JohnKWilson's blog

According to a self-promoting article on WorldNetDaily calling the book's appearance on the New York Times bestseller list "Obama's nightmare," "With more than 800 citations, the brand-new, autographed [sic] title from WND senior reporter and WABC radio host Aaron Klein bills itself as the most exhaustive investigation ever performed into Obama's political background and radical ties." Wow! 800 citations and autographed! It must be true. Of course, when most of those 800 citations are to other crackpot right-wingers, it's hard to give this book any credibility. It's exhausting, not exhaustive. The bad writing, the endless repetition of discredited conspiracy theories, all of it has been said before in more interesting ways by equally crazy people.

Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily, with the help of fellow conspiracy theorist Brenda Elliott, has penned a meandering and implausible book based on the theory that Obama is like the Manchurian candidate, a secret radical programmed by evil forces to undermine America.

Klein claims, "the establishment news media seemed to publish more exposes on those few individuals who did investigate Obama than on the presidential candidate himself."(viii) Really? As even Klein admits on the same page, "The Bill Ayers story would eventually become a prominent election theme."(viii) The massive attention in the media (albeit mostly on right-wing talk shows and blogs) to these ridiculous conspiracy theories about Obama shows the power of conservative control over the media, not some plot to keep Obama's "secrets" hidden.

Most of the book is a re-hash of conspiracy theories by better writers, so Klein desperately hypes every "new" piece of evidence. The book touts "his previously overlooked early childhood education in a radical church with ties to Bill Ayers' organization."(xi)

In the chapter titled, "Obama Tied to Bill Ayers....At Age 11!" Klein notes that Obama attended Sunday school at his grandparents' church, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.(4) So what does that have to do with Ayers? Absolutely nothing, it turns out. In 1969, while Obama was still living in Indonesia, the church gave sanctuary to some U.S. Military deserters who had been recruited to resist the draft by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Ayers was involved in SDS, and later would help destroy it.

As big revelations go, this is utterly insignificant. There's no evidence that Ayers had anything to do with the deserters. There's certainly no evidence that Obama's Sunday school taught him anything out of the ordinary.

But Klein has other evidence: he reports that the church was involved "in activating a local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union."(7) Oh, the horrors. Imagine how terrible it is to have a president who went to Sunday school as a kid at a church that helped an organization protect civil liberties. In the realm of "guilt by association" attacks, this one fails completely at both the guilt and the association.

Some of the guilt by association is just baffling to follow. Klein devotes four pages to denouncing "Ayers associate" Tom Hayden because Hayden organized the national group Students for Economic Democracy, and the Occidental College chapter co-sponsored an anti-Apartheid rally where Obama spoke. Klein admits that it is "unknown" whether Obama was a member of the group, but even if he was, it amounts to zero connection to Hayden in any case.(25)

And then Klein goes all "birther" on us: "the facts surrounding the politician's birth and childhood years are clouded in mystery."(65) Klein admits that there is no "convincing" evidence to prove that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii, although he claims the questions are "to this day unanswered."(70) But he has an even crazier theory than most of the birthers: "It is undisputed that Obama's father was not a U.S. Citizen, a fact that should have led to congressional debate about whether Obama is eligible under the United States Constitution to serve as president."(67) Yes, Klein actually believes that, contrary to all logic and legal rulings, the children of immigrants born in the U.S. are not U.S. citizens. This is birther craziness on steroids.

According to Klein, Obama's first book was probably created by Ayers: "Ayers may have ghostwritten most of the work."(14) Klein relies on Jack Cashill's comical "evidence" comparing the books by Ayers and Obama: "sections of both books that use a [sic] many similar nautical metaphors, like the use of the word 'ship' or descriptions of the sea, to denote feelings."(15) So, Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography because it uses the word "ship." Yes, case closed, no doubt about that.

Klein then cites Christopher Andersen's book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage, which goes even further in claiming Ayers' authorship. Andersen cites Cashill as his proof, but Cashill admits that Andersen "clearly has access to inside information that I did not have." Rather than concluding that Andersen made up a fake story, Klein instead reaches another conclusion: that Michelle Obama might have been Andersen's source.(16)

These funny conspiracy theories help obscure how dull this book really is, and how the repetition of the same discredited ideas wears on the reader. Even the ending of the book is lackluster, a tacked-on distortion of the health care bill. When your book's concluding sentence is, "At this juncture, the two versions of the health care bill must next be reconciled into a single document and voted on again," it shows how scatterbrained and ultimately pointless this whole book is.

The fear of a black president is here, too, as when Klein worries about "the milieu of black radicals in which Obama has traveled."(100) One of those fellow travelers is Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has guilt by job title association as "director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute," and as Klein helpfully points out, Du Bois was "a card-carrying communist and a socialist sympathizer."(100)

Louis Farrakhan, naturally enough, gets substantial attention, but for the strangest reason. In 2008, Obama gave a speech titled "A More Perfect Union" (full disclosure: that's also the subtitle of my updated book about Obama). Klein writes, "The title of Obama's speech, curiously, was also the main theme of Farrakhan's keynote address at the 1995 Million Man March, attended by both Obama and Wright."(94) Klein goes on to quote at length Farrakhan's analysis of the phrase. What Klein doesn't seem to understand is that the phrase doesn't come from Farrakhan, it comes from the preamble to the US Constitution, and just about every politician has invoked it.

Klein writes, in a truly hilarious line, "We do not believe in 'guilt by association' nor in 'the politics of personal destruction.'"(xii) If they don't believe in it, then it's strange to write a book consisting of nothing but that.

Much of Klein's book reads like a game of Six Degrees of Separation from Bill Ayers. SEIU head Andy Stern received training at the Midwest Academy, which was co-founded by Paul and Heather Booth, who were members of Students for a Democratic Society, which Ayers was a member of.(128) As conspiracy theories go, it's just laughably stupid.

Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, Klein explains, married the son of Vernon Jarrett in 1983, and Vernon Jarrett in the 1940s "frequented the South Side Community Art Center, which was dominated by communists."(156) This is quite a conspiracy theory: Obama is guilty of radical ties because one of his friends married a guy whose father was linked to an art center 60 years ago where some communists were seen.

Cass Sunstein is condemned for a paper in which "he uses terms such as 'distributive justice' several times."(179) Rosa Brooks, a Pentagon advisor, is denounced for being the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich and "reportedly named after communist heroine Rosa Luxemburg."(183) Klein repeats the common right-wing lie that Mark Lloyd of the FCC argued that private broadcasters should pay a fee equal to their total operating costs to fund public broadcasting.(189)

Some of the attacks are humorously off the mark. Klein quotes one right-wing blogger who mentions "Community Party USA 'front activist' and long-time Obama supporter, Alice Palmer,"(257) apparently unconcerned about any evidence showing that Palmer is a communist, or the fact that Obama forced Palmer out of her State Senate position and was disliked by her because of it.

Klein claims that Project VOTE!, where Obama led a Chicago voter registration campaign in 1992 was all part of the infamous Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory which "sought the downfall of U.S. Capitalism."(110) The link between registering voters and destroying capitalism is, needless to say, never explained.

Ironically, Klein calls Assistant to the President for Science and Technology John Holdren a "conspiracy theorist" for reasons that are never explained.(172) But it's Klein who is the real conspiracy theorist.

In what may be the most absurd claim of a preposterous book, Klein wrote: "Obama became the Manchurian candidate product of" ACORN and the Weather Underground.(109) This is what passes for best-selling intellectual analysis on the right today: a mish-mash of incoherent conspiracy theories "proven" by footnotes to a series of lunatics and idiot bloggers, all of it aimed at a voracious audience of conservatives who want to believe anything evil about Barack Obama, even when it makes no sense at all.

Crossposted at DailyKos. John K. Wilson is the author of President Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union and a forthcoming book about Rush Limbaugh.

I asked some Harvard law professors about this charge. Laurence Tribe responded to me, "The allegation is absurd. Obama earned every one of his enormously high grades. ‘Affirmative action’ had nothing to do with his success there. He was the most impressive student and research assistant I have taught in my 40 years at Harvard."

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law Professor who served as Solicitor General during the Reagan Administration, wrote to me, "It’s paranoid nonsense.  Grading is anonymous by a randomly generated exam number and it takes a vote of the faculty to change a grade."

This isn’t the first time Limbaugh has made the false allegation that Obama gained from favorable grading. In 2008, Limbaugh declared that Obama "probably didn’t get out of Harvard without affirmative action."

In reality, Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law, which meant that there would have needed to be a vast conspiracy to raise the grades of this unknown student. Limbaugh’s attack on Obama is particularly ironic coming from a man who flunked out of college and had his two books (and an earlier newspaper column) ghostwritten for him.

Limbaugh did not respond to my request for any evidence to support his accusation. Unfortunately, there’s no sign that the mainstream media will follow up. The Politico quoted Limbaugh’s claims without bothering to point out that they’re completely false, or asking him for any basis to support his allegation. Nor did Fox News Channel bother to ask Limbaugh about how he knows such things. It’s time for the media to follow up on Limbaugh’s lies, and also ask Republican officials if they embrace these ridiculous claims.

Crossposted at LimbaughBook and DailyKos.

To some on the left, Inside Obama's Brain might seem like a historical artifact by this point, written as it was in the late stages of Obama's 2008 campaign and the early months of his presidency, when so many people had high hopes and, Abramsky wrote, "Obama seemed largely to be retaining his appeal."(218) However, these dark days of populist, anti-incumbent anger during the depth of the Bush recession are likely to dissipate this year as the economy recovers. And when the pundits have proven wrong again, Abramsky's book will offer a lot of insights about Obama.

The author may strike some on the left as naïvely donning several pairs of rainbow-colored glasses. But this picture of Obama, if sometimes gauzy, is an important story to remember when so many progressives and independents get caught up in the political moment, when compromise is inevitable and high-minded ideals fall a long distance before the power of sleazy senators. Abramsky is not naive. In many ways, this book is a biography of Obama's idealism rather than his pragmatism, although it recognizes both sides of the man.

In trying to understand Obama, Abramsky occasionally strains to make his argument. At one point, Abramsky interprets the body language of Obama in a photo of an important meeting during the 2008 economic crisis, positing that Obama's alleged aloofness is "the distance of the sage." It seems less like being Inside Obama's Brain and more like reading a horoscope.

And Abramsky devotes three pages to the important role of Bettylu Saltzman in championing Obama to David Axelrod and others, but never mentions her most important contribution: asking Obama to speak at a 2003 rally in Chicago against the war in Iraq. Without a trusted friend like Saltzman in charge, it's unlikely that Obama would have risked coming out to speak at a left-wing rally, and without that speech, Obama would not have been able to trumpet his politically courageous opposition to the war years later, when it became a decisive factor enabling him to defeat Hillary Clinton.

But omissions like that are rare. Abramsky offers an unparalleled collection of interesting stories, some of them never told anywhere before, about many of the interesting moments in Obama's life and career.

Obama is a careful and cautious man, who doesn't wear his emotions on his sleeve. We never quite get the "peeling back of the veneer"(10) Abramsky promises us, but he offers a much more enlightened picture of Obama than all of the "insider" accounts of the 2008 election ever have. Abramsky effectively shows the role University of Chicago, Hyde Park, and Chicago played in shaping Obama's approach to policy and politics.

For Obama fans, Inside Obama's Brain is a heartwarming story of idealism punctuated with anecdotes that will make you smile. And for the disillusioned cynics, it's a reminder of the vast potential Obama has, and may yet realize, if the progressive movement helps him.

John K. Wilson is the author of President Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union (Paradigm Publishers, 2009). Crossposted at DailyKos.

The truth is that the first year of Obama's presidency was one of tremendous progressive accomplishments. We forget that because the biggest accomplishment, the $789 billion stimulus package, came so early in his administration.

The stimulus package alone would exceed the accomplishments of many two-term presidents. In the face of a massive recession, one even worse than most people imagined at the time, Obama got a spectacular bill passed in record time with monumental results. Compare the $789 billion stimulus package to what Bill Clinton did in 1993, admittedly in the face of a much less severe recession. Clinton proposed a $19.5 billion economic stimulus package, but only got $4 billion to extend unemployment benefits.

The stimulus helped push the economy out of a recession and substantially cut unemployment from where it would have gone otherwise. It provided a massive investment in public infrastructure. The only mistake Obama made was trying to accurate depict the economic consensus at the time, instead of engaging in alarmism about the dire state caused by the Bush recession. But nothing Obama did could live up to the exaggerated expectations so many people had for him.

Where Obama failed, it wasn't for lack of trying. On the public option for health care reform, Obama was by far the leading national advocate for it, pushing the idea strongly in the summer of 2009. But even though the public option was always strongly popular in every poll, progressives failed to create a movement to counter the misinformation of the far right.

Progressives have failed on all counts: they have been unable to build any criticism from the left to counter the rising right-wing Tea Party Movement, and they have failed to create any enthusiasm for the success of Obama's progressive reforms. All they have done is engage in internal sniping, attacking the most progressive president in history for failing to live up to their exaggerated expectations.

Now, some progressives may argue that Obama should have been the leader of the progressive movement, the man who stood up to accomplish everything by personal proclamation what progressives failed to do

But Obama was never that kind of progressive. We should be honest about Obama and his administration: They are who we thought they were. Obama is a pragmatic progressive who is always willing to engage in compromise to accomplish his goals.

Obama's biggest mistake so far has been to appoint Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as his leaders of treasury and economic advisors, perhaps believing their fake promises that they had seen their mistakes and would embrace reform. If Obama had appointed Sheila Bair and Robert Reich or Joseph Stiglitz, he might have found some real reformers and not be forced to adopt his recent populist approach of taxing big banks. However, at the bottom point of the worst recession since World War II, Obama probably felt that he needed to stabilize financial markets rather than really reforming them. He certainly didn't have an effective movement on his left pushing for serious reforms.

Arianna Huffington wrote, "it's become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us." Really? You thought elected officials in a corrupt system were going to save us, without any need to pressure them?

Perhaps I was naïve, too. The biggest hope I had for Obama was that he could single-handedly build a progressive movement as president that would fill in the yawning chasm we current face as progressives. It turns out that being president is kind of a difficult job, and Obama failed to revive the tattered mess of progressive politics while he was trying to fix the tattered mess of the entire federal government left to him after eight years of Bush Administration mismanagement.

I should have expected progressives to viciously denounce Obama. The left has been sniping at him from the start. I wrote a book about Obama as a pragmatic progressive in 2007 specifically because the left in America so thoroughly misunderstood him and the state of American politics. The left went from hating Obama to seeing him as their political savior and then back to hating him again once their inevitable disappointment with practical politics became real.

Astonishingly, while Obama is being eviscerated by the left for not being progressive enough, Democrats are looking at massive losses in 2010 because political experts say that these limited measures are too left-wing. The problem isn't really popularity. People hate Republicans even more than the Democrats. The problem is an enthusiasm gap. The right-wing nuts are desperately trying to stop progressive reforms by throwing Democrats out of office. And progressives are sitting on their asses, helping the far right-wing by pouting about how little they've gotten.

The Teabaggers may seem like a bunch of racist, conspiratorial morons pushing inaction in the face of the greatest economic crisis in America in more than a half-century. But compared to progressives, the Teabaggers are brilliant. They actually understand how to influence politics. The progressive movement is responding to the most progressive president in history by denouncing him at every turn, trying to stop his legislative efforts, and using their mighty power of apathy to get rid of his marginal majority in Congress. Absolutely brilliant! Progressives couldn't accomplish any more for the Republican Party if Karl Rove became editor of Huffington Post.

If you think Obama has failed to push progressive policies with 60 votes in Senate, it's not going to get any better with 55 votes. It's going to get much worse. A political defeat for the Democrats isn't going to cause them to come to their senses, abandon their corporate masters, and fulfill the demands of the people for progressive reform. Electoral defeat is going to make move even more to the right, as Bill Clinton and Democrats did following the Republican Revolution of 1994.

2009 was the year of Obama, where all of politics centered around him. 2010 needs to be the year of us, when we build a progressive movement to defend Obama and give him the power to pursue progressive reforms rather than centrist compromises.

Crossposted at Daily Kos.

That doesn't excuse all of the foolish journalists and commentators who falsely attributed these quotes to Limbaugh: "I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark." And: "You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed."

We now know that these quotes were apparently put up on WikiQuote in 2005 and then spread around the internet by someone using the nickname "Cobra."

The fake quotes about Limbaugh have been repeated by Rachel Maddow, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, Tamron Hall, CNN's Rick Sanchez, MSNBC's David Shuster, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell, Alternet's Rory O'Connor, the Nation's Dave Zirin, and several places on DailyKos.

Now, the critics of Limbaugh had no sure way of knowing that the slavery quote had been faked, since Limbaugh had never denied these widespread quotes. Limbaugh claimed, "Whatever happened to journalists calling people and saying, ‘Did you actually say this? I'm doing a story on blah, blah, blah. Did you actually say this?’" Well, I tried that. I sent Limbaugh an email on Sunday, telling him that I was writing a book about him, and that I believed the slavery and James Earl Ray quotes were fakes, and asking him for confirmation about this and the other quotes on race he had made. Limbaugh never responded to me.

Working on my book, I encountered these quotes earlier this year and immediately regarded them with suspicion. They didn't quite seem right, especially the James Earl Ray quote. Suspecting that these quotes were fake, in June I asked Jack Huberman, author of the 2006 book 101 People Who Are REALLY Screwing America (and Bernard Goldberg is Only #73) that included them, what his sources had been. Huberman replied that he was too busy on a deadline to look for the sources. This week, Huffington Post removed the quotes from a 2006 Huberman blog based on his book, after he was unable to come up with a reliable source. It seems likely that WikiQuote was Huberman's source. Huberman's book in turn became the source for a Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes list that circulated widely on the web.

Limbaugh called them "these slanderous, made-up, fabricated quotes found in a sewer on the Internet." And he's right. But Limbaugh isn't upset by these fake quotes; he's thrilled beyond belief. Now, Limbaugh gets to attack the media (his favorite hobby) and draw attention away from all of the actual, real racist quotes that he can't deny.

As for Limbaugh's outrage about these fake quotes, it's a remarkable act of hypocrisy from a man who has been faking quotes throughout his entire career.

Limbaugh's propensity for faking quotes is so common that Limbaugh has hired staffers to doublecheck his comments and add "(paraphrasing)" to his transcripts whenever he quotes Barack Obama or some other figure who has never said anything remotely similar to what Limbaugh claims he said. Of course, Limbaugh's listeners don't have the benefit of these after-the-fact corrections and assume that Limbaugh's fake quotes are actually accurate. Go search for "paraphrasing and site:rushlimbaugh.com" and you can find hundreds of examples of Limbaugh inventing fake quotes just in the past three years.

When it came to people repeating false quotes about Limbaugh that Limbaugh himself had never bothered to deny, Limbaugh was outraged: "we are in the process behind the scenes working to get apologies and retractions with the force of legal action against every journalist who has published these entirely fabricated quotes about me, slavery, and James Earl Ray."
But when it came to his own false quotes, Limbaugh has been entirely indifferent to fake quotes.

In one of his books, Limbaugh claimed to be quoting James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." The quote was a fake. Limbaugh admitted, "The quote is not Madison's. But the misattribution of this statement (an error, not 'a lie') has been made by many over the years."

Ah, so when Limbaugh was publishing fake quotes, it was "an error, not 'a lie'" and it was excused because the mistake was made "by many over the years."

On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of "liberal hate speech" by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center's newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool's edition published almost a month earlier. The next day, Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: "Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it's not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up."(April 28, 1995) Limbaugh's error was even more amazing because he had made the exact same mistake of reading the newsletter’s fake quotes as if they were real one year before.(Extra!, 7-8/94)

Limbaugh long ago ceased responding to anyone who pointed out his fake quotes. Instead, he goes on making up things to an uncritical audience of Dittoheads who believe anything he says.

One example came a week ago. At the very same time that news of Limbaugh's bid to buy the Rams was being published and the fake quote about slavery was getting more attention, Limbaugh was spreading news about a different fake quote. On Oct. 7, Limbaugh went ballistic on his show against Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and announced that he would refuse to take a flu shot in protest. Limbaugh claimed, "you've got Kathleen Sebelius saying you must take the pig flu vaccine, you must take it. Screw you, Mrs. Sebelius." But Sebelius never said anything like this.

So where did Limbaugh get the false impression that Sebelius had ever said this? Well, it turns out to be one of these slanderous, made-up, fabricated quotes found in a sewer on the Internet. In this case, the sewer was what Limbaugh bizarrely calls "state-controlled AP." Limbaugh repeatedly linked on his website to an Associated Press story that declared, "Sebelius: Americans must get swine flu vaccination."

But that headline wasn’t true. The article noted that "Sebelius appealed anew Wednesday for widespread inoculation." Absolutely nothing Sebelius said in the article suggested that vaccination would be mandatory. In fact, since the article talked about Public Service Announcements and other efforts to convince people to get inoculated, it was perfectly clear that Sebelius never said anything about forcing people to get a flu shot.

But Limbaugh never actually read the article. He only read the misleading headline. And then he went on to repeat the lie two days later, "The story yesterday was, Sebelius, 'You must take it,' and that is what I was reacting to." And this week, Limbaugh continued the false attack on Sebelius: "You want us to just bow down and kneel and follow every order issued by people who have no competence or experience in any area in which they are working?" The irony here is that Sebelius never made any order, but millions of Limbaugh fans will bow down before him and follow his order against a flu shot even though he has no competence at all in the area.

So, yes, some careless people read a slavery quote on the internet and assumed it was true because Limbaugh had never tried to refute it and had said so many similar racist things over the years. By contrast, Limbaugh willfully repeated a false statement he read on the internet even though he could have the truth simply by reading a few paragraphs of a story, and then repeated his error.

It's quite possible that people will die in the next few months because Rush Limbaugh persuaded them not to get a flu vaccination due to the fact that he was too lazy to read a 495-word article and decided to launch an anti-government crusade based on a fake quote he read on the internet. The fake quotes about Limbaugh played no role in his difficulties he faced buying the Rams, and instead discredited his critics. By contrast, the fake quote Limbaugh told about Sebelius and the flu shot will probably kill people.

Crossposted at DailyKos.