Ayers magazine slams authors as 'bottom-feeder'

Chicago Police Department mug shots of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

A socialist journal whose editorial board includes Weatherman terrorist group founders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn has slammed the co-authors of a recently released book investigating Obama, calling one a "bottom-feeder" and the other an "Internet crank."

In These Times, a Chicago-based socialist journal, also suggests the authors were motivated to investigate Obama for racial reasons.

WND senior reporter and WABC radio host Aaron Klein wrote "The Manchurian President" along with researcher Brenda J. Elliott. The subtitle of the book is "Obama's ties to communists, socialists and other anti-American extremists."

In These Times writer Chip Berlet reviewed "Manchurian." He notes Klein's book makes the argument Obama "was groomed for office by a nest of socialists, communists and other dangerous radicals based in Hyde Park, the South Side neighborhood that includes the University of Chicago."

Berlet slams Klein as "fanc[ying] himself a shark of an investigative journalist but is really just another bottom-feeder" and "senior staff reporter for the hard-right conspiracist WorldNetDaily."

Berlet calls Elliott an "Internet crank."

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In These Times quotes Obama associate and extremist activist Marilyn Katz as claiming Klein and Elliott wanted to attack Obama because of his race.

"They can't attack him directly based on his race or his credentials," so they map out "'who-knows-who?'" states Katz.

Katz appears prominently in "Manchurian." She served on a small radical group, Chicagoans Against War & Injustice, that organized a 2002 anti-war rally at which Obama was the keynote speaker. The rally was said to have helped launch Obama's political career.

The rally was also organized by extremist activist Bettylu Saltzman and Marxist Carl Davidson, a founder of the socialist New Party.

"Manchurian" presents evidence Obama was listed as a member of the New Party in 1995.

Katz, meanwhile, served on the finance committee of Obama's presidential campaign.

A Discover the Networks profile said Katz provided "security" for the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, and has known Ayers since the age of 17.

During the infamous Days of Rage riots by the SDS in October 1969, Katz introduced protesters to a new weapon to deploy against the police: a cluster of nails sharpened at both ends and fastened in the center. Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as by excrement. Katz would insist years later that her "guerrilla nails" were merely "a defensive weapon" to prevent "possible bad behavior by the police."

Katz served on the finance committee of Obama's presidential campaign.

Obama initially met Katz through his first job at a law firm run by Judd Miner. The New York Times reported Katz "gave [Obama] entry into another activist network: the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s."

After Obama became president, Katz reportedly tried to convince Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to appoint Valerie Jarrett, Obama's top adviser, to Obama's open U.S. Senate seat. The New York Times describes Katz as "a friend" of Jarrett's who encouraged her to step out of Obama's shadow and "be the sun."

In These Times, meanwhile, suggests again that Klein and Elliott may have been motivated by race.

The book review begins: "Anti-Obama rhetoric also mimics 1960s slurs dubbing Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. a dupe of a communist conspiracy – claims circulated by groups like the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, the white supremacist "Citizens' Councils" and the Ku Klux Klan. Billboards and flyers with this revelation appeared across the South, and postcards were distributed nationwide."

Countered Klein: "This is exactly what the far-left does when they've been exposed. They try to shut down all debate with claims such as 'racism.' The far left is attempting to do the same thing now to the Tea Party movement, which consists of grassroots opposition to Obama's policies."

As of 2009, both Ayers and Dohrn were on the editorial board of In These Times.

The duo became household names after it was exposed they maintained a close relationship for years with Obama.

New name for Obama

"The Manchurian President" is the result of years of investigative reporting by Klein and Elliott. The book contains dozens of meticulously documented but previously unreported scandals about Obama and other White House officials including top czars and senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod.

"The Manchurian President" also unmasks, exclusively, important aspects of Obama's carefully covered-up college years, with new details of his student career at Occidental College and later at Columbia University.

Obama's associations with the Nation of Islam, Black Liberation Theology and black political extremists are also revealed, with extensive new information on the subjects.

Also detailed are Obama's deep ties to ACORN, which are much more extensive than previously documented elsewhere. The book crucially describes how a socialist-led, ACORN-affiliated union helped facilitate Obama's political career and now exerts major influence in the White House.

In one chapter, the book unmasks the extremists among Obama's "czars" and other top advisers, including new information linking Axelrod and Jarrett to communist activists.

The many issues pertaining to Obama's eligibility to be president are carefully examined and given a much more extensive analysis than in previous works, including questions about Obama's birth documentation and whether or not he legally qualifies as a "natural-born citizen" according to the U.S. Constitution.

"The Manchurian President" also exposes how Obama's health-care policy, masked by moderate populist rhetoric, was pushed along and partially crafted by extremists, some of whom reveal in their own words that their principal aim is to achieve corporate socialist goals and a vast increase in government powers.

"I believe this work is crucial to Americans from across the political spectrum," says Klein, "including mainstream Democrats who should be alarmed that their party has been hijacked by an extreme-left fringe bent on permanently changing the party to fit its radical agenda."