Yep, the AP is doing its job as the propaganda wing of team Messiah. They are covering up the facts about one of Obama's mentors (yep, there is another questionable one, but this time it is not a racist "pastor"). Here is the AP story with its poignant treatment of this "mentor":At key moments in his adolescence, Barack Obama could not turn to a father he hardly knew. Instead, he looked to a left-leaning black journalist and poet for advice on living in a world of black and white.
Frank Marshall Davis had his opinions. He once argued that the public schools of his youth prepared neither blacks nor whites for "life in a multiracial, democratic nation." He called hypocrisy "a national trait of American whites." Advocating civil rights amid segregation, Davis wrote in 1949: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution."
The depth of the influence Davis had on the presumptive Democratic nominee is a question. While Davis' leftist politics could allow the candidate's critics to group Davis with Obama friends and acquaintances with allegedly anti-American views, those who knew Davis and his work say his activism was aimed squarely at social injustice.
Ahh, the cute word of social injustice....Hmmm...well here is the real Davis:
Davis was not a “journalist” in any real sense of the term. He was a propagandist and racial agitator for the CPUSA. He was also a recruiter for the communist cause.
Media Bias
The slanted AP story features quotes only from supporters or friends of Davis and Obama. But those picked to defend Davis are themselves interesting.
Ah Quon McElrath, identified as merely “a friend” of Davis’s and quoted by AP, was actually an organizer for the communist-controlled International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The ILWU was led by Davis’s friend and associate, secret CPUSA member Harry Bridges. Davis wrote for a newspaper, the Honolulu Record, which was controlled by the CPUSA and subsidized by the ILWU.
McElrath is quoted by AP as saying, “You could get a lot of strength from a person like Frank who had suffered all the discrimination...that a black man goes through in America.”
Davis went to Hawaii in 1948 after consulting with Bridges and Paul Robeson, another secret CPUSA member. He was a mentor to Obama during the years 1975-1979 and died in 1987.
Obama supporter Dr. Kathryn Takara is quoted in the AP piece as saying that “Frank was part of a group of black vanguard intellectuals.” Takara was the associate producer of a program about Davis that, like the AP story, ignored his CPUSA affiliation. So while she knows a lot about Davis, she seems blind to the evidence of Davis’s service to the communist cause.
In fact, Davis was a hard-core but secret CPUSA member with a history of involvement in CPUSA fronts who was so much of a Stalinist that he opposed U.S. participation in World War II during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but then supported U.S. involvement after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia.
Strangely, the AP article quotes John Edgar Tidwell, a University of Kansas professor who edited Davis’s books, as declining by e-mail an interview request because Davis has allegedly become the victim of a “McCarthy-era strategy of smear tactics and condemnation by association.” Tidwell knows that Davis was a secret CPUSA member and cites evidence in one of his books, including from one of Davis’s private letters, to prove it. Davis refused to deny his CPUSA membership as late as 1956, when a congressional inquiry had named him as a member of the communist underground.
So “McCarthyism” has become telling the truth about communists? Why has Tidwell taken such a low-profile during the presidential campaign when he should have so much to offer about Davis―and possibly Obama? Why the silent treatment?
The Big Question
Not surprisingly, AP leaves many major questions unanswered. The wire service notes that Frank Marshall Davis is referred to in Obama’s book Dreams From My Father “only as Frank.”
But why? What does Obama have to say about this curious omission? Could it have something to do with the fact that, by the time Obama wrote his book, he knew that Davis was a Communist? And that he deliberately covered this up? Or did he know it earlier?
This is the key question: What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Why didn’t AP ask this question? Was it afraid of the answer? Or did the campaign not want to comment?
There are more questions: Other than what was reported in Obama’s book, and by Davis’s friends and associates, what was the nature of the relationship between the two of them? Did Davis ever try to recruit Obama into the communist cause? Did Obama leave this out of his book, too?
AP does note that Davis was “an important influence” on Obama but doesn‘t mention Davis‘s communist views and how he took the Stalinist line before, during, and after World War II.
Some interesting takes in the AIM article. It does seem to question whether the AP fully investigated this story. If a Republican had a mentor who was a nice old man who once was a fascisti in Mussolini's Italy, don't you think they would be all over it, and not just give it the Rockwell treatment? I think so. Some interesting questions that need to be answered....
