Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  2. Dinitia Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives,” New York Times, September 11, 2001, E1.

  3. Horowitz, Radical Son, 334.

  4. As noted, the Weather Underground proudly took responsibility for twelve bombings. Among others, see Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.”

  5. Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.”

  6. Ayers told the Times that this philosophy was really more of a “joke about the distribution of wealth.” He also told Alan Colmes of Fox News that this was a “joke.” See “Alan Colmes Highlights Bill Ayers Exclusive,” FoxNews.com, February 24, 2009.

  7. Among others, see Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.”

  8. Here is Dohrn's bio page at the Northwestern website, followed by her official “c.v.” posting: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/BernardineDohrn/; and http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/clinic/dohrn/dohrnBeCV.pdf.

  9. Frederick Edwards, “Requiem for a Freedom Fighter—Corliss Lamont,” The Humanist, July–August 1995.

  10. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 110–11.

  11. Congress mandates that the State Department annually report on terrorism. In its final report, in 2000, the Clinton State Department devoted more words to Iran and Iraq than any other countries. For an analysis, see Paul Kengor, “Clinton Administration to Obama: Iraq Greater Terror Threat Than Afghanistan,” July 17, 2008, published in several sources, and posted at www.visandvals.org and www.faithandfreedom.com.

  12. These criticisms included irrational allegations such as “Bush lied, kids died.” See my discussion at the website of the Center for Vision and Values, specifically the two articles by Paul Kengor, “Yes, I Admit I Hate Bush” (January 12, 2006) and “Bush Lied, You Lied” (February 24, 2006).

  13. Quoted in “Gore Says Bush Betrayed the U.S. by Using 9/11 as a Reason for War in Iraq,” New York Times, February 9, 2004.

  14. Quoted in “Senate Leader Calls Bush ‘A Loser,’” CBSNews.com, May 7, 2005; and “Reid: Iraq War Lost, U.S. Can't Win,” MSNBC.com, April 20, 2007.

  15. “Meet the Press, Transcript for Dec. 5,” MSNBC.com, December 5, 2004.

  16. “From Congress to Union Halls, Demand Widens: Exit Iraq!” People's World, June 24, 2005, posted at http://www.peoplesworld.org/from-congress-to-union-halls-demand-widens-exit-iraq/. Barbara Lee, on the floor of the House, read a statement concerning alleged evidence that “Bush and his administration have lied to the world.”

  17. Zachary Coile, “Rep. Stark Blasts Bush on Iraq War,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 2003.

  18. Stark said this on October 18, 2007. At least twice he refused to retract his remarks. Eventually, on October 23, he issued an apology, not because he regretted his accusations against Bush but because he said the controversy detracted from more pressing concerns facing the nation, like “providing medical care for children.”

  19. See Charen, Useful Idiots, 190–91.

  20. See “Kerry ‘Regime Change’ Comments Draw Fire,” FoxNews.com, April 3, 2003, posted at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,83101,00.html.

  21. Not knowing that his microphone was on, Kerry was recorded saying this on March 12, 2004.

  22. The quote has been widely reported. For the original source, see the Congressional Record—Senate, June 14, 2005, S6594.

  23. Obama said this on August 13, 2007. In addition to hard-copy transcripts of the remark, a video clip of the remark is posted at YouTube.

  24. Dennis B. Roddy, “Exonerated Marine to Sue Rep. Murtha,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 25, 2008; Edwin Mora, “Some Marines Question the Navy's Decision to Honor Rep. Murtha,” CNSNews.com, March 23, 2009.

  25. Chad Pergram, “Murtha Says He'd Take Guantanamo Prisoners in His District,” FoxNews.com, January 21, 2009.

  26. Durbin's comments aired on CNN's American Morning, November 16, 2009, and were transcribed by CNN.

  27. Kerry said this on CBS's Face the Nation on December 4, 2005. The quote is published in the Face the Nation transcript of the show, pages 3–4.

  28. Kerry said this on October 31, 2006. Afterward, his spokesperson claimed that the statement had been a botched joke aimed at the alleged lack of intelligence of George W. Bush, a line quickly accepted by mainstream media sources like CBS, MSNBC, and the Associated Press. See “Kerry's ‘Botched’ Joke Backfires,” CBS News/Associated Press, November 1, 2006; and “Uproar over Kerry Iraq Remarks,” MSNBC.com, November 1, 2006.

  29. Kennedy said this on May 10, 2004. Among others, see “Senate Condemns Iraqi Prisoner Abuse,” FoxNews.com, May 11, 2004.

  30. Kennedy made this remark on September 18, 2003. For a stinging counter-response, see Charles Krauthammer, “Ted Kennedy, Losing It,” Washington Post, September 26, 2003, A27.

  31. See “Kennedy to Assail Bush over Iraq War,” Boston Globe, October 16, 2003.

  32. John Hendren, “Kennedy Calls Iraq Bush's ‘Vietnam,’” ABCNews.com, January 9, 2007.

  33. “Walter Cronkite Criticizes President Bush's ‘Arrogance’ over Iraq,” Associated Press, March 19, 2003.

  34. Foner wrote this as part of a London Review of Books symposium/panel of reactions (by historians) to September 11. Source: “11 September,” London Review of Books, October 4, 2001, vol. 23, no. 19, 20–25.

  35. Matthew Rothschild, “The New McCarthyism,” The Progressive, January 2002.

  36. See Paul Kengor, “Anti-Semite? Saddam Outdid Ahmadinejad,” September 26, 2007, posted at the website of the Center for Vision and Values.

  37. “Columbia University Faculty Action Committee Statement of Concern,” New York Sun, November 12, 2007.

  38. Tamar Lewin and Amanda Millner-Fairbanks, “President of Columbia Is Criticized,” New York Times, November 14, 2007.

  39. See “President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University,” Washington Post, September 24, 2007; and “Ahmadinejad Blasts Israel, Denies Existence of Iranian Gays During Columbia Speech,” FoxNews.com, September 24, 2007.

  40. This incident was widely reported. One early source was Matthew Continetti, “Professor Mogadishu,” National Review Online, March 31, 2003.

  41. Kim died on July 8, 1994.

  42. “The Carter Interview: Jimmy Carter's North Korean Notebook,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 3, 1994, A12.

  43. Ibid.

  44. See, for example, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm.

  45. See Barbara Crossette, “Korean Famine Toll: More Than 2 Million,” New York Times, August 20, 1999.

  46. Among others, see R. Jeffrey Smith and Ruth Marcus, “White House Wary of Ex-President's View N. Korea ‘Crisis Is Over,’” Washington Post, June 20, 1994; Michael R. Gordon, “Back from Korea, Carter Declares the Crisis Is Over,” New York Times, June 20, 1994.

  47. Carter called for renewed inspections in a January 31, 2003, statement, released by his Carter Center and posted at the website of the Carter Center: http://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc1165.html.

  48. Jimmy Carter, “The Troubling New Face of America,” Washington Post, September 5, 2002.

  49. Jimmy Carter, “Just War—or a Just War?” New York Times, March 9, 2003.

  50. For the record, whether the war in Iraq met “just war” standards was hardly a closed case, as this subject was vigorously debated throughout the war period, with powerful arguments made in the affirmative by Catholic theologians/scholars like Michael Novak and George Weigel, who most assuredly had studied Augustine's doctrine. Yet Carter assumed he had the sure answer, and the New York Times did nothing to suggest otherwise.

  51. For example, when Ronald Reagan mentioned Jesus Christ in a January 1984 speech to the National Religious Broadcasters, the Times denounced him. Reagan presented the speech, complained the Times, “not while worshiping in his church but in a Washington hotel.… You don't have to be a secular humanist to take offense at that display of what, in America, should be private piety.… It's an of
fense to Americans of every denomination, or no denomination, when a President speaks that way.” The Times noted that Reagan was, after all, “the President of a nation whose Bill of Rights enjoins Government from establishing religion, aiding one religion, even aiding all religions.” This was 1984, but the Times has remained consistent in this thinking. If anything, the Times editorial board is more liberal today than it was in 1984. See the editorial, “Sermon on the Stump,” New York Times, February 3, 1984.

  52. General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the 1991 Persian Gulf operation, speculated that Saddam Hussein had hoped that Jimmy Carter would step into the fracas and broker a deal that would stop the United States from driving Iraq from Kuwait. See “Schwarzkopf on Hussein: Calculating ‘Carter Factor,’” New York Times, October 13, 1994, A16.

  53. Sharon Jayson, “Carter Rebuts State Dept. on Hamas,” USA Today, April 24, 2008.

  54. Ibid.

  55. In his January 2002 State of the Union address Bush said of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea: “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.”

  56. See Michael Kelly, “A Presidential Blast from the Past,” Washington Post, February 27, 2002.

  57. Sean Penn went to Iraq in 2002 and Iran in 2005; Bening went to Iran in 2009. Penn in 2005 fingered the Eisenhower administration for Iran's “anger at the United States.” See Alistair Lyon, “Sean Penn Says War in Iraq Is Unavoidable,” Reuters, December 15, 2002; “Sean Penn in Iran,” four-part series for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning August 22, 2005; and “Hollywood's Bening Hopes to Help Mend US-Iran Ties,” Agence France-Presse, March 1, 2009.

  58. Transcript, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, September 29, 2002.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid.

  62. See Stephen F. Hayes, “The Baghdad Democrats,” The Weekly Standard, October 14, 2002.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Transcript, “Congress Debates Iraq,” NewsHour, PBS, October 2, 2002, posted at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec02/iraq_10–2.html.

  67. Matt Apuzzo, “US: Saddam Paid for Lawmakers’ Iraq Trip,” Associated Press, March 26, 2008.

  68. Ibid.

  69. “Prosecutors Say Saddam's Intelligence Agency Financed McDermott's Iraq Trip,” Seattle Times, March 26, 2008.

  Chapter 22: Still Dupes for the Communists

  1. See, for example, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, “Hollywood's Missing Movies: Why American Films Have Ignored Life under Communism,” Reason, June 2000; Radosh and Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood, 243–45; and Evans, Blacklisted by History, 538.

  2. Tony Kushner, “Kushner on Miller,” The Nation, June 13, 2005, 6.

  3. See Henry Weinstein and Judy Pasternak, “I. F. Stone Dies,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1989, A1; and Charen, Useful Idiots, 89. To see these tributes, go to: http://www.ifstone.org/on_his_death.php.

  4. TNR, though still solidly on the left, long ago quit carrying the water for Communists. For years, in fact, the magazine has done some of the best work countering the Communists who duped the magazine in its early years.

  5. Ron Radosh, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” The New Republic Online, March 12, 2007.

  6. See Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers; Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Knopf, 1978); and Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday, 1962).

  7. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Truest Believer,” New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1997.

  8. Quoted in Radosh, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  9. See, for instance, Jamie Glazov's interview with Haynes and Klehr, “Frontpage Interview: In Denial,” FrontPageMagazine.com, November 25, 2003, posted at http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15347.

  10. See Kengor, “Anti-Anti-Communism and the Academy,” April 2009, posted at the website of the Center for Vision and Values.

  11. James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931–1934,” American Historical Review, vol. 106, issue 2, December 2007.

  12. See, for instance, the journal article written by Obama's father: Barak [sic] H. Obama, “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” East Africa Journal, July 1965, 26–33. On this, see Ben Smith and Jeffrey Ressner, “Long-lost Scholarly Article by Obama's Dad Surfaces,” USA Today, April 16, 2008. Smith and Ressner are reporters for Politico.com, which tracked down the article.

  13. Takara quoted in report by Herb Romerstein and Cliff Kincaid, “Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection,” Accuracy in Media, May 2008, posted at AIM.org.

  14. Lisa Miller and Richard Wolffe, “Finding His Faith,” Newsweek, July 12, 2008.

  15. That church was located in Bellevue, Washington, one of the areas where the family lived. Tim Jones, “Obama's Roots Are Steeped in Tradition,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2007.

  16. According to initial reports, this was the latter 1970s, though some more recent reports claim the relationship lasted longer than that.

  17. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Random House, 2004), 77.

  18. Ibid., 100–1.

  19. I corresponded with John C. Drew (who contacted me after reading an article I had written on Obama and Davis) in April 2010 via several e-mails. Though the mainstream media had paid no attention to Dr. Drew, around February 2010 some conservative media outlets had begun covering his allegations, which appear completely credible. Before Drew contacted me, I had read his comments at length in print and listened to them in radio and web interviews. In one of the better interviews, in February 2010 Drew spoke with Scott Baker, a former Pittsburgh news anchor (WTAE-TV) who now does web broadcasting. The interview has been posted in its entirety on several websites. (I watched it via a February 14, 2010, post at the “New Zeal” blogspot.) At Occidental, Drew was a Marxist, as he says was true also of Obama. His main goal is to clarify where Obama stood at Occidental, which is certainly not insignificant. That said, he did tell me: “There are a lot of brands of Marxism. That was one of the key ingredients of my argument with the young Barack Obama. I see evidence of [a] continuing commitment to Marxist ideology every time President Obama traces the furor of the public to underlying economic conditions and inevitable changes taking place in society. (As he did recently with his complaints about Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.) In the Marxist model, the economy is the driving force behind change in the other spheres of society.” Source: April 5, 2010, e-mail from John Drew.

  20. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 96–97.

  21. In February 2010, both Columbia and Occidental were contacted for this book, specifically in order to view letters of recommendation written on Obama's behalf. The communications director at Occidental said that under FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), the college needed written permission from the president himself to release his records. Columbia simply stated that the records were “unavailable” and “not public.”

  22. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 76–77, 90–91, and 97.

  23. Gerald Horne, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” PoliticalAffairs.net, March 28, 2007.

  24. Quoted in Herb Romerstein and Cliff Kincaid, “Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection,” Accuracy in Media, May 2008, posted at AIM.org.

  25. Tidwell, ed., Frank Marshall Davis: Black Moods, Collected Poems, xxviii.

  26. Ibid., xxxv. The letter was likely written around 1944. It seems no earlier than 1943 and no later than 1945. As Tidwell notes, the letter is not dated, which, as any historian knows, is quite common in biographical research. Tidwell has the letter in his possession. He includes a “Note on the Text” that discusses Davis's undated letters.

  27. Kincaid told me in an e-mail that the files were released very quickly after he requested them, suggesting to him that the file had been previously processed through an earlier FOIA request, perhaps submitted by a Davis
biographer like John Edgar Tidwell. Source: June 12, 2010, e-mail correspondence with Cliff Kincaid.

  28. See http://www.usasurvival.org/marshall.fbi.files.html.

  29. See http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/davis.FBI.File.pdf.

  30. Ibid. In particular, see exhibits 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, and 15.

  31. See page 59 of the set of files available here: http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Frank_Marshall_ Davis_5.pdf.

  32. See Herb Romerstein, “Who Was Frank Marshall Davis?” posted at http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/who.frank.marshall.davis.pdf. This information is on the first page (fifth paragraph) of Romerstein's report, following an introduction by Kincaid.