A MAOIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE

When that little boy was coached to ask Obama "why do people hate you?", maybe a more accurate question would have been "Why do you hate America?". When you keep spending more money than you make, most intelligent people know it will lead to financial ruin.

So, bring down the country you hate, and "transform" it into the banana republic you vision it should be. In order to do that, you will need to apologize to the world for our short comings, kiss up to all dictators, insult our allies, and fill the White House with Mao Tse-Tung admirers. PajamasMedia writes:


A Maoist in the White House

The greatest mass murderer in history. How much more of this can we take?

by Roger Kimball, October 16, 2009

Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not “progressives.” They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.

Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer.

In a speech before high school students last June, Dunn spoke passionately about her two favorite political philosophers, “the two people I turn to most” for answers to important questions like “how to do things that have never been done before.” Who are these paragons? One was Mother Teresa. Dunn didn’t have much to say about her. Most of her enthusiasm was lavished upon her other favorite fount of political wisdom: Mao Tse-Tung.

Mao Tse-Tung. That would be the deviant monster who, quite apart from his disgusting personal life, engineered the mass murder of anywhere from 50 to over 100 million people. Estimates vary so widely because murder on that wholesale scale is difficult to tabulate, especially in a country as backwards as China was under Mao’s long reign. But there is little doubt that Mao has the grisly distinction of being the greatest mass murderer in history.

Yet this is the man that one of Obama’s closest advisors commends to an audience with warmth and enthusiasm. In 1947, she tells her audience, Chiang Kai-Shek seemed to hold all the cards: he had the army, the airforce, and yet Mao went on to victory, telling people, as Anita Dunn told her listeners, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Don’t believe me? Listen:

N.B.: Anita Dunn is not just an Obama hanger-on. She is part of his inner circle, one of his top aides, along with David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel, and Robert Gibbs. What does it mean that someone in that position proffers one of the greatest monsters the world has ever seen for emulation?

Anita Dunn calls Mao a “political philosopher.” In fact, as a real philosopher, the late, great Leszek Kolakowski, understood, Mao’s real achievement was as “one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century.” His violent peasant revolution mouthed Marxist slogans, but at its core was less Marxist than a particularly rebarbative form of anarchic and anti-intellectual tyranny. “The obfuscation of Western admirers of Chinese Communism,” Kolakowski observes toward the end of his magnum opus, Main Currents of Marxism, “is scarcely believable.” I wish he were still here for Anita Dunn.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many American universities, along with some other Western redoubts of privilege and irresponsibility, harbored a few deluded characters who declared themselves Maoists and were fond of toting around his pathetic compendium of absurdity, “The Little Red Book.” These creatures were the sorriest detritus of our own cultural revolution. Some destroyed themselves. Others grew up, in whole or part, and were absorbed by a rich and forgiving society into the tissues of American life. Only now is it clear that some of the most radical and benighted have subsisted long enough in the outer corridors of power to find themselves suddenly translated into its inner sanctum, the White House and other top agencies of the United States government. It is an eventuality that would be risible were it not repulsive and, indeed, frightening.

So, we have a self-professed admirer of Mao Tse-Tung in a top job at the White House. Where does it end? Where?

Follow up:

The Maoist Explains Herself: Egg, Face, at the White House
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn tries her best to spin her way out of her praise of Chairman Mao.
by Roger Kimball, October 18, 2009

Damage control time!

–She didn’t mean it.
–She was only quoting a Republican operative.
–Fox News is mean to Democrats.
–Glenn Beck is an extremist.
–The President is trying to clean up a big mess left by George Bush.
–Can’t we just change the subject?

When Glenn Beck aired a video of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Chairman Mao — one of her “two favorite political philosophers” — in front of an audience of high school students, the conservative blogosphere lit up like a non-denominational sustainably harvested Kwanza tree. I wrote about it [above]. Andrew McCarthy added some historical background here. Peter Wehner had this to say. Et, I need hardly say, cetera.

There’s one part of the left-wing reaction to the obloquy heaped upon Anita Dunn that should not be allowed to go unchallenged. It might go like this: “George Bush quoted Mao [or Stalin, or Hitler, or some other bad guy]: does that make him a Maoist [or Stalinist, a Nazi, or whatever]?”

As Fausta Wertz points out, Anita Dunn offered a variant of this exculpatory strategy when she claimed, in reaction to the tsunami of criticism her remarks occasioned, that she was only quoting Lee Atwater.

Let’s say that Mr. Atwater had quoted the bit from Mao that Anita Dunn quoted — you fight your war and I’ll fight mine, etc., etc. So what? Lee Atwater did not identify Mao as one of his two favorite political philosophers. He did not stand before a room full of high school students and praise the revolutionary tactics of the greatest mass murderer in history.

Bottom line: it is one thing to quote a tyrant. It is another to endorse his view of the world.

Probably, Anita Dunn would be as horrified as the next person by Mao’s savage wholesale butchery. The same could be said of most of those college students who carried around Mao’s Little Red Book and proclaimed themselves on the side of Revolution. Sure, many exhibited a creepy fascination with violence. But these privileged American kids would have run screaming from the room had they had to confront the merciless slaughter perpetrated by Mao and his merry band of utopians.

That’s neither here nor there. What the left-wing excuse factory wants is for the American people to overlook the radicalism of the people populating Obama’s inner circle, of which Anita Dunn is a prominent member. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me once again remind readers of what Obama promised in his campaign. I don’t mean the long string of broken promises about helping the middle class, pulling out troops from Iraq, prosecuting the war in Afghanistan with vigor, etc. Those were just campaign promises, i.e., vote-getting expedients that events have led Obama to renege on.

No, I mean the one big promise that he has every intention of fulfilling: the promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” That is what Obama and his lieutenants are about. They are egalitarians — not, perhaps, quite so radical as Chairman Mao, but (as the case of Anita Dunn shows) they have plenty of admiration for Mao’s goals. Obama himself has criticized the U.S. Constitution for being merely a “charter of negative liberties” that fails to promote “redistributive change.”

This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?


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