far as the 13-year old that was or was not actually molested by Davis, to the best of my recollection the book describes that incident as occurring back in Chicago during his first marriage, before he married his second wife or even arrived in Hawaii. That leaves Obama’s mother out as a candidate.
For the rest, the best evidence is that Davis was a Communist at least for a while, and that, more importantly, he continued to be a man of the Left; that he had a strong and troubled influence on Obama, although there were certainly many other influences; that it induced a sense of unease and invasion in the young Obama; and that Davis wrote a pornographic memoir with some autobiographical characteristics.
That’s disturbing enough, I think, without speculating on worse. It is also, I believe, quite consistent with Davis’s son’s story. The rest of the details will probably never be known.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Are Kellman and Obama lying about how they really met – and who introduced them?
KELLMAN DNC SPEECH (PREPARED TEXT):
In 1985, I needed to hire a community organizer. I found myself in New York City, across from a 25-year-old recent college graduate. I wanted to convince him to give up a comfortable life and a bright future to come to Chicago to take up the toughest of challenges for a salary of just $10,000 a year.
* “… I FOUND MYSELF…” IS DELIBERATELY VAGUE AND PASSIVE.
* HOW DID HE FIND HIMSELF THERE – ACROSS FROM OBAMA?
* WAS IT BY MAGIC? BY CHANCE?
* WHY IS HE BEING VAGUE?
BYRON YORK:
Kellman set out to find a black organizer. He ran an ad in some trade publications, and Obama responded.
But at first Kellman wasn’t sure Obama was right for the job. “My wife was Japanese-American,” Kellman recalled. “I showed her the résumé, with the background in Hawaii. The name’s Obama, so I asked, ‘Could this be Japanese?’ She said, ‘Sure, it could be.’” It was only when Kellman talked to Obama on the phone, and Obama “expressed interest in something African-American culturally,” that a relieved Kellman offered Obama the job.
* AN AD???
* IN VAGUE PUBLICATIONS?
* HAS ANYBODY SEEN A COPY OF ONE?
* AND IN THIS VERSION, KELLMAN OFFERS OBAMA THE JOB OVER THE PHONE. HMM…
OBAMA AT WESLEYAN:
“I wrote letters to every organization in the country I could think of. And one day, a small group of churches on the South Side of Chicago offered me a job to come work as a community organizer in neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings.
My mother and grandparents wanted me to go to law school. My friends were applying to jobs on Wall Street.
Meanwhile, this organization offered me $12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car.And I said yes.
* OBAMA DESCRIBES IT AS IF HE GOT THE OFFER AS A RESULT OF HIS LETTER-WRITING;
* THERE IS NO MENTION OF ANY AD, OR ANY PHONE CALL.
* HUH?!?!? 12,OOO!? BUT KELLMAN SAYS ABOVE (AT THE DNC), IT WAS 10 GEES!?
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS VERSION:
He came to Chicago as a skinny 24-year-old, not long out of Columbia University, who was looking for a job as a community organizer. He was still in New York, frustrated by his inability to find anything suitable, when one day he spotted a want ad in what he would call a “do-gooder” magazine.
* HMMMM…. THIS VERSION — WHICH COMES AFTER THE DNC CONVENTION, (AFTER KELLMAN’S VERSION IS BROADCAST TO THE NATION AND IT DIFFERS FROM OBAMA’S) — SEE,S TO COMBINE ELEMENTS OF KELLMAN’S “AD VERSION” WITH OBAMA’S LETTER – AND THE VISIT TO NY.
* THESE VERSIONS SEEM TO ME TO DIFFER SUBTLY – YET SIGNIFICANTLY.
* THEY EACH HAVE A DIFFERENT VERSION OF HOW KELLMAN AND OBAMA MET, HOW THE OPFFER WAS MADE, HOW MUCH IT WAS FOR, ETC.
* IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THEY ARE COVERING UP SOMETHING. BUT WHAT!?
PROBABLY THAT IT WAS THROUGH COLUMBIA GRAD BILL AYERS THAT KELLMAN AND OBAMA WERE PUT TOGETHER.
“THE WOODS FUND” FINANCED OBAMA’S JOB. THIS FUND WAS FINANCED BY TOM AYERS – BILL AYERS’ FATHER. [USE THAT LINK AND RTWT!]
* IN ADDITION: COLUMBIA WAS AT THE TIME THE HOME OF THE LATE EDWARD SAID – WHOSE JOB IS NOW HELD BY FORMER CHICAGOAN, FORMER ARAFAT ASSOCIATE AND LONGTIME OBAMA FRIEND RASHID KHALIDI.
* ANOTHER COINCIDENCE?
* I’M GUESSING NO.
* THERE ARE WAY TOO MANY “COINCIDENCES” IN THIS STORY.
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/09/are-kellman-and-obama-lying-about-how.html
perhaps frank marshall davis put BHO JR in touch with KELLMAN?
it’s as plausible as any ONE OF THE MANY versions obama and his COMRADES have told…
If the whole, full story of Obama, his birth, his family, his upbringing, education, ideology, religion, friends, mentors and backers, “accomplishments” and meteoric, demagogic rise through politics to become President were pitched as a movie script, it would be rejected as just too far fetched.
Collateral damage in all this, of course, has been the MSM and, especially, the dying American newspaper industry, whose lies, fabrications, evasions, omissions and editorials in the service of leftist/Democratic party ideology and Obama can now be much more easily discovered and understood in an Internet age; newspapers–who along with the other members of MSM now form the propaganda arm of the Left–and whose “news” and “facts” and “developments” are now no more believable than those found in Pravda at the height of the old U.S.S.R.
br549
I am not calling you, sir, personally and individually, a part of the problem. Nor am I. I am saying that in general it is we the people who have neglected our responsibilities to know, understand, and execute good self-governance in our actions, education, and associations.
In general we have not refused the blandishments and seductions of collectivist ideas and solutions.
Again, our conduct has sown the seeds for the discontent and dissolution that attends the general disorder of our times. I think of Frank Marshall Davis, for example. Supposing there had never been Jim Crowe and the evils which flowed from it. Would Mr. Davis have been lynched when he was five years old? Imagine what that terror must have done to a child who probably already was scarred psychically from the things his caregivers had subjected him to.
The barbarous treatment of children sows the seeds for all manner of evils that overtake us later.
GRINGO POSTED: ” I will not go over Kaleokualoha’s prevarications in defense of his father. Others have already done it. I particularly liked “He joined the CPUSA because membership had its privileges.” But Neo already took care of that.”
Please list my so-called “prevarications.” If you read the quote from “The New Red Negro,” you will find that only CPUSA publications provided institutional support for African-American writers. Besides professional support, membership also provided social opportunities. People join organizations for various reasons other than acceptance of institutional core values.
So where is my “prevarication”? I invite you to refute any of the “specific misrepresentation” documented in my posts.
Maybe they had a bowling league.
Sure. And lots of guys join NAMBLA for the bridge tournaments.
“I’d like to get some more social opportunities. Should I join the Kiwanis or the Communist Party? Tough call. Let’s see – what social events does each one have?”
Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Occam’s Beard: Actually, I think that if one was a black intellectual or artist or writer during the 30s, the Communist Party was the place to be to make professional connections—with the movers and shakers such as Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, etc.. But I also find it highly likely that those who joined were also believers; one didn’t do something like that just for the parties, as you say. Whether or not they continued as Communists (Robeson did till his dying day), many remained on the far Left side of things.
To have been significantly disenfranchised through all those years, as indeed “blacks” were, would have been a strong motivation in their gravitating toward any source which offered some sense of compassion and solidarity with their long entrenched plight. That admitted, however, there’s no question that the left has consistantly only used black culture, here and in Africa, for the promotion of their own narrow clique agendas. Black culture has benefitted the least from the regimes and left-wing agendas. There is a good reason why Martin Luther King was a Republican.
Neo, I agree. I was just taking umbrage at the disingenuous (“but I didn’t inhale” type) argument. If one is interested in moving up in leftist circles, certainly joining the Communist Party is a sensible thing to do. But I balk at being asked to believe that that decision did not reflect some substantial commonality of viewpoint. To put it another way, I doubt the comrades would provide much support for someone who joined the Party but was not not perceived as sharing its views.
Can’t have it both ways.
Kaleokualoha–keep up with the justifications, special pleading, denials and excuses dezinformatsia boy, you may think that they salvage your father’s conduct or reputation, but I doubt few here are gonna buy them.
The CPUSA provided more than professional contacts. It provided the only institutional support in its publications. Writers need to be published. Here is a link to “The New Red Negro” cited by Cliff Kincaid (hopefully it works):
http://books.google.com/books?id=kt5LMD-OnxoC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22the+new+red+negro%22+communist+davis&source=web&ots=B-HaNJA9HW&sig=ZiOltjxuI1QwdjCAvvEC0f4NnGQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result
“Some substantial commonality of viewpoints” is not the same as accepting core values. For example, do you believe that everyone who joins a church accepts the church’s core values? The Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests belie that theory. If you disagree, please advise regarding the rational basis for your disagreement.
Even if they accpted them when joining an organization, many later reject those values. For example: corrupt cops and Mikhail Gorbachev. If you disagree, please advise regarding the rational basis for your disagreement.
If you cannot debate the issues, then I understand you may resort to ad hominem personal attacks. It goes with the territory.
Kaleokualoha, bringing up the Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests makes no sense as an analogy. Are you saying that your father as a sort of casual Communist was in the position of the innocent parishioners let down by pedophile priests? Or that Pedophilia in any way represents a core value of the Catholic Church? That would be news to everyone. If you believe that pedophilia is a core Catholic value, this would would strike me as a pure expression of anti-Catholic bigotry.
And as for later recanting false beliefs or association with wicked people, it is a big deal when it happens, and people who do recant deserve credit for distancing themselves from their naive mistakes. I haven’t heard that your father ever did that, but if he did, you have a unique opportunity to give testimony to his self-criticism about having ever been associated with the CPUSA in any way. So let’s hear it.
What do you think the issue is?
Pingback:SoulWow Clean, Cobb & other things | The Anchoress
Kaleokualoha: Please list my so-called “prevarications.”
Here is one statement from Kinkaid.
That statement is accurate. Your denying its accuracy is a prevarication. Point one: “raving Stalinist” is over the top. Point two: the CPUSA followed the party line laid down from Moscow, i.e. the Stalinist line. Accurate. Like I said, prevarication on your part.
This I consider prevarication on your part.
Yes, just like joining the Chamber of Commerce. I find it absurd your claim that someone would join the CPUSA without any reference to adherence to its beliefs, for fellowship or advancement. Career opportunities in the CPUSA? You have to be kidding me! If so, your rather was a most cynical person. Perhaps he was. But of the explanations I have read for those who joined the CPUSA, they nearly all said that they had joined for “idealism.” Your father would be the first who would not have included “idealism” or some sort of adherence to communism for joining the CPUSA.
Also from the above article.
It is possible that this is not accurate. You pointed out that your father was involved from the 1930s with the Communists, if not a formal member. It brought forth a memory from my past. I was a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War. After I had obtained my 1-O classification, a neighbor handed me a copy of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a deeply anti-war novel. I later found out that Trumbo had written it, like The Remarkable Andrew, as a reflection of his Commie views that the US should not get involved in WW2 at a time that the Hitler-Stalin pact was in place.
After Hitler invaded the USSR, Trumbo changed his mind on the war, and turned into the FBI letters sent to him that objected to our fighting in WW2. Considering the somewhat parallel paths of your father and Trumbo with regards to the CPUSA, I consider it entirely plausible that your father changed his mind on WW2 after June 22, 1941, just as Trumbo did. After all, Trumbo apparently didn’t join the party until 1943, well after his Johnny Got His Gun, which is also similar to what you state for your father’s joining.
Any comments about this quote from Kinkaid?
Distinction without a difference. Only Marxists parse words to such fine degrees, and that to hide their true beliefs and intentions.
So are you merely pointing out that in the abstract such people exist, or you saying that your father specifically was one such person, and that he didnot in fact adhere to communist philosophy? That he was simply lying to the comrades to use them for what he could get from them? Or was he lying when he said he did not adhere to their values?
This is turning into a graduate seminar course in mendacity and prevarication.
mark is in denial.
I WROTE “For example, do you believe that everyone who joins a church accepts the church’s core values? The Spanish Inquisition and pedophile priests belie that theory.”
OBLIO WROTE ” Are you saying that your father as a sort of casual Communist was in the position of the innocent parishioners let down by pedophile priests? Or that Pedophilia in any way represents a core value of the Catholic Church? That would be news to everyone. If you believe that pedophilia is a core Catholic value, this would would strike me as a pure expression of anti-Catholic bigotry.”
RESPONSE: Sorry, I thought I was quite clear. The issue is people being members of an organization WITHOUT accepting the organization’s core values. Pedophilic priests and torturing inquisitors were members of the Church even though they did NOT accept the Church’s core values. Davis was a member of the CPUSA without accepting the CPUSA’s core values. They remained in the organiation even though they did NOT accept the organization’s core values.
Bottom line: dear old Dad was either a flaming communist, or as you assert, a manipulative hypocrite.
You should hang out with the Meeropols. They too refused to accept the truth about their parents.
On its face, the evidence makes out a convincing case that your father was a straight-up, full-on, no-foolin’ communist. Until and unless someone can provide proof (e.g., that he had joined the CPUSA at the request of the FBI) that he wasn’t. The abstract possibility that he might possibly have joined with mental reservations to take advantage of their bingo night and their dental benefits isn’t good enough. It ain’t that kind of party.
“mark is in denial.”
Neo,
You should stop your notes on this guy. Close the notes and chart on him with the above clinical diagnosis. Recommend that he get in touch with the Meeropols for support. There is nothing you can do about this guy. Occam’s Beard pretty much said it all.
There is a certain degree of honor defending one’s parent like this, but a truly intellectually mature man would find that there are higher duties in this world.
I love both my parents and they are in many ways very good people. But in therapy I had to face some uncomfortable facts about them and live in the light of the truth. Just as I learned to face the truth about myself as well.
Mark is not responsible for his father’s decisions in life. He should not have to apologize for them, or defend them. I mean, we all have to separate from our parents at some point in our maturing process.
I’ve already obliquely made mention of the fact that Mark’s father probably had a very, very hard childhood. People do not become like what he became without there having been substantial damage done when one was most dependent and vulnerable. But emotional damage notwithstanding, all of us are still responsible for our actions. We make choices with our lives and they are on us.
RE: GRINGO’S CLAIMS OF PREVARICATION
Alleged Prevarication #1. GRINGO WROTE:
As an honorable man, Cliff Kincaid must also be unaware that his portrayal of a raving Stalinist could not be further from the truth. Davis deeply loved the United States…
Here is one statement from Kinkaid.
…Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) when it faithfully echoed the Stalinist line….
That statement is accurate. Your denying its accuracy is a prevarication. Point one: “raving Stalinist” is over the top. Point two: the CPUSA followed the party line laid down from Moscow, i.e. the Stalinist line. Accurate. Like I said, prevarication on your part.
RESPONSE: You are wrong. Nowhere did I deny the accuracy of THAT statement. I denied Kincaid’s misrepresentation of my father as any kind of Stalinist. He explicitly criticized Stalin in his writing.
1. As The New Red Negro makes clear, there was no monolithic Stalinist doctrine within the CPUSA: “This is not to say that the impact of the Communist Left on African-American writers in the 1930’s and 1940’s flowed from absolute unity of ideology and practical application of that ideology. As mentioned before, the CPUSA itself, despite the claims of both the party leadership and its most ardent detractors, contained various, often conflicting tendencies. This conflicts appeared within top leadership, where Earl Browder and William Z. Foster and their supporters were frequently at odds. They also surfaced in the regional leadership of important districts that were occasionally, and in the case of southern California frequently, in opposition to the national leadership. Finally, at the rank-and-file level, when leadership debates broke out into the open (as they did in 1929, 1956-1946, and 1956), the were replayed in almost every CPUSA unit, often serving as the vehicle for the expression of a wide range of “unorthodox” political beliefs (ranging from social democratic to anarcho-syndicalist.”
2. Kincaid claims Davis was a “Stalinist,” because “He stayed with the Communist Party even after the Hitler-Stalin pact. That’s why I refer to him as `a Stalinist agent’.” Davis could not have “stayed with” the party after the pact when he was not even a member of the party before WWII.
3. Kincaid’s most egregious lie was “His values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin,” hence the “raving Stalinist” statement.
4. To assume that all organizational members follow their organization’s official line is fallacious reasoning. It makes no more sense than believing all Catholics are against birth control and abortion because of official Church doctrine.
CONCLUSION: I did not deny the accuracy of the referenced statement. Therefore, this claim of “prevarication” is without merit.
Alleged Prevarication #2. GRINGO WROTE: This I consider prevarication on your part.
He joined the CPUSA because of the professional and social opportunities it presented.
Yes, just like joining the Chamber of Commerce. I find it absurd your claim that someone would join the CPUSA without any reference to adherence to its beliefs, for fellowship or advancement. Career opportunities in the CPUSA? You have to be kidding me!
RESPONSE: Once again I refer you to “The New Red Negro,” which clearly states that ONLY the CPUSA provided institutional support. Writers need publishers. “The New Red Negro” cites the applicable CPUSA-funded publications that were used by Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Frank Marshall Davis. The CPUSA also provided social networks for African-American intellectuals.
CONCLUSION: This claim of prevarication is also without merit.
GRINGO WROTE: And AP doesn’t note the evidence that Davis and his comrades tried to take over the NAACP in order to transform its Honolulu branch into a front for the Stalinist line.
RESPONSE: Thanks for bringing that up. One of my earliest comments here (5:27 AM) specifically addressed Kincaid’s fabrications on that issue:
[QUOTE]
If that is too much reading, then please consider just one issue in AIM’s disinformation campaign: the 1949 Honolulu NAACP issue where AIM posts flagrantly misrepresented the Congressional testimony of NAACP rookie Edward Berman. Cliff Kincaid had the audacity (LOVE that word!) to post a verbatim transcript of the testimony (http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/hawaii-obama.pdf), and then published four different misrepresentations of that same testimony!
His misrepresentation ranged from claiming that the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins directly criticized my father, to claiming that my father tried to take over the NAACP itself! For a detailed analysis of these falsehoods, please see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gG5kN7
[END QUOTE]
Please read Berman’s actual testimony, and AIM’s falsehoods regarding that testimony. Links are provided to all four AIM posts, with detailed analyses of their misrepresentation. If you believe that AIM’s representation of Berman’s testimony was accurate, please advise.
OCCAM’S BEAR WROTE: “The abstract possibility that he might possibly have joined with mental reservations to take advantage of their bingo night and their dental benefits isn’t good enough. It ain’t that kind of party.”
RESPONSE: Once again, the historical record is clear. The CPUSA provided African-American writers with their only institutional support. Why do you continue to ignore this evidence?
“When evidence is intentionally excluded to bias the result, it is sometimes termed the fallacy of exclusion and is a form of selection bias.”
– Wikipedia
This form of selection bias is known as the “Nifong Syndrome,” in recognition of the Duke Lacrosse Team prosecutor who intentionally ignored exculpatory evidence. It is intellectual dishonesty.
No dice, Kaleokualoha. On the question of your faulty analogy, you weren’t responsive. Torturing inquisitors and pedophiles could agree with the core teachings of the Catholic Church, and they would say that they did. Beyond that, you are making the analogy that Frank Davis was to the CPUSA as pedophile priests are the the Catholic Church. This is not the argument you want to make!
The question you really sidestepped was, “Did Frank Davis ever recant?”
You say in a subsequent post that your father was not a Stalinist, because he criticized Stalin. OK, tell us: For what did he criticize Stalin? When did he criticize Stalin? How did he criticize Stalin? And under what circumstances did he criticize Stalin? Absent explanatory detail, your assertions on this point cannot be convincing.
I can certainly believe that joining the CPUSA looked like good business for a left-leaning, African-American newspaperman and writer in the 30’s and 40’s. Throw in patronage from people like Wright and Robeson, and it seemed to work for your father, especially if it provided entree to a part of society he could have never earned otherwise.
I can also believe that some African-Americans believed that the civil rights struggle was The Biggest Thing Ever, and that if you were supporting the struggle, everything else could be forgiven, overlooked, or denied. Your father could have fallen into this category, as indeed many other people do to this day.
You are avoiding the question about what your father really believed. Talking about smears is just a distraction. You could try to make the affirmative case.
But you don’t.
Kaleokualoha, when it comes to selection bias, you aren’t immune. There is a certain irony in your attempt to link critics of Frank Davis with Nifong. Duke’s Gang of 88 that supported Nifong would be your father’s biggest defenders.
No doubt there are some modern Frank Davises among the Gang of 88. For the Gang of 88, symbolic race politics trumped every consideration of justice. That is a lot like being an African-American CPUSA member in the 30’s and 40’s.
Did you criticize Nifong in public before he was discredited? Have you done it since?
Oblio,
I just wanted to make a correction in your above statement. Most of us here are not defining Mr. Davis as a Stalinist. We know he most certainly was a Communist, but there were Communists who were not Stalinists.
I certainly did not call him a Stalinist. Neo didn’t call him a Stalinist. I don’t think you did either.
However, we both detect that an attempt is being made at sophistry. I think you’ve detected it. So have I. He is trying to insert distinctions and language so as to find a way to wiggle out of the original assertion about Frank Marshall Davis.
I’ve tried to give him an out in this entire discussion by putting out there the very adult notion that we are not responsible for our parents’ decisions, affiliations, actions, and attitudes. We do not have to defend them, if confronted with the truth.
We aren’t slandering Frank Marshall Davis here. The subject is really Barack Obama’s being influenced by Marxists in his family and by someone brought in from outside the family. It explains a lot about why Barack Obama became who he is. One can understand better why, given the access he had to some of America’s best schools, why he decided to pass up a lucrative career doing other things, going into community organizing Alinsky style and politics.
One of the things that most turned me off to the Leftists I rubbed elbows with in the late Seventies and on into the Eighties was their comfort with deceitfulness. And they encouraged me to do it too. I refused. Not all of them were liars, but most of them were. So, what does that say about the Left in the United States?
I say it means we cannot ever trust these people with political power and influence.
Fred, I didn’t call Frank Davis a Stalinist, either. I was reacting to this statement:
I screwed that up.
I was responding to the statement @ 10:44:
“I denied Kincaid’s misrepresentation of my father as any kind of Stalinist. He explicitly criticized Stalin in his writing.”
I am a lot more interested in the rhetorical evasions and logical inversions taking place. Whether Davis was at any time either a committed or practical Stalinist like Robeson is not a particularly important question.
OBLIO: I apologize for still making my analogies unclear. Let me break it down symbolically:
Person X joins organization Y without accepting core values Z. This pattern holds true whether:
X1 is Davis, Y1 is CPUSA, and Z1 is collectivism
X2 is errant priest, Y2 is Catholic Church, and Z2 is Catholic Church doctrine
X3 is teenager, Y3 is YMCA, and Z3 is YMCA principles
X4 is police recruit, Y4 is police department, and Z4 is commitment to “serve and protect”
NOTES:
1. In cases one through four, the relationships between X, Y and Z are the same. I am not comparing each person with the others, each organization with the others, or the core values the others. I am only comparing the relationship patterns among each person, his organization, and his organizational values.
2. You can substitute any other X/Y/Z set that maintains the same pattern. For example, other organizations with members who may join for reasons OTHER than organizational core values include civic associations, martial arts schools, the Foreign Legion, etc. The list is endless. Please advise if this is still unclear.
OBLIO WROTE “Torturing inquisitors and pedophiles could agree with the core teachings of the Catholic Church, and they would say that they did.”
RESPONSE: The Catholic Church has explicitly rejected that behavior. Such abuse absolutely conflicts with core values.
OBLIO WROTE: “The question you really sidestepped was, “Did Frank Davis ever recant?”
RESPONSE: That’s a loaded question, like “have you stopped beating your wife,” because it presupposes that he accepted something. He never accepted collectivism so he could not “recant” it. He never apologized for joining the CPUSA, however. He said he would make an alliance with the devil himself if it would help stop Jim Crow.
OBLIO WROTE: “You say in a subsequent post that your father was not a Stalinist, because he criticized Stalin. OK, tell us: For what did he criticize Stalin? When did he criticize Stalin? How did he criticize Stalin? And under what circumstances did he criticize Stalin? Absent explanatory detail, your assertions on this point cannot be convincing.”
RESPONSE: You cannot prove that any attitude does not exist; you can only provide contrary evidence and refute false evidence. I believe I have refuted Kincaid’s false evidence as to the reason HE called my father a “Stalinist.” “The New Red Negro” (page 48), states “Frank Marshall Davis wrote poetry attacking Stalin by name, which appeared in his collections “I Am The American Negro” (1937) and 47th Street Poems (1948).
OBLIO WROTE: “You are avoiding the question about what your father really believed. Talking about smears is just a distraction.”
RESPONSE: My purpose is NOT to promote his beliefs, although his core value was simple: civil rights. My purpose is to refute the falsehoods fabricated to denigrate his relationship with Barack Obama.
OBLIO WROTE: Did you criticize Nifong in public before he was discredited? Have you done it since?
RESPONSE: If “in public” means citing the Nifong Syndrome in support of other issues, the answer is “yes.” If “in public” means directly criticizing him in the blogosphere, the answer is “no.” My very first entry into the blogosphere was in response to Cliff Kincaid’s disinformation campaign last year, while Nifong was removed in 2006. I was a blogosphere virgin until my family was directly attacked in 2008.
BTW: Has anyone looked at the evidence of AIM’s misrepresentation of the 1949 Honolulu NAACP situation? Has AIM met the standards of journalistic ethics in its reporting? Has AIM been truthful in YOUR opinion.
OBLIO:
Since you asked about what my father “really believed,” here is a brief outline. When asked to comment on any parallels between Dr. King and Davis, University of Kansas Professor Edgar Tidwell, commonly acknowledged as an expert on the life and writing of Davis, wrote:
“Frank and King are aligned along a historical continuum, in a determined effort to destroy the yoke of racism. People often make the mistake of seeing Dr. King’s civil rights work as the only effort made to effect social change in this country. But Frank represents only one of many such efforts, each conducted in different venues. A. Phillip Randolph’s famous threatened March on Washington in 1941 (which produced the FEPC), the “Double V” campaign, the work of the NAACP, and much more paved the way for Dr. King. Add to these the various labor initiatives and you have further evidence of predecessors to Dr. King.”
According to Professor Tidwell, THESE were the “radical” goals of Frank Marshall Davis:
(1) integration of armed forces
(2) integration of AFL and CIO
(3) fair wages and other benefits for workers
(4) general dismantling of all laws supporting racial segregation
(5) end to laws supporting anti-Semitism
(6) end to atomic warfare
(7) rights for soldiers in combat zones to vote in national elections
(8) support for Fair Employment Practices Act
(9) support for a broad United Nations (not just US and Great Britain
forming a world power union)
(10) end to restrictive covenants in real estate
Professor Tidwell also commented:
“I’m hardly interested in proving my research to Kincaid or any of those whose work is a travesty to scholarship. But to address your question thoroughly requires more space and time than I have at the moment. There are obvious similarities, if you depend on Frank’s comments in Livin’ the Blues. Frank commented that the Black press in the South “split much of the kindling which was ignited a quarter of century later by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and turned into a roaring fire that burned down legal segregation in Dixie” (p. 190). Two different institutions—the Press and the Black church—shared the need to tear down the walls of legal segregation.
I always found it interesting that Frank essentially saw himself as a precursor to King. (Go to his comments about “black defeatists” on p. 194 too.) As much as this may sound like Frank’s ego talking, I feel the comparison is much deeper. It’s not so much of what Frank claims to have done than it is an endorsement of the many who had the courage to accept their responsibility to “speak truth to power.”
Kaleokualoha, I will be brief.
If you are arguing that the ideology of the CPUSA was only collectivism, you are being simplistic, perhaps unintentionally. I understood the general argument of the analogy the first time, irrelevant though it was; the symbolic elaboration was both faulty and a waste of space.
You were the one who brought up the possibility that a person may later reject the values of an organization of which he had been a member (4/4 5.45 pm). A strong criticism of Stalinism would be evidence for your case, that Frank Davis was attracted to Communism for mainly circumstantial (best way to get published) and tactical (best way to to fight Jim Crow) reasons. I wasn’t asking you to prove a negative about attitudes; I was challenging you to provide facts about actions. You haven’t come close to doing so. You are leaving it to everyone else to go back and read poetry from the 30’s and 40’s and try to puzzle out what it means in context. You could have said “My father told me…” and that would be direct testimony from someone in a position to know. You do it elsewhere.
“He said he would make an alliance with the devil himself if it would help stop Jim Crow.”
This a pretty fair summary of what he did. Your list of his goals is interesting. On the surface and in the abstract, some of them are laudable. But to me, they read like a series of party platform positions at a given point in time. When they were articulated and in what context will say a lot about what the list really means. I suppose I will have to head off to Tidwell to see whether he can shed any light, and if he is trying to.
Finding the truth in cases like these is made difficult by the mountain of lies the Marxist Left has told over the past 150 years. I have written elsewhere on this site that anti-Marxists have also produced their own counter-lies. The falsity of either side does not prove the veracity of the other side. I might poke around into doings within the Honolulu NAACP in 1949. There was clearly more Communist activity going on in Hawaii through the 40’s and 50’s that I would ever have guessed.
OBLIO WROTE; “I was challenging you to provide facts about actions. You haven’t come close to doing so. You are leaving it to everyone else to go back and read poetry from the 30’s and 40’s and try to puzzle out what it means in context. You could have said “My father told me…” and that would be direct testimony from someone in a position to know. You do it elsewhere.”
RESPONSE: Which facts about which actions? That he criticized Stalin in writing or something else? Both of the primary advocates in the debate (AIM and the Davis family) consider “The New Red Negro” and Professor Tidwell to be credible and accurate sources. If you require more detail on topics they address, then the research onus is on you.
Once again: My purpose is not to provide ancillary research on my father’s beliefs. It is to refute the lies spread about him.
OBLIO WROTE: “When they were articulated and in what context will say a lot about what the list really means. I suppose I will have to head off to Tidwell to see whether he can shed any light, and if he is trying to.
RESPONSE: Professor Tidwell’s book, “The Writings of Frank Marshall Davis,” contains a detailed introduction that may answer some of your questions. The writings contained therein, and my father’s poetry, may answer your other questions. All of this, however, is beyond the scope of my involvement in the blogosphere.
Good luck!
Given what Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson had said, the prevarication charge stands.
Your father was a Commie. Stalin was a Commie. Mao was a Commie. Lenin was a Commie.
That is whom he chose to associate himself with. You didn’t make the choice. He did.
Until you provide documentation regarding your father’s stance on WW2 both before and after June 22 1941, I will consider his stance to be consistent with that of Dalton Trumbo, who followed the Stalinist line on fighting/not fighting in WW2 even when not a member of the CPUSA.
You have provided no documentation whatsoever to indicate that in the 1940s your father ever deviated from the party line. Given the track record of party members following the party line, I find it rather telling that you have been unable to provide any such documentation.
Gringo: What SPECIFIC prevarication charge “stands”? Please quote the EXACT line of mine that is false.
You have provided no proof of prevarication. As a matter of fact, you have provided no proof that he even joined the CPUSA, have you?
The only evidence of his membership is from the same Edgar Tidwell who states there is no evidence that he was a Stalinist. Do you consider Tidwell to be a credible source or not?
Gringo: What SPECIFIC prevarication charge “stands”? Please quote the EXACT line of mine that is false.
If you read the quote from “The New Red Negro,” you will find that only CPUSA publications provided institutional support for African-American writers.
So how come mainstream publishing houses published the following:
Langston Hughes:
The Weary Blues. Knopf, 1926
Fine Clothes to the Jew. Knopf, 1927
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. Knopf, 1932
Shakespeare in Harlem. Knopf, 1942
Fields of Wonder. Knopf,1947
The Ways of White Folks. Knopf, 1934
The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940
Richard Wright :
Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper, 1938)
Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940)
How “Bigger” Was Born; Notes of a Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940)
12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York: Viking, 1941)
Black Boy (New York: Harper, 1945)
Like I said, prevarication.
Gringo:
My statement referenced a claim in “The New Red Negro.” (page 48, paragraph 2, line 2):
“. . . only the Communist Left had any significant institutional impact on African-American writing during the 1930s and 1940s.”
Although you may challenge the accuracy of the author’s statement, where is MY prevarication? Is it changing “Communist left” to “CPUSA”? Is it changing “significant institutional impact” to “institutional support”? Or does my statement reasonably paraphrase the applicable assertion of the book, as I posted (“If you read . . . you will find . . .)?
If my alleged “prevarication” consists of inaccurately paraphrasing a statement from “The New Red Negro,” then I most humbly beg your forgiveness. In that case, I am guilty of charged. You will also probably find other insignificant deviations from absolute accuracy in my posts.
If, on the other hand, my alleged “prevarication” is actually the author’s misdeed, then you are out of line. I did not assert the veracity of the author’s statement, only that “you will find” such a statement in “The New Red Negro.”
Which is it?
Such pettifogging is not worthy of the dignity of a reply.
Thus, the absurdity of your “prevarication” charge is revealed. If you cannot substantiate your accusations in open debate, then you should not make them.
This is the corollary of AIM’s misrepresentation of Berman’s Congressional testimony. AIM cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of Berman’s testimony, but AIM is fully responsible for flagrantly misrepresenting that testimony.
If you misrepresent a source, you are responsible. Journalistic ethics impose more stringent standards when professionals use questionable sources, but such was not the case with “The New Red Negro.”
AIM’s flagrant misrepresentation of their source was a “prevarication.” My slight misrepresentation of my source can hardly be considered a “prevarication” by any objective evaluation. Gringo’s accusation, and subsequent stonewalling, reveals his lack of objectivity.
The CPUSA provided more than professional contacts. It provided the only institutional support in its publications.
You made this statement. it is a flat out prevarication, as the above listing of Langston Hughes’s and Richard Wright’s publications shows.
Just as you made the below statements
If you refer to it twice, you apparently believe it is the truth- which it is not. Yes, prevaricattion.
Yes, I believed it was the truth. If I believe my source, how have I “prevaricated”? “
Ah! I understand now. Every inaccuracy, intentional or not, is a “prevarication” in your world. Is that correct?
Whether or not he was a Stalinist is not the issue here. One can be a Communist without being a Stalinist. I personally knew Communists and none of whom were Stalinists.
This is a straw man being used as misdirection for polemical purposes.
Even if Mr. Davis was a friend of Paul Robeson and if Robeson were a Stalinist, it does not make Mr. Davis a Stalinist.
Fred, I think I was pretty clear on the Stalinism point and Gringo isn’t arguing it, either. I see Gringo asking whether Davis ever deviated from the Party Line. Reasonable question. Gringo offers a proof by counter-example that even Communist African-American writers like Wright could get published by mainstream publishers.
What Kaleokualoha is going on about is beyond me. Kaleokualoha has a couple of sources and one story. He has a bee in his bonnet about AIM. Other than that, he takes a position of philosophical skepticism: he knows nothing and can know nothing. We aren’t getting close to clarity at this point, and at the rate we are going, we never will.
Yes, I believed it was the truth. If I believe my source, how have I “prevaricated”?
If someone repeatedly states what is not so (at least three times in the above case), such as “The sun revolves around the earth,” do we consider that person a fool, or a liar? Up to you.
For what it is worth, Google Book Search on Fight for Freedom and Other Writings on Civil Rights gives a timeline for Langston Hughes, from which we can discern some “institutional support.” An excerpt follows. ( As Hughes spent a year in the USSR, he obviously got some CP-type support. My point is that he got a fair amount of non-CP type support. I left it out because this had to be typed, not copied/pasted. )
Which shows that while Langston Hughes may have received “institutional support” from the CPUSA or CPUSSR (his year there), his genius was recognized enough that he obtained funding from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps some of these were CP fronts, but I wager that most were not.
Correction:
1933 Supported by a patrol, Noel Sullivan of San Francisco, Hughes spends a year in Carmel writing short stories.
1933 Supported by a PATRON, Noel Sullivan of San Francisco, Hughes spends a year in Carmel writing short stories.
Oblio,
I was criticizing Kaleokualoha for constantly returning to that description. I think he uses it because he finds it easy to shoot down, and uses it in a way that implies we called Davis a Stalinist. Ergo, in his mind, we are full of shit.
I frequently use the terms Communist and Marxist interchangeably. But I don’t use terms like Stalinist and Trotskyist because they imply very specific loyalties to specific people and their versions of Communist ideology. It seems pointless to me. Communism is Communism. It is what it is. The logic of it lends itself to cults of personality, oligarchies, and apparatchiks. It lends itself to ruthless mind control and impoverishment of people.
This is my conspiracy theory on the matter. Davis wrote a bit about abusing a 13 year old girl whose parents he was friends with. There is also a tidbit if I recall of Ann Dunham being taken out of school and moved to another school when she was 14. There is also the bit that Obama was seven years old when he started kindegarten. Then of course Obama refusing to release his birth certificate.
So the question is, did Dunaham give birth to Obama when she was 14, after being molested by Davis and hid the child while she finished highschool? Then she found a foreign black student to marry her and so they could pretend the child was legitimate. That would mean though that Obama’s age is not accurate, and that he is two or three years older than we know. Perhaps Obama did not know himself until he was older. Without a birth certificate, it is possible.
The original post stated “How much Davis’s Communist ideology influenced Obama is unknown, and Obama purposely isn’t telling.” In response on April 3 at 9:28, I posted Tidwell’s single-paragraph response to disinformation regarding Davis’s communist influence, which is the first appearance of “Stalinist” in these comments.
I subsequently explained at 10:48 that AIM accused him of being a Stalinist. I did not say that posters on this blog accused him of being a Stalinist, although Occam’s Beard accused ME of being a communist!
OK, Fred.
Hey Kaleokualoha,
Long time no see… still making a career out of name cleaning? revisionist history? and finding new locations where your not known?
still the same formuleic responses following the same script in which you just float aroud asserting the same stuff… davis was not a communist, he isnt a pedophile, etc.. (shall i cut and paste in your spligint hairs game from lots of other places?)
you can find our freind here at huffington, newsbusters, slate, and hundreds of places…
if you write about davis, and you do not tow the davis party line and stalinist (revisioned) history, they come out of the woodwork… (and those that dont know them will get sucked in).
here is prior argument..
http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2008/10/those_who_haven.html
What empirical evidence do you have that Frank Marshall Davis was Stalinist? Posted by: Kaleokualoha at October 13, 2008 11:43 PM
Oh Lord. This nut again. Where’s Artfldgr for another round of trounce-ass? This should be fun. Again.
Artfldgr will bring out very useful and well-documented information, and Kaleokualoha will produce info from kook conspiracy sites. Then Kaleokualoha will wait a day til the thread is off the front page and insert his last word, thus “winning” the argument. Again.
Fun times, gents. Fun times.
Posted by: Thulsa Doom at October 14, 2008 6:12 AM
interesting thing about the net and the way back machine… one can follow along and see things as they happen over and over again… what was possible in the past since there was no record, is now different as one can go back and read the prior arguments.
read along or search out his work…
same old same old…
so rather than my taking his points on again, i will just say go around the net you will find a one man show that runs all over…
read Richard Wright’s Too smart to be a communist… if you can find it.. 🙂
Im sorry i didnt see he was here before the long same old same old arguments..
its the same old same old tripe in which he soft peddels the truth to exhonerate davis, but more importantly, establish a revisioned history to the situation.
(no one brought stalinist up this time, its part of K’s methods and since his stuff is often cut and pasted it will drag other things in too).
others have pointed out that he is probably not davis kid… but it would give him an air of believability. and everyone gives him the benifit of the doubt.
it will get interesting in a few years since the complete archives of CPUSA texts are now being pored over for details.
there is the second book of mitrokhins coming out as well (or is it out, i dont know). this one deasls with more of the organizations and the people involved.
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP -Comrade Davis,” wrote Wilkins, “was supported by others who recently ‘sneaked’ into the organization with the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.” Wilkins knew well that this was a standard “tactic” by the communists; it was known by everyone involved in the NAACP at the time. Wilkins, like many civil-rights leaders of his time, refused to be duped by Davis and his comrades.
and
The red diaper term refers to children of Americans who were either members of the Communist Party (CPUSA) or were “fellow travelers,” or espoused the parallel strains of hard Marxism that emerged in the last century here. The generations that actually joined the party tended to be most active in the 1930s and 1940s. Their politically precocious children were most active in the “New Left” of the 1960s and later. These descendants provided hard-left ideological backbone to their idealistic, peace-and-love, hippy peers.
Although this new generation was much less likely to join the CPUSA, as the public image of the Party fell with the passing decades, the seeds of the “radicals” and “progressives” were already firmly planted. Many moved to teaching, the media, and philanthropic organizations — to the so-called “New Class.” Others, as a kind of inherited priesthood, followed leftist elective politics camouflaged under the label of the traditional, anti-Communist Democratic Party.
Cliff Kincaid points us to an example of a modern-day red diaper baby here. That is Chesa Boudin, son of Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, both of whom went to prison for their role in a 1981 robbery and assault in Nyack, New York. The crime took the lives of two police officers and a security guard. Chesa Boudin, now in his 20s, was a Rhodes Scholar and is author of Heading North, Looking South: Reflections on a Year in Venezuela here. He is also the grandson of “secret Community Party strategist Leonard Boudin,” who, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune here, “masqueraded as a civil rights lawyer during the years the Weathermen killed, robbed and bombed but was really a contact man for such hostile foreign powers as the Soviet Union and Cuba.”
Just a toddler when his parents began serving time, Chesa Boudin was raised by fellow Weather Underground members and unrepentant terrorist bombers William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Ayers and Dohrn, of course, are Barack Obama’s Hyde Park neighbors and were fellow movers-and-shakers within the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, formerly a leftist foundation with radicalizing solutions to improving the Chicago public schools.
blueridgeforum.com/?p=196
and Davis and richard Wright had a big falling out… because richard wright became an anticommunist (as did langston huges near the end of his life)
and davis membership in the CPUSA during this most active period (see tidwells work).
davis testified before SISS and took the fifth on his membership… (which was already confirmed elswhere). as did his later infiltration of the NAACP and his help on trying to get it to take a stalinist line.
though as to the question here whether davis injected his views to obama, well thats clear in other areas of the book.. specifically the last time obama saw davis.
Davis called college “an advanced degree in compromise” and warned obama to to forget his people, and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the american way and all that s**T”
Although Frank Marshall Davis was not included among the Hawaii 7, the 1953 and 1954 Reports of the Commission on Subversive Activities of the Territory of Hawaii named Davis and his wife as members of the active groups that the party formed in Hawaii when it went underground in 1950. Davis invoked the Fifth Amendment when called before a December 1956 Honolulu U. S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on the “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States.”
A gray-haired Frank Marshall Davis may have touched the sensibilities of a young bi-racial Obama by flaunting a multicolored dashiki, but underneath Davis’ colors were pure red. The FBI file on Davis here, covering the years 1944-1963, is 601 pages long.
The Dunhams attended the East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue, nicknamed the “the little red church on the hill” for its left leaning.
Obama’s father left Hawaii when his son was two. A second divorce from another third-world man (Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian ) and a baby daughter later, Ann reinvented herself as a Ph.D. anthropologist working as a Ford Foundation program officer in Indonesia. There, as Time noted in a biographical sketch here, “her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers.”
=======================
“Guilt by Participation”
After all this sifting and speculation, it is fair to ask: so what if Barack Obama may be a red diaper baby? So what if some of his allies and supporters are radicals and reds?
Well, here is why it does matter.
Red diaper babies tend to grow up with a fire in the belly against American social “injustices” as perceived through the radical lens that they saw so passionately espoused as children in the family circle.
David Horowitz, now a prominent conservative, is a former red diaper baby and 1960s radical activist, who completely turned his politics around in the late 1970s. Horowitz wrote in his autobiography, Radical Son:
“I understood early that my parents’ political religion was really the center of their moral life. This meant–without they necessarily intending it–that the condition of their parental love was that I embrace their political faith.”
Or, as Josh Kornbluth jocularly puts it here in his one-man show, Red Diaper Baby, his father:
“…believed there was going to be a violent Communist revolution in this country and I was going to lead it. [Pause.] Just so you understand the pressure.”
Red diaper babies lack the usual sense of what is normal, reassuring, and what should be preserved. Their focus is on what they consider alarming, despicable, and should be eradicated–targeting many of the same things, however, that most Americans revere. Their political center of gravity is far to the left.
No matter the rhetoric they adopt to dress up their aspirations, their values are not our values and their goals are not our goals.
To question Obama’s many leftist associations is more than a “birds-of-a-feather-flock-together” assertion of guilt by association.
Rather, as NRO’s Stanley Kurtz writes in the New York Times here, it is “guilt by participation.”
There is a complication to any inquiry like this. To most Americans, the story of the Left in the U.S. is simply arcane. And it has been made more obscure by Leftist efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to erase that history. Insofar as the Left is influential in setting intellectual norms in this country today, inquiries into the activities of American communists are made to seem bad form, shabby, unsporting. Even pointing to the role of CPUSA pressure in American politics since the 1930s makes you fair game to be smeared as a knuckle-dragging anti-communist–as repellent as they painted Senator Joseph McCarthy. Regardless of hard evidence of Soviet activities in the U.S., such as the Venona intercepts here, declassified in 1995, frank public discussion of the CPUSA remains largely taboo in “elite” circles.
======================
If senator Obama becomes president, particularly if the current Congressional majority increases, we are likely to see some sharp changes in America’s political rules and some White House decisions that might previously have seemed unthinkable. A presidential candidate who has kept company with the profoundly disaffected and occasionally violent may well be expected to keep such company in the White House.
One problem that K#$%/HijoDeDavis may have had in this forum is that Neo and a fair number of the posters here are not corn-fed Cons who have never been exposed to anyone further left than the local Rotary Club speaker. Many of us have had direct exposure to the far left- in fact many of us once were affiliated with it. We have already been exposed to that BS. Like the Who said, Won’t Get Fooled Again.
Sorry, Artfldgr, but this statement is the totally fabricated AIM misrepresentation of Berman’s Congressional testimony, written by Paul Kengor in his http://www.aim.org/guest-column/return-of-the-dupes-and-the-anti-anti-communists:
“Roy Wilkins of the NAACP -Comrade Davis,” wrote Wilkins, “was supported by others who recently ‘sneaked’ into the organization with the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.” Wilkins knew well that this was a standard “tactic” by the communists; it was known by everyone involved in the NAACP at the time. Wilkins, like many civil-rights leaders of his time, refused to be duped by Davis and his comrades.”
That is a complete lie. Berman’s testimony (link already provided) did NOT indicate that Wilkins criticized Davis. This is only one of four different misrepresentations of Berman’s testimony in AIM posts. I challenge you to disprove this analysis.
Further, I am not denying that my father was a communist. I conceded that point early in the debate. I directly challenge Cliff Kincaid’s misrepresentation of my father, as outlined in my blog, in various website that post such lies.
I notice that YOU brought up the “Stalinist” canard again, although Kincaid’s explanation is totally false (‘Stayed with the party . . .”), and you have not provided a shred of evidence to disprove ANY of the “specific misrepresentation,” mostly coming from Cliff Kincaid, that I documented in my blog. I challenge you to do so.
GRINGO: The Communist Left SUBSIDIZED literary journals. This was “institutional support.” Richard Wright and some others were commercially published AND wrote for subsidized publications. Therefore, this is a factual statement from “The New Red Negro”: “”ONLY the Communist left had any significant institutional impact on African-American writing during the 1930s and 1940s.”
Because information on commercial publications is available, it is unlikely that research such as “The New Red Negro” would misrepresent these publications. When facing apparently conflicting evidence, an honest evaluator should first consider explanations that are consistent with the evidence BEFORE accusing anyone of “prevarication.”
Give it up. We don’t care, and if I might speak for the group, you’re not convincing a soul.
Long-winded screeds about Tidwell and AIM (I for one have no idea who you’re talking about, nor do I care) and splitting hairs regarding whether Davis believed in the communist equivalent of the transubstantation are hopelessly unconvincing.
That’s the bottom line. We’re all agreed then. Whether he was a Stalinist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite, Pol Potite, Pelosiite, Sorosite, or whatever schismatic sect of communist is a small print historical footnote that doesn’t matter a whit except to other communists. Debating what kind of communist he was is like debating what breed a rabid dog belongs to; for most of us, knowing the dog is rabid is quite enough. Similarly, a communist is a communist. Period.
Beard: A basic issue in Neo-neocon’s original post is Davis’s ideological influence on Obama, as propagated throughout the blogosphere by “Accuracy In Media” (AIM), and debunked by Tidwell. YOU may not care, but it has been an issue for others. YOU may casually accuse people of being a communist without a shred of proof, but truth is more important to people of integrity.
Because Gringo was so quick to accuse me of prevarication, yet there seems to have been nary a peep regarding my documentation of AIM’s flagrant misrepresentation of the 1949 NAACP issue, this suggests a certain lack of objectivity. Methinks that any weakness in my analysis would have been virtually heralded with trumpets blaring.
Such “deafening silence” regarding proven misrepresentation against my father, combined with premature accusations of prevarication in support of my father, indicates the Nifong Syndrome is alive and well in this region of the blogosphere. Ad hominem attacks, such as the unsubstantiated claim that I am a “communist,” further reinforce this conclusion.
Since you are such harsh critics, once again I invite you to refute ANY of the “specific misrepresentation” painstakingly documented on my blog (http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/Kaleokualoha/gGxdvX). I have issued this invitation since last summer, to no avail.
But my hat goes off to Gringo for helping me better understand subsidized literary journals during that period. Thanks, Gringo!
BTW: I still haven’t heard back as to whether you consider ANY inaccuracy to be “prevarication,” or only deliberate misrepresentation. Does it only depend on whether you are sympathetic or hostile to the source? Wouldn’t such a fair-weather definition suggest a lack of integrity? Please advise. Thanks again!
A commie is a commie is a commie.
End of story.
I don’t know what the term is except for “troll,” but it is obvious that Kaleokualoha’s strategy is to clog up the discussion with endless repetitions and elaboration of the same points, so that others will abandon the discussion out of frustration and disgust.
Now that I think of it, I have seen him pull this same stunt on other sites, when Frank Marshall Davis has come up.
Artfldger vs. Kaleokualoha!
I’d pay to see it.
Artfldger vs
Kaleokualoha
I’d pay to see it
My strategy is to challenge posters to substantiate their falsehoods regarding my father, or disprove my documented “specific misrepresentation.” If they do neither yet continue to lie, then ignorance is no excuse.
Would you do any less when encountering lies regarding YOUR father?
Kaleokualoha, your “strategy” is pointless.
“Of course truth is stranger than fiction…after all, fiction is supposed to make sense.”
-Mark Twain
“Falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves.”
– Daniel Webster
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
– Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)
“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
– Bible, John 8:32
“NOTHING IS TRUE-EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED”
-Hassan I Sabbah
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
-Jack Nicholson to some Scientologist
“WHEN LEGEND BECOMES FACT-
PRINT THE LEGEND”
-Joh
“NOTHING IS TRUE-EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED”
-Hassan I Sabbah
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”
-Jack Nicholson to some Scientologist
“WHEN LEGEND BECOMES FACT-
PRINT THE LEGEND”
-John Ford
“HISTORY IS BUNK”
-HENRY FORD
“WHAT?”
-GERALD FORD
–
“The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
– H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
“Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)
“The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.”
– William O. Douglas
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil
triumphant.”
– Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)
Pingback:La juventudes desgraciadas de Mahoma, Hitler y Obama | La Yijad en Eurabia
Sorry to be indelicate, but if someone was violated as a child by a mentor, and they failed to deal with the violation, except in vauge poetry, are there any statistics on the chances of them also being confused sexually, and are there any statistics on the chances of them violating others the same way they were violated?
I have seen a lot of people who lead two lives, and I just wondered.
Thanks.
Because there is no evidence that Obama “was violated as a child by a mentor,” anyone speculating that this actually happened may be projecting their own libidinous psychological disorders onto others.
Pingback:Cemented Homophia [Dan Collins]
Pingback:Obama As The Joker ?? | Tejaswy
Pingback:The Two Malcontents » Is Obama a Narcissist?
Pingback:Meet Obama's early family! Creepy. - Christian Forums
Pingback:RSS agregator » Blog Archive » Meet Obama’s early family! Creepy.
The leftist blogorrheic above, demonstrates “The mental disease of liberalism/communism”, the term coined by Frank of Queens and John of Staten Island, and later crabbed by Michael Savage
Posters above logically state facts and the relentless communist blats more of the same old intellectualized nonsense for which they’re known – when they’re not hogtying young boys and shooting them in the back of the neck, as did che’s murderers in Cuba, an island gulag the above Davis-apologist doubtless considers to be paradise on earth.
It’s well understood that this davis was a communist agent who took his marching orders from the KGB. He was a well known pedophile and it became worse from there. Davis was palsy-walsy with grampy dunham because he sought like company – a fellow travelling commie completely devoid of boundaries.
This duo ‘did things’ together and clearly they involved a minor child left in gramps’ care.
Evil. Sick. Twisted. And utterly tediously predictable – the denial system of the communist eclipses that of the worst drunk imaginable.
Keep peddling your tripe, Mr. Commie. The more they talk these days, the more vehemently they protest, the more clearly American citizens at last see the communist menace that’s infested society all these decades.
Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasota Key, Florida
16 September, 2009
“He did things back in Chicago…”
– Det. Lt. Maxwell Hoover,
“Mulholland Falls”
c. 1997, The Zanuck Group
Pingback:Mournful Soul (2) - Page 60 - Christian Forums
Pingback:Judge postpones ‘birther’ hearing until Monday; Orly Taitz claims to have Obama birth - Page 43 - Christian Forums
“I have also dismissed it as irrelevant. Because the truth is that Davis was already influential enough in Obama’s life without needing to be an actual blood relative. ”
I have a few contentions with this premise. One is the obvious fact that Obama really looks more like FMD than his alleged Kenyan father. But more importantly, what is being neglected here is the psychological implications of one’s father being a role model to their child. Considering the convoluted relationships and family dynamics of Obama’s early life, imagine finding out in late adolescence that a man with certain ideologies is your biological father and not the one that you had originally been told was your father. The gravity of the communist mentality would weigh more heavily on a young impressionable man that wanted to seek some kind of closure with the man that he discovered to be his real father. There may have been some kind of psychological trauma and character insecurities associated with this. Maybe even a sense of abandonment from what he believed was biologically entitled to him. His steadfast resolve with the communist agenda may have been his way of strengthening the bond between himself and the father that he felt he was deprived of.
Pingback:What Do You Do About a Problem Like Obama? | Little Miss Attila
I think it’s just Seagrams on their shorts.
You all sound like you are feeling sorry for him and giving him excuses for why he is like he is. I think he is very calculating at doing all he can to destroy America and our values. Regardless of his past, he is destroying our future and that of our kids. Is he doing all of this because of a disfunctional childhood. Man that says alot for all the kids out there that have been drug to hell and back by their parents. You make your own decision as to what road you take. He took the road of destruction! Do we really all have to pay for his childhood? I think not, get him out of office. We do not need a community organizer we need a President and Commander-In-Chief PERIOD!!!!!
Pingback:Obama’s disturbing poem on man-boy relationship | Endtime News With Prophecy in Mind