The next target for the red-baiting right: Valerie Jarrett (and the REAL Frank Marshall Davis)
Glenn Beck and friends’ corporate-funded crusade against all the black people… I mean “communists” … in the Obama White House continues! This time, the crack … ingesting journalists at World Net Daily are setting their sites on that uppity Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, Communist. Writes WND:
OBAMA WATCH CENTRAL
Communist sympathizer introduced top adviser?
Valerie Jarrett’s family worked closely with Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis
Posted: September 08, 2009
4:57 pm EasternBy Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDailyNEW YORK – Was Valerie Jarrett, one of President Obama’s closest advisers, introduced to the president’s political circles by her father-in-law, a communist sympathizer who worked with the radical Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis?
Jarrett reportedly interviewed Obama’s former environmental adviser Van Jones for his White House position from which he resigned this past weekend. WND exposed Jones is an admitted black nationalist and radical communist.
Jarrett defended Jones after his appointment in March. She stated in an interview that the White House staff were “so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House.”
“Obama Watch Central…” wow, that sounds really serious! So Jarrett, like everybody else who isn’t a right wing Republican, is a commie. All we need now is the ipso-facto communist flow chart:
Jarrett’s family background and her initial introduction to Obama may tie her to Jones’ radical ideology.
Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was an associate of Frank Marshall Davis, the controversial labor movement activist who has been identified as an early influence on Obama.
Vernon Jarrett and Davis worked together in 1940 in a Communist Party-dominated organization, the Citizen’s Committee to Aid Packing House Workers. The group’s own correspondence, previously uncovered by the New Zeal blog, describes its communist influence. Many of its leaders were tied to the Communist Party.
The pair also frequented the South Side Community Art Center, which was dominated by communists. In addition, Davis and Vernon Jarrett worked in the late 1940s on the communist influenced, black-run Chicago Defender newspaper.
In 1948, Jarrett started a radio show, “Negro Newsfront,” and went on to become the Chicago Tribune’s first black syndicated columnist.
A Washington Post obituary of Jarrett notes he “stoked the political embers in Chicago that led to the 1983 election of the city’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington.”
“Vernon Jarrett was a key influence in Washington’s decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty and remained a key supporter through his four-year tenure,” the newspaper reported.
Obama has hailed Washington’s victory as a motivation for him to move to Chicago from New York. Washington was involved in communist-dominated circles in Chicago.
… Valerie Jarrett married Vernon’s son, William Robert Jarrett, in 1983.
Aha!!! Valerie Jarrett married the son of a man who hosted a “Negro” radio show in the 1940s, and she did so 43 years after his suspicious Communist visitings! Note that nowhere in this raggedy piece of “journalism” does WND provide any, I don’t know… PROOF … that any of the people it names, from Vernon Jarrett to Frank Marshall Davis to the former friggin mayor of Chicago, ever were Communists. They and a whole rheem of wacko right wing online sycophants, merely assert that they are, and in their minds, that ends the debate. But even a cursory peek into any of these supposed smoking guns reveals little more than the ravings of clearly addled minds. Let’s start with the sinister, communist “South Side Community Arts Center. For starters, it’s a Chicago landmark:
Built for grain merchant George Seaverns, Jr., this Georgian Revival-style residence (see Colonial Revival) was converted in 1940 for use by the South Side Community Art Center. The building’s interior, remodeled at that time, is a rare example of New Bauhaus-style design. The art center, which was established as part of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project, has been influential in the development of the city’s African-American artists. It is the only continuous survivor of the more than 100 centers established nationwide by the WPA during the 1930s and ’40s.
Ahhh, it was an FDR thing, and all FDR things are communist … or is that Socialist … oh who can keep it all straight!!?) And it promotes BLACK artists, which is always a sure sign that Marx is in the house.
That’s all well and good, but the Jarrett commie connection hinges on one Frank Marshall Davis. So who is he? Prepare to writhe in red-splattered terror…
In 1931, he moved to Atlanta to become an editor of a semiweekly paper. Davis transformed the Atlanta World[6] into a daily newspaper within two years of taking the job as the paper’s managing editor in 1931. Under Davis’s leadership the Atlanta Daily World became the nation’s first successful black daily.
In the pages of the paper, Davis articulated an agenda of social realism, which included appeals for racial justice in politics and economics, as well as legal justice. He championed black activism, especially to compensate for social ills not remedied by the larger white society. He warned against blacks accepting the Depression-era remedies being pushed by communists.[7]
The citation above is from a paper called “The Voice of the ‘World’: the Early Career of Frank Marshall Davis, 1931-34″ which was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 1989, written by Leonard Ray Teel. The paper is housed at the U.S. Department of Education. You can read it yourself here. On page 10, Teel writes the following:
Frank Marshall Davis (undated)
The mood of protest in the early 1930s was such that some editors welcomed even the efforts of the Communist Party. At the end of 1931, Carl Murphy’s influential Baltimore Afro-American applauded the “Communist program of racial equality” as a hopeful balance to the year’s deplorable events == “fifteen lynchings” and the death sentences given to eight black youths in the Scottsboro, Ala. rape trial. The editors welcomed the Communists as neo-abolitionists: “Reds as courageous as the Minute Men or the volunteer firemen seem everywhere ready for a demonstration against race prejudice, whether it be at hand or a thousand miles away.”
Alliance with the Communist Party, even from a distance, was too radical for some black editors, among them Frank Marshall Davis. While he was as ardent as any editor against injustices — in jobs, housing, education, the law — Davis warned agaisnt reliance upon a non-American system for solving Aemrican problems. In 1932, a year after becoming managing editor of the Atlanta World, Davis was invited to a national symposium of prominent black editors, including Murphy of the Afro-American and Robert S. Vann of the Courier. There, he warned against reliance on the Communist system to achieve racial justice. To Davis, the black protest movement was not compatible with the communists’ “crude and noisy militancy.” He saw “no fear of the rainbow brotherhood going Red in wholesale numbers — at least not until white America takes long steps in that direction.”
Oops. Looks like Frank Marshall Davis, the associate of the father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, was an anti-Communist. And so, if he wasn’t a communist and was an associate of Vernon Jarrett, whose son would go on to marry Valerie, who praised Van Jones, doesn’t it stand to their reasoning that none of them are communists??? Of course, even in his day, Davis was labeled a commie by right wing elements, for doing he unthinkable: getting down with the trade union movement.
In 1935, Davis moved back to Chicago to take the position of managing editor of the Associated Negro Press[8], a news service for black newspapers, which had begun in 1919. Eventually, Davis was named executive editor for the ANP. He held the position until 1947.
During the Depression, Davis participated in the federal Works Progress Administration Writers’ Project. In 1937, he received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship.[9]
While in Chicago, Davis also started a photography club, worked for numerous political parties, and participated in the League of American Writers. With the encouragement of authors such as Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, Davis published in 1948 his most ambitious collection of poems, entitled 47th Street: Poems, which chronicles the varied life on Chicago’s South Side.
1940s
Davis used his newspaper platform to call for integration of the sports world, and he began to engage himself with community organizing efforts, starting a Chicago labor newspaper, The Star, toward the end of World War II. In 1945, he taught one of the first jazz history courses in the United States, at the Abraham Lincoln School[10] in Chicago.
In 1948, Davis and his second wife [sidebar: she was white...] who had married in 1946, moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, at the suggestion of Davis’s friend Paul Robeson. There, Davis operated a small wholesale paper business, Oahu Papers, which mysteriously burned to the ground in March 1951. In 1959, he started another similar firm, the Paradise Paper Company.
Davis also wrote a weekly column, styled “Frank-ly Speaking,” for the Honolulu Record, a labor paper published by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), headed by Harry Bridges. The paper had been founded in 1948 by Koji Ariyoshi, and closed in 1958. Davis’s early columns covered labor issues, but he broadened his scope to write about cultural and political issues, especially racism. He also included the history of blues and jazz in his columns.
Jazz, labor unions, integration, community organizing, interracial marriage … and HAWAII … hey, was this Marshall guy born in Kenya or what??? If he wasn’t dead already I’d up and demand his birth certificate!!! Oh, and by the way, given the fact that Davis was born in 1905, and Barack Obama in 1961, it’s hard to imagine Davis being a lifelong mentor to Obama, who didn’t exist when Davis was at his most prolific. In fact, according to the Honolulu press, Davis was friendly with Obama’s grandfather — a white World War II veteran — while Obama was in high school (a radical time for any young communist, to be sure.) Oh, and it appears that Mr. Davis, like many Blacks of his day, was at one time a Republican, who even worked for the Republican National Committee in the Wendell Willkie campaign of 1940.
The ridiculous notion that Davis was a “lifelong communist” was floated, pre-WND, by the ironically named Fairness and Accuracy in Media, which refuses to admit that its shabby “research” has been … debunked and by the Rupert Murdoch press. But they weren’t the first red-baiters in the door. Davis was accused of being a communist during the McCarthy era by certain interests in Hawaii for a reason that should sound familiar to anyone who follows what passes for conservatism:
On the eve of the famous ILWU strike of 1949, the big issue was wage parity. Labor (non-white) was demanding from management (white) equal pay with workers on the West coast. The white executives and employers were starting to fight back against the union, and even their wives organized the “broom brigade,” an anti-labor group to oppose the strike.[4] They named themselves imua, a Hawaiian word which means to move forward, and they tried to convince the wives of the striking workers to side with management and join a presumed better life. They also launched a publicity campaign supported by the commercial newspapers accusing the ILWU of threatening to starve the people of Hawai`i with the impending strike because much of the food came from the United States.
Davis and his wife both publicly aligned themselves with the ILWU. (In response to the “broom brigade,” Helen picketed with other labor wives.) This did little to endear them to the power elite in the islands, who of course controlled public images. As Ah Quon McElrath recalls:
Generally, the community didn’t look upon trade unions with a great deal of love and affection. Besides which the Izuka pamphlet about Communism in Hawai`i had just been issued so there was fuel added to the fire which had started during the 1946 strike when they said that outsiders were coming in and taking over . . . Hawai`i and destroying the sugar industry as well as the pineapple industry. (1986, 24:1)
… as Davis recalls, “Not too long before my arrival, all Democrats were tarred with this same brush by the ruling Republican clique (1992, 323-24). His problems multiplied when it became clear that there were concerted efforts to brand him an outside instigator, and even a Communist. “The local establishment, which evidently had been given a file on me by the FBI, flipped,” Davis recalls, “I was a Communist and a subversive and a threat to Hawai`i.”
Yep, Sounds like an “admitted communist” to me. Bottom line: during the 1940s and 50s it was the vogue for right wing and corporate interests to brand anyone connected to a union, or to labor activism, or to racial agitation and “community organizing” as a communist. That red baiting continued through to the 1960s, when Dr. Martin Luther King had the misfortune of being labeled a communist on the black side AND on the labor advocacy side.
So the right has proved once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There have been periods in American history when large swaths of the country became enamored of communism (particularly before the U.S. and Soviets parted ways after World War II.) In fact, the American Communist Party and Socialst parties regularly ran candidates for president prior to the 50s. There have been two major “red scares” — the first during Woodrow Wilson’s time in the early 20th century and the second when Joe McCarthy made a mockery of the House of Representatives during the 1950s. In both cases, many of the targets fell into familiar categories despised by the radical right: Jews, Blacks (Paul Robeson and Elia Kazan were among those hauled before the House Un-American Affairs Committee), intellectuals, Hollywood types … all of those kinds of people the right believes are “robbing” them of “their” country and “culture.” By the 1960s, left-over McCarthyists like J. Edgar Hoover were branding any Black person who dared to call for equal rights for all Americans regardless of race a communist, including Martin Luther King, who in their minds was a double negative — on race and labor.
The sad fact is that there are people out there, like Michelle Malkin and the ubiquitous Mr. Beck, who yearn for those halcyon days of civic religion, when their side could make war against the people they despise (or envy…) the “smart people” who disdain their plain talk and simple thinking; the Hollywood “elite” and “mainstream media” who mock them and their values, actors, singers and comedians (have you noticed there are very few right wing comedians?)… who make them feel un-cool; popular culture, which excludes them, and of course, the tried and true: Black people. Black people are always communists. And they are always the premier objects of fear and loathing for the neo-McCarthyites. And now, to their horror, one of them is in the White House. And he didn’t come alone. He brought others … Van Jones … Jews like Rahm Emanuel … and Valerie Jarret (according to the HuffPo, look for FCC diversity czar Mark Lloyd to be the next communist on the list…) The only blacks (or minorities in general) who are acceptable are those willing to prove that they despise black or brown people, too (think Clarence Thomas, or for that matter, Michelle Malkin…)
So here we go again. The modern-day John Birch Society is grasping at any tenuous connection it can to tar everyone connected with the Obama administration as a communist, and a socialist, too (spoiler alert: they’re not the same thing…)
Laugh at them if you like (I do, often.) But these people are crazy serious (emphasis on the crazy.) And to them, it’s always 1950.
Good reading: James Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” written for Harper’s Magazine in 1964. It starts off:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
… Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.
Read the rest here.
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11 Responses to “The next target for the red-baiting right: Valerie Jarrett (and the REAL Frank Marshall Davis)”
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So I have read many diatribes like this on both sides. I don’t see this to be more convincing than anything else. There is a lot of proof out there that he was in CPUSA and if you read some of his poetry, including “To the Red Army”. But in the end I have to ask if most Americans would have no concern after doing some research about this man, why wouldn’t Obama actually mention his complete name in his book? That in itself should cause a person pause. That on top of Jeremiah Wright and black liberation theology (based in Marxism), Van Jones, Cass Sunstein, Mark Lloyd, etc. I don’t see how you can do anything other than question the President. You can tell a lot about a man by the people he chooses to surround himself with. ACORN, Tides Foundation, SEIU, CFAP, and the list goes on and on. If nothing else I would think those on the left that hate big business and corporate ties to the government might have questions about the relationship with GE. Please feel free to dig into these and see if you begin to have your own questions. Or just be big enough to just say that you agree with these poeple and support them in “…fundamentally changing America”.
Oh, wait, don’t tell me … let me guess … SEIU, the Center for American Progress, Cass Sunstein … they’re all communists, right? In fact, everyone who isn’t a Republican is a communist … right? Jeez, you folks have got to stop getting your news from Glenn Beck. You’re starting to embarrass the country.
I just want to know why your making the issue about race? It proves the weakness of your argument right off the bat. I don’t agree at all with Beck and his theories, but to make a rebutal based purely on race is kind of conspiratorial in its self is it not?
Interesting. I’m not certain the labeling and name calling in this article helps persuade the reader to come over to the author’s POV. I certainly wasn’t persuaded. Must have been the Harvard influence… I’m getting so that I don’t like or trust anyone from Harvard anymore.
Having acknowledged that, it is clear that we have a division in America these days, and it appears to be the progressive, socialist, communist forces trying to drive out and destroy the freedom loving and law abiding conservative voice of the people. This is NOT a political party thing (unless you consider the fact that the unlawful communism is being sponsored by the Democratic Party and tacitly supported by the complicit Republican Party bosses), but it is extremely destructive to our culture, our economy, and our future.
I am extremely concerned with the outcome of this battle for control of the American people that has been waged on American soil for the last 100 years by the unlawful centrists. Our nation is legally a federated republic, and the states and the people are legally in control – why the states don’t do more on an official basis to control the feds implies the complicity is also rampant within the states.
Now it is up to the people to steer the country back on to a course of lawfulness and legitimacy – maybe it has always been that way. The elected officials hired to represent the people in state and federal government have been self serving and statist, and this is why the communists have been able to so easily penetrate our country – everyone in government has been bought off, and simply aren’t doing their constitutionally restricted job. Nobody in government has been protecting the republic.
So, this would appear to be a good time to fire the lot of the elected government in the voting booths – if we can get legal and fair elections.
Honest and fair elections are my next concern. These tyrants from Chicago have pretty well locked up the election process so that we can’t have legal elections anymore. See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/23495809/Jon-Christian-Ryter-Forgot-the-Past-Here-s-the-Future
I’m not certain the labeling and name calling in your comment helps persuade m to come over to the writer’s POV. And I’m assuming you know that “socialism” and “communism” are two different things. … or maybe you don’t. Right wingers are funny people. They hate intellectuals (as you admitted), adore simpletons like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, and trust corporations completely, while trusting elected government not at all. The total fealty to corporate interests by a people IS the essence of fascism. But then again, you probably don’t know what fascism is, either, since you probably get your news from Rush Limbaugh.
As for the “battle for control of the American people” — where were you when your favorite president, George W. Bush, was introducing the most draconian domestic spying operation ever undertaken by a non-communist government? Where were you when John Yoo denied the constitutional constraints on the president, and declared Mr. Bush to be a “unitary executive,” which in layman’s terms, means a king? Legal and fair elections? We had one in 2008. Or do you only accept the “legal and fair” appointment of presidents by the Supreme Court, as happened in 2000?
Partisanship by any means necessary is incipid. You partisan Republicans will cook up any irrational reason to take down Democratic presidents, because in the end, you don’t believe in Democracy. You believe in one-party rule, and that party, is the GOP. It’s pathetic. And I suppose when the Tyrants from Texas return to the White House one day in the horrifying future, you will reverse every single one of your arguments, and the things you loathe today, you will wholeheartedly support because they are being done by your political party.
Good luck with that.
Interesting. I don’t recall stating any political position, so I’m not certain how you determined I am a Republican. And, again, you get into the name calling. Truly intellectually disingenuous. You’re better than that.
I write pretty clearly, and most people don’t have a problem understanding what I am saying or what I mean. Is your problem with what I am saying, or do you just not understand my words?
BTW, we can thank the communists, socialists, progressives, and all other left leaning groups for misleading the rest of the world by obfuscating the true meanings of their philosophies, as you are doing now. To be open about their philosophy would shut doors of opportunity – they tried openness and it failed. Now they use lies and subterfuge to get their power. Pretty telling about the validity of their philosophies.
The basic functional meanings of all of these groups is that they are centrists and believe in government control of the people without individual freedoms and individual God given rights. That’s why I have issues with centrists – I enjoy what freedoms I have and will not surrender any of them. To frustrate you even more, you should know I will attempt to regain lost freedoms and will develop new freedoms whenever possible.
Screw the state. I don’t work for the state – it works for me.
How’s that for simplicity? Do you understand me now?
Wow, that’s a lot of words for so little content! I’ll say this again, with numbers, to make it clear:
1. It is YOU who are using “name calling,” when you label Democrats as “Communists/Socialsts, etc.” That happens to be a slanderous statement, and you repeat it throughout your comments.
2. The fact that you consider Democrats to be commies, and that you insist on red-baiting, shows that you are a Republican, since that is the Republican tactic of choice these days.
3. The fact that you’ve just shown up, and become a latter-day “patriot,” after eight years in which the president of the United States assumed dictatorial powers, with absolute SILENCE coming from you so-called “conservatives,” shows that you are, again, a Republican partisan, and not speaking on the basis of principle.
4. All of that flowery talk about your “freedoms” is unimpressive to me, in that you only care about your “freedoms” when a Democrat is in the White House. You have still not answered my question as to why that is.
Ipso facto — you are in my opinion, nothing more than a partisan disguised as a patriot. So I’m not calling you names, I’m calling them as I see them. If I were to call you a name … well, that would be uncivil.
OK, let’s have at it.
1. I said: “This is NOT a political party thing (unless you consider the fact that the unlawful communism is being sponsored by the Democratic Party and tacitly supported by the complicit Republican Party bosses), but it is extremely destructive to our culture, our economy, and our future.”
You said: “It is YOU who are using “name calling,” when you label Democrats as “Communists/Socialsts, etc.” That happens to be a slanderous statement, and you repeat it throughout your comments.”
It doesn’t appear to me that I labeled any one or any organization as Communists/Socialists. Re-read my comments. I said the communism and socialism was being sponsored by the Democrats and supported by complicit Republicans. Having said that, if the shoe fits…
2. You said: “The fact that you consider Democrats to be commies, and that you insist on red-baiting, shows that you are a Republican, since that is the Republican tactic of choice these days.”
I judge people by their actions and by their colleagues. Talk is cheap, so Obama and the rest of the administration can tell us any sort of story and it means nothing. But their actions do mean something.
3. You said: “The fact that you’ve just shown up, and become a latter-day “patriot,” after eight years in which the president of the United States assumed dictatorial powers, with absolute SILENCE coming from you so-called “conservatives,” shows that you are, again, a Republican partisan, and not speaking on the basis of principle.”
Ah, you so clearly have no idea what you are saying about me. Just shown up? I was a patriot before you were born (with all likelihood). You also somehow believe I supported Bush in everything he did, and that just ain’t so. I judged Bush by his actions also. He did many things that only progressives do, and I objected when he did them.
4. You said: “All of that flowery talk about your “freedoms” is unimpressive to me, in that you only care about your “freedoms” when a Democrat is in the White House. You have still not answered my question as to why that is.”
Again wrong headed as hell. I live in America, and I care about everyone’s freedoms because I know that when you lose a freedom, so do I. One hand has to wash the other – we all have to win and keep our freedoms. You should also be very concerned about losing your own freedoms, because once they are lost, they are difficult to regain.
I don’t care what political party is in the White House – I judge the occupant by their actions. I liked JFK a lot, and view him as perhaps the last honorable Democrat President. I didn’t like Carter or Clinton – one was an idealist, the other a lying scumbag. I liked Reagan, and I liked Bush – for most of the time, but he did have the habit of loose steerage (like the open border situation, and the unstoppable immigration problem).
In light of this fairly extensive conversation, I suggest you study the law so that you can learn to pay better attention to the specific meaning of words, and take a political science course or two so that you can interpret other people’s statements and actions in a political sense.
FYI, I’m 66, own a small business, am a single dad, am back in college full time working on another degree, have lived in seven states and in Europe, and am politically a Libertarian.
Have a nice day. I hope I haven’t damaged your sense of fair play.
BTW, why is it that the foreign press talks openly about the communist views of Obama, yet the US media remains politically correct in their views? It is our nation we are losing.
Uh-huh. First of all, sir, and I will call you sir in order to be respectful, the fact that you use the words “communism” and “socialism” interchangeably proves to me that you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
Next up, the fact that you use the term “Democrat” when the actual word is “Democratic” means that you are probably a Dittohead, but most definitely a Republican, since those are the only people who use that term. (It’s usually polite to call people what they call themselves. Otherwise, we members of the DemocratIC party will start calling you guys Republics. Or Repugnant. Whichever.
Third, re how much you care about everyone’s freedoms. Play a violin behind it next time, because whenever someone says that, it usually translates to me as “I am a gun nut who doesn’t want to pay any federal income taxes.”
And lastly, whenever right wingers like you start spouting off about all the communistic, horrifying things that President Obama has done, I never find many actual communist-type incidents cited in the long, pseudointellectual diatribes they send (see Your Previous Comments.) So let me cite some specifics, k?
1. President Obama did not bail out the banks or AIG. That was done by a bi-partisan majority in Congress and the Bush administration, along with the Bush-appointed Fed chair, Ben Bernanke. If shoveling public funds to Wall Street is Marxist, than you’d better paint a red hammer and sickle on Dubya’s door. You did mention that you liked Dubya “most of the time.” What about THAT time?
2. President Obama did not tank the economy and turn a surplus into a massive deficit by cutting the taxes of the richest 4 percent of the country, nor did Obama risk the future solvency of our country on the insane neoconservative project of invading Iraq — a country which, I might add, had nothing to do with 9/11 and no bearing on America’s national security (see the part of the pre-amble that goes “secure the blessings of liberty.” The next two words are “to ourselves,” not “to whichever oil-rich country Dick Cheney and the psychotic neocons tell us we should invade.” Those two policies alone — the tax cuts which went overwhelmingly to the wealthy, and the two wars Bush started, account for the vast majority of our current account and long term deficits. See here:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036
In fact, the Bush-era tax cuts constitute the SINGLE LARGEST CHUNK OF OUR DEFICITS. But then again, you right wingers don’t have a problem with deficits, so long as they are created by making rich people and big corporations richer.
So let’s get back to Mr. Obama. He so far has 1) upheld the Bush bailouts to the big banks, 2) bailed out the auto industry and, let’s see, what else … signed the Lily Ledbetter Act? In other words, with healthcare eating up his first year, the guy hasn’t done anything much, let alone swept across the economic landscape like a modern day Che Guevara. The right’s caricature of Obama is laughable, because in reality, the only big thing he has done is the stimulus bill, which essentially bailed out the states (including here in Florida) and kept teachers, cops and firefighters on the job, while providing the sole capital injection the economy has had in 18 months. Obama inherited a failed economy, produced by his predecessor and their eight years of robbing the treasury on behalf of their friends, including in the defense/war industry.
And yet, your side thinks OBAMA is the bad president?
Jesus, it’s almost like arguing with a potato.
And btw, telling me to “study the law so I can learn to pay attention to the specific meaning of words” or take a science course is pretty presumptuous and patronizing for someone who purportedly is critiquing my civility. Maybe it’s because you’re “66 and own a small business and are a single dad” that you’re kind of used to telling young gals what to do.
Have a nice weekend, and no, you haven’t damaged my sense of fair play. I live in America surrounded by right wingers and neocons. I have no sense of fair play.
As I said, have a nice day.