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Monday, September 10, 2012

GOP convention coverage:
none dare say 'Communist'
From Accuracy in Media:
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-other-anti-obama-film/

Newz from Limbo comments:
Newz from Limbo has never claimed that President Obama is a communist. (However, his support of the official pack of lies concerning the attacks of 9/11 does not speak well of him.)

But the issue brought up by Accuracy in Media has less to do with whether a film shown at the GOP convention unfairly smears the President as a suspected communist, than it does with the decision of mainstream media decision to talk about one anti-Obama film while giving the other the silent treatment, as if one film is more newsworthy than the other.

The reason for the choice is most likely the media taboo against mentioning domestic communism.

The film, Dreams of My Real Father, attempts to document the idea that Obama's biological father was Frank Marshall Davis, a leftist who took the 5th Amendment on communism in the 1950s. Marshall, according to AIM writer Cliff Kincaid, had been a father figure to Obama during his youth.
http://www.obamasrealfather.com/

Interestingly, the Davis controversy is fueled by the Obama birth certificate issue, as Newz from Limbo has reported.
http://conantcensorshipissue.blogspot.com/2012/07/was-obamas-dad-red-birth-record-furor.html

As media professionals well know, the news value of a film being shown at the Republican convention is that one can expect some of the film's charges to be hurled during the campaign. So the decision to focus on one film but not the other appears to be yet another instance of media avoidance of "McCarthyism," no matter how relevant,

And the fact is that mainstream media have in the past had to cope with Communism and radicalism controversies surrounding Obama, giving less of an excuse for spiking the Dreams of My Real Father story.

Some of those controversies:

# During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose regarding Barack Obama's contact with Bill Ayers, then a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist organization responsible for the bombing of the United States Capitol Building and the Pentagon in the 1970s.

Ayers served on two nonprofit boards with Obama. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a gathering at their home in 1995, where Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate. Obama denied any close link to Ayres.

Dohrn, a law professor at Northwestern University School, is also a former leader of the Weather Underground.

While a terrorist, Dohrn read a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, and was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, where she remained for three years.

The Ayres-Dohrn matter erupted on the national stage during a 2008 presidential debate when ABC newsman and debate moderator George Stephanopoulas questioned Obama about it. Taking up the cue of the former press and political adviser to President Clinton, Hillary Clinton then hammered on the issue. John McCain's campaign later took up the theme with attack ads and robocalls.

# In June 2008, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and others focused on what they saw as the leftism of a government-subsidized outfit known as ACORN, for which Obama had been a community organizer. After covert videos showing ACORN workers giving advice on how to evade the law, Congress unleashed invesitgations and the group folded.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/06/25/the-acorn-obama-knows/

# Obama hit the roof over Fox News commentator Glenn Beck's exposure in August 2009 of the fact that a top White House aide, Van Jones, had been a Communist Party activist.

Though most mainline media ignored the communism issue, Jones suddenly was too hot a potato for the White House job. However, the New York Daily News and other newspapers focused on Jones having once signed a petition urging a reinvestigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, assailing his fitness on that ground, and ignoring Jones' Communist past. How a person with such a background came to be hired by the White House was never answered in mainstream media.

A YouTube video of Beck's expose has been removed by Google, which notifies searchers thus:
"Glenn Beck exposes Color of...
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimants including:
*ABC New
*FOX News Network
Sorry about that."

# In 2011, alternative conservative media unearthed the fact that Obama's CIA chief had warmly endorsed two persons closely aligned with the Communist movement. Mainstream media maintained strict silence and Panetta, a former top man in Bill Clinton's administration, was duly confirmed as Obama's defense secretary.
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/who-checked-out-leon-panetta/

Panetta, as a Calfornia congressman representing Santa Cruz, inserted a tribute in the April 11, 1984, Congressional Record to one of his constituents, Lucy Haessler, calling her a “woman of peace” for her work in the pro-Soviet Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Panetta said that Haessler participated in “peace conferences” sponsored by the Women’s International Democratic Federation “in France, the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany." At the time, Poland and East Germany were members of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact.

Panetta’s praise for Haessler got the attention at the time of Human Events, a national conservative weekly, which noted that the women's federation “appears to take the Soviet line on virtually every issue that comes up, ranging from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and yellow rain [communist chemical warfare] to the issue of new U.S. missiles in Europe."

Panetta told Human Events that he was unaware of the extremist nature of the women's league and other groups, countering: “Let me tell you something. I don’t know if you know about Santa Cruz, but Santa Cruz is a center for people who’ve been real activists in all kinds of organizations. If I started doing those kinds of checks on people who help out…I’d never stop. It’s just that kind of place.”

Yet Panetta's tribute to Hugh De Lacy, a man who had refused to tell Congress whether he was a communist, was inserted into the Congressional Record in 1983. Panetta, in fact, applauded De Lacy for standing up to "McCarthyism."

The series of “Dear Hugh” and “Dear Leon” letters discovered by conservative journalist Trevor Loudon in the Hugh De Lacy papers at the University of Washington shows that Panetta had had a working and cordial relationship with him. In fact, Panetta provided De Lacy, identified as a key contact of a communist spy ring, with sensitive documents.

De Lacy was never prosecuted for espionage. His communism, however, was attested by John Abt, longtime general counsel of the Communist Party, in his memoirs.

"Judging from the tone of some of the letters," AIM charges, "De Lacy appears to be telling Panetta what to say and do as a sitting member of Congress.

Many details provided by AIM.

# Further writings on Davis:
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=31194

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