My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves | Beware The Man Behind Obama

Beware The Man Behind Obama

By Bernie Reeves

Paul Theroux is an excellent travel writer. But he is also an example of the calcification of Old Left doctrine that never seems to break and disappear in the euphemistic dustbin of history. In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, his latest adventure, Theroux revisits his 1973 journey from London to the Far East and back through Russia. And everywhere he travels, he oozes the same anti-American vitriol that welled up within his soul on his first trip during the heady days of the Student Movement and the Vietnam War. Unsuspecting victims from Budapest to Uzbekistan to India to Cambodia are regaled with the devastations of the Bush administration and America in general.

In Vietnam, Theroux hits his stride: “It was possible to see in the photographs that one of the aims of the American generals was to flatten Vietnam, to burn it to the ground in order to flush out the Viet Cong — the fury, the revenge, the despair, the irrationality, the nihilism that possesses the demoralized warrior when he sees there is no way out. And we failed.” I’d say Theroux failed too. It’s all evil if it’s American, but the underlying point is that nothing changes for people like Theroux — and abusing the facts of history is OK if the cause is righteous.
He reaches his apogee of anti-American angst in Russia. In response to a sadly typical recounting of torture, slave labor and murder under the Soviets by an elderly Russian, Theroux offers: “The paradox is that at exactly the same time — the 1950s — we had McCarthy in the US persecuting people for sympathizing with the Soviet Union.” America with McCarthy in full throat hardly compares to the 20 million murders under the Soviet Union, except to people like Theroux.

And there are plenty of people like Theroux still around, mainly on campus and in the arts and media — and certainly he and his ilk are welcome to their views. The problem is their mind-set never alters, no matter the course of human events. Vietnam is finally under the microscope of history, and the American side is receiving the credence it deserves — for example the excellent book Triumph Forsaken by Mark Moyar that draws on newly declassified documents to present a full account of American motives and strategy.

And the collapse of the Soviet Union and the documents now available certainly put the lie to the idealism of the Left. And as for McCarthy, it turns out not only was he correct that the US government was riddled with Soviet spies in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, the senator from Wisconsin actually undershot the number by the hundreds. And now Morton Sobell — arrested with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and sentenced to 19 years in prison — confessed only last month that they were all indeed guilty of stealing atomic secrets for the Soviets. As the innocence of the Rosenbergs is a cardinal truth to the Left, you’d think one of them would own up and throw in the towel.

Alas, they won’t and like Theroux are disingenuously unrepentant as their world view crumbles and their heroes collapse under scrutiny. That’s why the Left has no credibility. They do have tenacity, but of the obsessive-compulsive variety — a political insanity that no amount of treatment can alter. And like their heroes of the old Communist regimes, those who don’t agree with their rigid views — and refuse “re-education” — are banished from their lives.
That’s why Barack Obama worries me. He is a homunculus patched together by the self-same Left, using damaged and discredited parts strewn along the pathways of recent history. And who is the Frankenstein lurking behind Obama and his strident wife Michelle? The despicable and dangerous Bill Ayers, the leader of the Weather Underground domestic terror gang of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Ayers got off for his various crimes — the kind we now use water-boarding to extract confessions about — yet he still hates America, calling it “evil and racist.” And he has, of course, no remorse for his views while all around him everything he believes in has collapsed in the light of reality. Like many of his fellow travelers from the earliest days of the Comintern, he has left the company of informed people who can challenge his views and infiltrated the educational system in order to manipulate the behavior of children to create the socialist mind-sets of tomorrow. He and his outrageous wife and fellow radical Bernadine Dohrn both enjoy sinecures — he at the University of Illinois-Chicago and she at the Northwestern School of Law — where they continue their crimes against the country that nurtures them.
Ayers enlisted Obama in his intrigues to use foundation grants to set up school programs to propagandize kids and social outreach schemes to influence neighborhood political campaigns. Thus, while Obama is an attractive candidate on the surface, underneath he is a creation of the discredited radical Left, the stealth weapon to resurrect the doctrines of a system that disparages the individual and, in its extreme manifestations as communism, murdered 100 million people in 75 years.
I realize things are tough in the capitalist world today, but the answer isn’t Barack Obama, the spokesman for the discredited manifesto of the Left.

Notes From La-la Land
We need Pat McCrory in Raleigh. Bev Perdue is a good person and I like her, but after eight years of mismanagement and scandal during the Easley administration, change is needed, serious change that includes management skills to right the ship of state. Most every department in state government is suffering from staggering inefficiency. And it’s been deadly. Due to lack of controls at the State Parole Board, the beautiful and gifted Eve Carson was brutally murdered. That’s reason enough to bring in a new broom to sweep state government clean.
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“You come down on vacation and go home on probation” is how one local put it describing police tyranny in the Morehead City-Atlantic Beach community. Everyone’s talking about it: kids being ripped out of cabs for breathalyzer tests; cops hidden in every nook and cranny; tickets issued for marginal infractions; and the overall sense you aren’t welcome there anymore. And this is the beach, where people go to relax — and pay for all the town services with purchases and property taxes. Go to www.metronc.com and click on my online-only column Between Issues and read what happened to me.
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Yuri Nosenko, the Soviet spy who came over to the West in 1964 with information that the KGB had nothing to do with the JFK assassination — setting off one of the most heated debates in CIA history — died last month. The Agency management decided he was an honest defector, but Pete Bagley, the man who handled Nosenko’s defection, still maintains Nosenko was a double agent “plant” sent to the US to spread disinformation. Bagley’s 2007 book Spy Wars set off a firestorm that still rages, including his appearance as a special guest at the 5th Raleigh Spy Conference in March 2008. Go to www.raleighspyconference.com for more.