One of the few in TV news to hammer Barack Obama's extremist associations before the 2008 election, Sean Hannity still wonders aloud why so many Americans overlooked Obama's astonishing three-decades-long immersion in leftist radicalism and elected him president.
Likewise, here at WND we have focused relentlessly, month after month, on Obama's subversive, anti-American associations, activities and statements. Besides our daily news coverage, our senior reporter Jerome Corsi wrote the No. 1 New York Times best seller "The Obama Nation," exposing Obama's disturbing past way before November '08. And just recently, another of our top reporters, Aaron Klein, wrote the mega-exposé "The Manchurian President," which quickly hit No. 1 on Amazon's nonfiction list and was just named to the New York Times list.
Question: With irrefutable evidence of – to quote Klein's subtitle – "Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists" being trumpeted nonstop on talk radio, the Internet and Fox News, why do millions of Americans to this day still approve of Obama and the job he's doing as president? Why do they blithely "space out" when confronted with the reality of socialist and communist influences in his administration, even as he daily pursues his plan to transform the freest nation on earth into a European-style welfare state?
Many will correctly blame this widespread incomprehension on our long-term exposure to progressive propaganda emanating from an education establishment and news/entertainment media shaped overwhelmingly by the left.
But one particular propaganda campaign, one enduring myth, has proven so fantastically successful that it has intimidated critics of the left's disastrous ideology into virtual silence. The myth-narrative goes like this: Although it's never really been proven that communists infiltrated the U.S. government, people who nevertheless make such hurtful accusations are evil, "witch-hunters," "red-baiters," "commie-under-every-bed" fear-mongers and – the king of all such epithets – "McCarthyites."
Presto. Like a magic spell from "Harry Potter," all leftists need do to instantly make criticisms vanish and detractors cringe is to intone the powerful incantation, "This is McCarthyism all over again" or "This is worse than McCarthy."
Case in point: Check out Bertha Lewis, shameless CEO of the scandal-plagued ACORN, loudly praising socialism to her audience, while holding up the enchanted "McCarthyism" shield to protect her and her criminal organization from all criticism.
"We are living," she warns her listeners, with appropriate fear and loathing in her voice, "in a time which is going to dwarf the McCarthy era."
"The McCarthy era." Quick review: That's when the supposedly evil Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, back in the 1950s, claimed the U.S. government was riddled with communists. Ever since then, the term "McCarthyism" has been synonymous with making baseless accusations and ruining innocent people's lives.
But wait. Wasn't it actually true that our government was full of communists and Soviet spies, some even in highly influential positions?
Once they were finally declassified and made public in 1995, the VENONA files – decoded Cold War-era cables sent from Soviet agents working within the United States to Moscow – proved incontrovertibly that McCarthy was right; there were hundreds of Soviet agents honeycombed in the U.S. government.
As Ann Coulter wrote in her best-seller, "Treason":
Among the most notorious Soviet spies in high-level positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations – now proved absolutely, beyond question by the Soviet cables – were Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to President Roosevelt and White House liaison to the State Department under both Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, U.S. representative on the International Monetary Fund; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.
But we're supposed to forget all that, you see – or else "McCarthyism" will cease to serve as the most powerful and popular defensive weapon in the left's arsenal. Indeed, it's employed at every opportunity:
Liz Cheney, whose group is called "Keep America Safe," recently produced and aired a gutsy TV ad calling attention to the fact that leftist Attorney General Eric Holder brought into the Justice Department nine attorneys who specialized in pro bono representation of terrorist detainees – and refused even to identify all but two of them. In response to her ad, Cheney was condemned as "worse than Joe McCarthy" and of fomenting "The New McCarthyism."
I personally got the "You're worse than Joe McCarthy" treatment last time I was a guest on the "Hannity" TV show. Watch this clip of liberal icon Bob Beckel and me sparring on the "Great American Panel." Because I dared to rattle off specifics of Barack Obama's 30 years of Marxist mentoring, straight out of the public record, Beckel accused me of being "worse than Joe McCarthy" and told me I should apologize to Obama.
(For the record, I have not apologized to Barack Obama for telling the truth. I reserve my apologies for when I actually do something wrong.)
If you attended government schools and a university dominated by leftist instructors, or if you've relied on the fraudulent "mainstream media" for your news over the years, you may not have heard this. But Sen. Joe McCarthy – gasp! – was right in contending that the U.S. government was full of communists.
"Liberal Fascism" author Jonah Goldberg noted in NRO Online that while McCarthy, with his drinking and his rhetorical excesses, was a very flawed messenger and thus easy to criticize, "he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well." Indeed, added Goldberg:
What is a matter of fact – unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact – is that there were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
So where does that leave our cringe-inducing epithet "McCarthyism"? As Coulter explained in "Treason," the left created "a myth to defeat legitimate charges of treason." What Joe McCarthy did was roll up his sleeves, challenge the myth and expose the reality of communist subversion of the U.S. government. "For this," concludes Coulter, "he sacrificed his life, his reputation, his name. The left cut down a brave man, but not before the American people heard the truth."
So, to answer Hannity's musings as to why more people haven't been horrified at Obama's friendship with communist/terrorist Bill Ayers, or his 20-year relationship with his America-hating far-left "spiritual mentor" Jeremiah Wright, let's just remember this: For two generations now we've been conditioned through leftist propaganda in high school, college, the "mainstream media" and Hollywood, not just to trust big government and distrust free-enterprise capitalism, but to recoil in abject horror at the very thought of mentioning that someone in high office is a socialist, or a Marxist, or a communist.
I mean, that would be worse than Joe McCarthy!