The Vetting, Part I: Barack's Love Song To Alinsky
By Andrew Breitbart
Breitbart.com
Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects--but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – “Who guards the guardians?” Andrew saw himself in that role—as a guardian protecting Americans from the left’s “objective” loyal scribes.
Andrew wanted to do what the
mainstream media would not. First and foremost:
Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama.
Andrew did not want to re-litigate the 2008
election. Nor did he want to let Republicans off the
hook. Instead, he wanted to show that the media had
failed in its most basic duty: to uncover the truth,
and hold those in power accountable, regardless of
party.
From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012,
we will vet this president--and his rivals.
We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in
preparation for today’s Big relaunch--a story that
should swing the first hammer against the glass wall
the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.
In The Audacity of Hope,
Barack Obama claims that he worried after 9/11 that
his name, so similar to that of Osama bin Laden,
might harm his political career.
But Obama was not always so worried about
misspellings and radical resemblances. He may even
have cultivated them as he cast himself as Chicago’s
radical champion.
In 1998, a small Chicago theater company staged a
play titled The Love Song of
Saul Alinsky, dedicated to the life and
politics of the radical community organizer whose
methods Obama had practiced and taught on Chicago’s
South Side.
Obama was not only in the audience, but also took
the stage after one performance, participating in a
panel discussion that was advertised in the poster
for the play.
Recently, veteran Chicago journalist Michael Miner
mocked emerging conservative curiosity about the
play, along with enduring suspicions about the links
between Alinsky and Obama. Writing in the Chicago
Reader, Miner described the poster:
Let's take a look at this poster.
It's red—and that right there, like the darkening water that swirls down Janet Leigh's drain [in Psycho’s famous shower scene], is plenty suggestive. It touts a play called The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, Alinsky being the notorious community organizer from Chicago who wrote books with titles like Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. On it, fists are raised—meaning insurrection is in the air.
And down at the very bottom, crawling across the poster in small print, it mentions the panel discussions that will follow the Sunday performances. The panelists are that era's usual "progressive" suspects: Leon Despres, Monsignor Jack Egan, Studs Terkel . . .
And state senator Barack Obama.
Miner obscured the truth. His article only
reveals only a small portion of the poster. Here’s
the whole poster:
And here’s the press release:
So, what’s in the play? It truly is a love song to Alinsky. In the first few
minutes of the play, Alinsky plays Moses – yes, the
Biblical Moses – talking to God. The play glorifies
Alinsky stealing food from restaurants and
organizing others to do the same, explaining, “I saw
it as a practical use of social ecology: you had
members of the intellectual community, the hope of
the future, eating regularly for six months, staying
alive till they could make their contributions to
society.”
In an introspective moment, Alinsky rips America: “My
country … ‘tis of whatthehell / And justice up a
tree … How much can you sell / What’s in it for me.”
He grins about manipulating the Christian community
to back his programs. He talks in glowing terms
about engaging in Chicago politics with former Mayor
Kelly. He rips the McCarthy committee, mocking,
“Everyone was there, when you think back – Cotton
Mather, Hester Prynn, Anne Hutchinson, Tom Paine,
Tom Jefferson … Brandeis, Holmes … Gene Debs and the
socialists … Huey Long … Imperial Wizards of all
stripes … Father Coughlin and his money machine …
Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd … and a kicking chorus of
sterilized reactionaries singing O Come, All Ye
Faithful …”
And Alinsky talks about being the first occupier –
shutting down the O’Hare Airport by occupying all
the toilet stalls, using chewing gum to “tie up the
city, stop all traffic, and the shopping, in the
Loop, and let everyone at City Hall know attention
must be paid, and maybe we should talk about it.” As
Alinsky says, “Students of the world, unite! You
have nothing to lose but your juicy fruit.”
The play finishes with Alinsky announcing he’d
rather go to Hell than Heaven. Why? “More
comfortable there. You see, all my life I’ve been
with the Have-Nots: here you’re a Have-Not if you’re
short of money, there you’re a Have-Not if you’re
short of virtue. I’d be asking more questions,
organizing them. They’re my kind of people – Hell
would be Heaven for me.”
That’s The Love Song of Saul
Alinsky. It’s radical leftist stuff, and it
revels in its radical leftism.
And that’s Barack Obama, our president, on the
poster.
This is who Barack Obama was. This was before Barack
Obama ran for Congress in 2000—challenging former
Black Panther Bobby L. Rush from the left in a
daring but unsuccessful bid.
This was also the period just before Barack Obama served with Bill Ayers, from 1999 through 2002 on the board of the Woods Foundation. They gave capital to support the Midwest Academy, a leftist training institute steeped in the doctrines of -- you guessed it! -- Saul Alinsky, and whose alumni now dominate the Obama administration and its top political allies inside and out of Congress.
Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief
, described the Midwest
Academy as a "crypto-socialist organization.” Yet
almost no one has heard of Midwest Academy, because
the media does not want you to know that the
president is a radical's radical whose presidency
itself is a love song to a socialist "community
organizer."
The reason Newt Gingrich surged in the Republican
primary contest in January is that he was attempting
to do the press's job by finding out who the current
occupant of the White House actually is. Millions
also want to know, but the mainstream media is
clearly not planning to vet the President anytime
soon. Quite the opposite.
For example, Miner tries to turn Obama’s appearance
on the Alinsky panel into a plus for the president:
Obama was on the panel that talked about Alinsky the last Sunday of the play's run at the Blue Rider Theatre in Pilsen. Neither Pam Dickler, who directed the Terrapin Theatre production, nor Gary Houston, who played Alinsky, can remember a word Obama said. But he impressed them. "You never would have known he was a politician," says Dickler. "He never said anything at all about himself. He came alone, watched the play, and during the panel discussion was entirely on point and brilliant. That evening I called my father, who's a political junkie, and told him to watch out for this man, he's going places." Houston was just as taken by Obama—though he remembers him arriving in a group.
But is it a good thing to impress the sort of
people who show up to laud The
Love Song of Saul Alinsky? Here are the other
members of the Obama panel:
Leon Despres: Despres knew Saul
Alinsky for nearly 50 years, and together they
established the modern concept of “community
organizing.” Despres worked with secret Communist
and Soviet spy Lee Pressman to support strikers at
Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937; the strike ended
in tragedy when 14 rioting strikers were killed and
many wounded in a hail of police bullets. Despres
worked with another Communist Party front, the
Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, but eventually
left because of the “Stalinism” of its leaders.
Also in 1937, Despres and his wife delivered a
suitcase of “clothing” to Leon Trotsky, then hiding
out from Stalin’s assassins in Mexico City. Despres
and his wife not only met with the exiled Russian
Communist, but Despres’s wife sat for a portrait
with Trotsky pal and Marxist muralist Diego Rivera
while Leon took Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo to the
movies.
Quentin Young: From 1970 until at
least 1992, Quentin Young was active in the
Communist Party front organization, the Chicago
Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights – a group
dedicated to outlawing government surveillance of
radical organizations. He was also a member of the
Young Communist League. Young, a confidante and
physician to Barack Obama, is credited with having
heavily influenced the President’s views on
healthcare policy.
Timuel Black: An icon of the
Chicago left, Black was originally denied officer
training because military intelligence claimed he
had secretly joined the Communist Party. Black also
worked closely with the Socialist Party in the
1950s, becoming president of the local chapter of
the Negro American Labor Council, a organization
founded by Socialist Party leader A. Phillip
Randolph.
In the early ‘60s Black was a leader of the Hyde
Park Community Peace Center, where he worked
alongside former radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and
the aforementioned Communist Dr. Quentin Young.
Black served as a contributing editor to the Hyde
Park/Kenwood Voices, a newspaper run by Communist
Party member David S. Canter. By 1970, Timuel Black
was serving on the advisory council of the Communist
Party controlled Chicago Committee to Defend the
Bill of Rights.
Timuel Black says he has been friends with domestic
terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,
“going back to 1968, since long before I knew
Barack.” In April 2002, Black, Dohrn and Democratic
Socialists of America member Richard Rorty spoke
together on a panel entitled “Intellectuals: Who
Needs Them?” The panel was the first of two in a
public gathering jointly sponsored by The Center for
Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois,
Chicago. Bill Ayers and Barack Obama spoke together
on in the second panel at that gathering. Communist
academic Harold Rogers chaired Timuel Black’s
unsuccessful campaign for Illinois State
Representative.
Studs Terkel: A sponsor of the
Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace
in 1949, which was arranged by a Communist Party USA
front organization known as the National Council of
the Arts, Sciences, and Professions.
Roberta Lynch: A leading member of
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a leader
of the radical Marxist New American Movement (NAM).
Are we expected to believe that “Baraka Obama” was a
countervailing voice of reason on a panel of
radicals?
The reason that Obama's Alinskyite past, and his
many appearances in political photography and video
from the 1990s, are conspicuously missing from the
national dialogue is that State Senator Barack
Obama's reinvention as a reasonable and moderate
Democratic politician could not withstand scrutiny
of his political life.
Because the mainstream media did not explore his
roots, the American public remains largely ignorant
of the degree to which Obama’s work with ACORN and
his love of Alinsky were symbolic of his true
political will.
If any of the candidates can resist the media, and
parlay Newt’s strategy into a nomination, we’ll have
the choice between an imperfect but well-known
Republican and the real “Baraka” Obama, not the
manufactured one the media prefers.