A Misguided Attack on Stanley Kurtz’s ‘Radical-in-Chief’ and Other anti-Obama Books
I knew that Stanley Kurtz’s new and important book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, would be the subject of attack. I predicted that at first, the mainstream press would either ignore it or, if they found that they could not, would seek to go on the offense by comparing it to the score of rather knee-jerk screeds written against Obama by other conservatives, many of them rather easy to ridicule, dismiss, and demonize.
Clearly, Kurtz has his hands full, having to try to distinguish his contribution from the rest of the pack and hope that it is taken seriously. I have tried to do my own on its behalf by writing a serious review of the book that will be published in the next issue of National Review. I hope readers buy that issue if they do not subscribe, and take my arguments about it into consideration. I go so far as to write in my conclusion that if the work Kurtz has done for this book had been able to be accomplished during the 2008 campaign, “Barack Obama would not have been elected President because he is simply not who he claimed to be.”
Those who actually bother to read Kurtz’s book know immediately that he bases his analysis on rigorous scholarship, a careful look through the archives of various political groups with which our president has been associated with and influenced by throughout the years. No one else has done this work. The other volumes criticize Obama by talking about his record and his views. Some of the authors easily score points — after all, the Obama administration is not hard to criticize — but at times, they are way off base and issue arguments not backed up by real evidence.
Now, the centrist conservative commentator John Avlon has written a column he calls “The Obama Haters Book Club.” I usually find Avlon to be someone who makes shrewd and sound observations, and I have in past blog posts linked to him and singled out some of his earlier articles for praise.
What he does in this particular column, however, is purposely link together virtually every anti-Obama book as all being the same. As he puts it, “at this point the titles all blur together in a manic mad-lib, always accusing Obama of something close to war-crimes against the American people.” He next attacks the motives of the authors, writing, “You might not be able to distinguish between the self-published pathology and the semi-professional polemics — they are all fear-mongering for personal and partisan profit. And that’s the larger point.”
So all the authors, Avlon suggests, are writing only for fame and profit, and do not even believe their own arguments. He does not seem to realize that what is sad is that some of the bad books in his list contain analysis by its writers that its authors do believe. I wonder if Avlon would like it if someone responded to his own recent book Wingnuts with a similar argument.
My comments are exactly the same about Stanly Kurtz’ body of work. I tried on every front to get my friends to see the evidence SK had uncovered before the election
but most felt I was a kook! He has proven beyond a doubt that Obama is a radical.
We must wake up!!! Thank you,Stanley Kurtz! This is the biggest sham pulled on the
American people!!
Obama said he was a marxist in his own ghost-written autobiography. He was raised by marxists. He has only associated all his life with marxists. He is governing as a marxist. He has hired dozens of outspoken marxists. He has taken over the auto industry, the financial industry, the student loan industry and the health care industry. He denigrates free-market countries, and praises marxist countries. He speech is peppered with marxist terminology. The evidence is beyond overwhelming. The only question is what flavor of marxist that he is.
What is there to argue about?
Thinking he is anything other than a marxist is equivalent to thinking OJ was framed or that 9/11 was an inside job.
I can understand people being reluctant to say it, but to deny the overwhelmingly obvious is a sign of insanity, as well as suicidal.
You are absolutely correct!
Liberals hate it when they’re alking about “A,B & C” and you jump to “X, Y & Z.” They like to do everything with sinister incrementalism; boil the frog slowly, and it infuriates them to know that people are on to them.
My lefty friends laugh their heads off at Glenn Beck: “Oh, it’s the John Birch ‘Red Scare’ of the sixties all over again!” And yet they defend socialism and communism a few minutes later. It’s the same every time: 1.) “Obama’s not a communist! That’s a hyperbolic scare tactic!” 2.) “Communism’s great! It takes care of people the same way Obama wants to.”
Their problem with labelling Obama as a communist is merely about timing. They don’t want it revealed too soon. Why, that’s like telling a child that there’s broccoli in something before you get him to eat it! …And the left always treats the people like children.
There’s that Political Correctness thingy raising its fat, empty, paper mache head again; calling Obama a Socialist, instead of a Communist. Sheesh.
I don’t why Avalon is upset, 55 % of Americans think Obama is black while 45 % of Americans think he’s just another Harvard lawyer with a penchant for left wing values, flavored with a bit of reverse racism, all historically white European conceptual innovations. Oh well.
Avlon is not a “centrist conservative”; he’s one of those wishy-washy “radical centrists,” essentially a latter-day Ross Perot without the jug-ears and cornpone accent. For him, the confused, illogical, disengaged, uninformed, status-obsessed, conflict-averse, highly-suggestible and easily-led “independent” suburban and yuppie voter is the lodestar of politics – not just because these doofuses decide elections (which they do, sadly), but because, in his view, they’re metaphysically right. When you listen to Avlon closely, he splits every difference and eludes every difficult question, all on the way to ending up in the Leftist camp on most policy questions. Mr. Radosh gives Avlon far more respect than he deserves.
Don’t judge a book by its cover or its title.
Except in this case.
“they are all fear-mongering for personal and partisan profit.”
Standard Stalinist boilerplate. Can’t Avlon even come up with a new lie? Does he have to repeat the tropes of his grandparents?
I bought Kurtz’s excellent book and read it in two days. Well worth the money and the read. Avlon’s article is much ado about nothing. How many anti-Palin books are on the market? All that effort and dead trees for what… a former Wasilla mayor and 1/2 term governor? You don’t have to look any farther than the book covers presented in the Avlon article. How do you compare Kurtz’s well-researched book to Laura Ingraham’s comedic “Obama Diaries”?
“We can’t expect the American people to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they wake up one day to find that they have Communism.” – Nikita Kruschev
“By their fruits shall ye know them” true then, truer now.
It’s also important to note that this book is not just about Barak Obama. The last part of the title, “the Untold Story of American Socialism”, is also important. The nature of socialist theory, strategy and tactics in America have changed in several ways from the sometimes-frightening, unsuccessful approaches of the late 1960s until today. It is critical for people to understand these changes if they want to understand today’s political landscape.
Some of the President’s actions which don’t quite seem to make sense (like his apparent attempts to drive certain types of voters into the Republican Party by demonizing or insulting them) might be recognized as either habitual or deliberate, rather than irrational, after reading this book.
Stanley Kurtz was one of my favorite writers a few years back, then went off radar. I will buy his book in the spirit of ‘know thine enemy’ asap. Boiling the frog on low simmer has finally got the critical mass of independents to open their eyes and jump out of the crock pot, but ObamaCare may have inflicted permanent damage.
The problem with Radosh’s piece starts in its opening words and very premise, that John Avlon is a “centrist conservative” and not a liberal Republican.
Avlon is a liberal nitwit, and the next words he writes that accurately reflect the fundamentals of conservatism at play in our national politics will be his first. Radosh is a complete fool for thinking otherwise.
rather knee-jerk screeds written against Obama by other conservatives,
Or maybe we should just stop being snobs. Sean Hannity was the first and loudest to come out about 0′s roots and he was right on everything, and he gave air to some of these “screeds”, which, btw, appear to be correct on just about everything.
A certain type of conservative ignored him, however, because he was, well, Sean Hannity; and, of course, he was shouting loudly which is just something not done.
Further, we have to go recognize that JournOlist really happened and that possibility if not likelihood that our critics are dishonest.
And for the record, Kudos to Stanley Kurtz.
John Avlon is a lightweight even by Daily Beast standards. His female counterpart is Meghan McCain, John’s plump, unaccomplished daughter.
When liberals can’t silence you,they then try to systematically tear you apart. These people who are supposed to be “tolerant”and “accepting”sure don’t live up to the hype.
Why is Stanley Kurtz attacking the US’s first African-American president? Allow me to answer that using Kurtz’s own guilt-by-association method:
Stanley Kurtz is an acolyte of Ernest Lefever, who founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center, of which Kurtz is a Senior Fellow. According to his own brothers, Lefever subscribed to William Shockley’s theories that blacks are genetically inferior. Ergo, Stanley Kurtz is a white supremacist. So using the Kurtz method, the motive behind his book is now clear.
What a balanced comparison!
Ernest Lefever seems to have left the Ethics and Public Policy Center while Stanley Kurtz was still in school. Kurtz joined this organization many years after Lefever left it. On the other hand, Kurtz describes how Obama was directly mentored and financed by various socialists or socialist groups over a protracted period of time. You’re grasping at sort of a thin straw, aren’t you?
You seem to be seriously suggesting that:
1) allegations by two brothers that Lefever accepted parts of William Shockley’s ideas about low-skill blacks and whites out-breeding high-skill blacks and whites are JUST AS RELEVANT to Kurtz’ personal beliefs as 2) Barak Obama’s partially-hidden, long personal and political associations with a number of socialists are to Obama’s political beliefs and political agenda.
Of course, there is an alternative explanation for Obama’s political dependence on socialists, namely, that he was just using them for his own personal advancement. But that still leaves us without a clear picture of what motivates some of Obama’s actions as President. Do you have other explanations for his close associations with so many socialists?
Incidentally, if you want to call people worried about the over-breeding of low-skill blacks “white supremacists”, you should perhaps look into the history of Planned Parenthood. Some of the sentiments along these lines within this organization are quite recent.
“You seem to be seriously suggesting….”
I wasn’t “seriously suggesting” anything. I was demonstrating why a book that’s being taken far too seriously is a bunch of guilt-by-association crap.
So, you think that Obama is not trying to take the country in a more socialist direction? Do you believe that:
1. All those “associations” had no effect on Obama’s ideology – he was just dabbling
2. He needed their help to promote his political career, but he’s got his own agenda. He uses political associations without being influenced by them.
Or what? What do you understand Obama’s political philosophy to be?
Considering that we are all on a two-way street. One way leads to some form of statism and the other leads away from it. So Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism are all on the way to the State is
God. Capitalism, Individualism, Anarchism are heading the other way. All ideologies fit into this scheme. So it does’t really matter if Obama is called a socialist or a liberal. Just what kind of statist he is will be revealed over time.
A simple truth, Obama said to judge him by who he surrounds himself with. Well I have, and now his followers would have me believe he is not a Socialist. For that to be true Obama must have lied, in either case I see no reason to trust him.
Mr. Radosh, how are we to take anything you write seriously going forward if you think John Avlon is a centrist conservative commentator? And you believe this after reading his columns in The Daily Beast and his book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America? And is it usual for a centrist conservative commentator to use polls that even Markos Moulitas admits are fake?
Obama’s not a socialist; he’s a fascist. So’s his wife: “Barack will require you to work!”
It’s like Mussolini married Marie Antoinette.
I’m 160 pages into this book. Very intertaining. I have written many notes and research it. These are are cold facts and kinda chilling.
The code words, class warfare, enemies and stealth. All there.
Effectively, I don’t know if which is about to get the job done for me, but surely worked for you! Outstanding post!