Rarely has a book-length compilation of conspiracy theories this comically stupid been simultaneously so completely boring. As the title (The Manchurian Candidate: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists) indicates, this book is a predictable, unoriginal conspiracy theory that tells us Barack Obama is a secret radical out to destroy America.
According to a self-promoting article on WorldNetDaily calling the book's appearance on the New York Times bestseller list "Obama's nightmare," "With more than 800 citations, the brand-new, autographed [sic] title from WND senior reporter and WABC radio host Aaron Klein bills itself as the most exhaustive investigation ever performed into Obama's political background and radical ties." Wow! 800 citations and autographed! It must be true. Of course, when most of those 800 citations are to other crackpot right-wingers, it's hard to give this book any credibility. It's exhausting, not exhaustive. The bad writing, the endless repetition of discredited conspiracy theories, all of it has been said before in more interesting ways by equally crazy people.
Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily, with the help of fellow conspiracy theorist Brenda Elliott, has penned a meandering and implausible book based on the theory that Obama is like the Manchurian candidate, a secret radical programmed by evil forces to undermine America.
Klein claims, "the establishment news media seemed to publish more exposes on those few individuals who did investigate Obama than on the presidential candidate himself."(viii) Really? As even Klein admits on the same page, "The Bill Ayers story would eventually become a prominent election theme."(viii) The massive attention in the media (albeit mostly on right-wing talk shows and blogs) to these ridiculous conspiracy theories about Obama shows the power of conservative control over the media, not some plot to keep Obama's "secrets" hidden.
Most of the book is a re-hash of conspiracy theories by better writers, so Klein desperately hypes every "new" piece of evidence. The book touts "his previously overlooked early childhood education in a radical church with ties to Bill Ayers' organization."(xi)
In the chapter titled, "Obama Tied to Bill Ayers....At Age 11!" Klein notes that Obama attended Sunday school at his grandparents' church, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.(4) So what does that have to do with Ayers? Absolutely nothing, it turns out. In 1969, while Obama was still living in Indonesia, the church gave sanctuary to some U.S. Military deserters who had been recruited to resist the draft by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Ayers was involved in SDS, and later would help destroy it.
As big revelations go, this is utterly insignificant. There's no evidence that Ayers had anything to do with the deserters. There's certainly no evidence that Obama's Sunday school taught him anything out of the ordinary.
But Klein has other evidence: he reports that the church was involved "in activating a local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union."(7) Oh, the horrors. Imagine how terrible it is to have a president who went to Sunday school as a kid at a church that helped an organization protect civil liberties. In the realm of "guilt by association" attacks, this one fails completely at both the guilt and the association.
Some of the guilt by association is just baffling to follow. Klein devotes four pages to denouncing "Ayers associate" Tom Hayden because Hayden organized the national group Students for Economic Democracy, and the Occidental College chapter co-sponsored an anti-Apartheid rally where Obama spoke. Klein admits that it is "unknown" whether Obama was a member of the group, but even if he was, it amounts to zero connection to Hayden in any case.(25)
And then Klein goes all "birther" on us: "the facts surrounding the politician's birth and childhood years are clouded in mystery."(65) Klein admits that there is no "convincing" evidence to prove that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii, although he claims the questions are "to this day unanswered."(70) But he has an even crazier theory than most of the birthers: "It is undisputed that Obama's father was not a U.S. Citizen, a fact that should have led to congressional debate about whether Obama is eligible under the United States Constitution to serve as president."(67) Yes, Klein actually believes that, contrary to all logic and legal rulings, the children of immigrants born in the U.S. are not U.S. citizens. This is birther craziness on steroids.
According to Klein, Obama's first book was probably created by Ayers: "Ayers may have ghostwritten most of the work."(14) Klein relies on Jack Cashill's comical "evidence" comparing the books by Ayers and Obama: "sections of both books that use a [sic] many similar nautical metaphors, like the use of the word 'ship' or descriptions of the sea, to denote feelings."(15) So, Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography because it uses the word "ship." Yes, case closed, no doubt about that.
Klein then cites Christopher Andersen's book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage, which goes even further in claiming Ayers' authorship. Andersen cites Cashill as his proof, but Cashill admits that Andersen "clearly has access to inside information that I did not have." Rather than concluding that Andersen made up a fake story, Klein instead reaches another conclusion: that Michelle Obama might have been Andersen's source.(16)
These funny conspiracy theories help obscure how dull this book really is, and how the repetition of the same discredited ideas wears on the reader. Even the ending of the book is lackluster, a tacked-on distortion of the health care bill. When your book's concluding sentence is, "At this juncture, the two versions of the health care bill must next be reconciled into a single document and voted on again," it shows how scatterbrained and ultimately pointless this whole book is.
The fear of a black president is here, too, as when Klein worries about "the milieu of black radicals in which Obama has traveled."(100) One of those fellow travelers is Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has guilt by job title association as "director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute," and as Klein helpfully points out, Du Bois was "a card-carrying communist and a socialist sympathizer."(100
Louis Farrakhan, naturally enough, gets substantial attention, but for the strangest reason. In 2008, Obama gave a speech titled "A More Perfect Union" (full disclosure: that's also the subtitle of my updated book about Obama). Klein writes, "The title of Obama's speech, curiously, was also the main theme of Farrakhan's keynote address at the 1995 Million Man March, attended by both Obama and Wright."(94) Klein goes on to quote at length Farrakhan's analysis of the phrase. What Klein doesn't seem to understand is that the phrase doesn't come from Farrakhan, it comes from the preamble to the US Constitution, and just about every politician has invoked it.
Klein writes, in a truly hilarious line, "We do not believe in 'guilt by association' nor in 'the politics of personal destruction.'"(xii) If they don't believe in it, then it's strange to write a book consisting of nothing but that.
Much of Klein's book reads like a game of Six Degrees of Separation from Bill Ayers. SEIU head Andy Stern received training at the Midwest Academy, which was co-founded by Paul and Heather Booth, who were members of Students for a Democratic Society, which Ayers was a member of.(128) As conspiracy theories go, it's just laughably stupid.
Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, Klein explains, married the son of Vernon Jarrett in 1983, and Vernon Jarrett in the 1940s "frequented the South Side Community Art Center, which was dominated by communists."(156) This is quite a conspiracy theory: Obama is guilty of radical ties because one of his friends married a guy whose father was linked to an art center 60 years ago where some communists were seen.
Cass Sunstein is condemned for a paper in which "he uses terms such as 'distributive justice' several times."(179) Rosa Brooks, a Pentagon advisor, is denounced for being the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich and "reportedly named after communist heroine Rosa Luxemburg."(183) Klein repeats the common right-wing lie that Mark Lloyd of the FCC argued that private broadcasters should pay a fee equal to their total operating costs to fund public broadcasting.(189)
Some of the attacks are humorously off the mark. Klein quotes one right-wing blogger who mentions "Community Party USA 'front activist' and long-time Obama supporter, Alice Palmer,"(257) apparently unconcerned about any evidence showing that Palmer is a communist, or the fact that Obama forced Palmer out of her State Senate position and was disliked by her because of it.
Klein claims that Project VOTE!, where Obama led a Chicago voter registration campaign in 1992 was all part of the infamous Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory which "sought the downfall of U.S. Capitalism."(110) The link between registering voters and destroying capitalism is, needless to say, never explained.
Ironically, Klein calls Assistant to the President for Science and Technology John Holdren a "conspiracy theorist" for reasons that are never explained.(172) But it's Klein who is the real conspiracy theorist.
In what may be the most absurd claim of a preposterous book, Klein wrote: "Obama became the Manchurian candidate product of" ACORN and the Weather Underground.(109) This is what passes for best-selling intellectual analysis on the right today: a mish-mash of incoherent conspiracy theories "proven" by footnotes to a series of lunatics and idiot bloggers, all of it aimed at a voracious audience of conservatives who want to believe anything evil about Barack Obama, even when it makes no sense at all.
Crossposted at ObamaPolitics. John K. Wilson is the author of President Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union and a forthcoming book about Rush Limbaugh.