July 2, 2012
AMERICAN THINKER
By Paul Kengor
As readers of this site are aware, thanks especially to Jack Cashill's recent posts, I've been researching and writing a book on Barack Obama's mentor,
. That book, titled The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor, just came off the press this week, with an official release date of July 17. I knew that the book would be very relevant, and we've been preparing for media reaction. In the book, I list at length the stunning commonalities in Davis's thinking and communist propaganda work and President Obama's thinking and work. That said, I didn't imagine how relevant it would be in light of the Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare. Let me explain.
Frank Marshall Davis, who lived from 1905 to 1987, mentored Barack Obama in Hawaii in the 1970s. Davis was a devoted communist -- pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, and pro-Mao. His Communist Party number was 47544. Davis did terrible, blatant propaganda work for the international communist movement. In The Communist, I publish rare declassified FBI and Soviet archival documents on Davis and his work. I also present columns written by Davis for Communist Party newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. (Click here for video.)
Among those columns, Frank Marshall Davis wrote a piece on July 21, 1955 calling for taxpayer funding of universal health care. That column was published in the Honolulu Record, which was the Communist Party publication for Hawaii. As Davis put it, he wanted to "see my tax dollars go to insure health care for everybody."
I first read that column over a year ago. Given Davis's linking of "tax" dollars to universal health care, and Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court doing the same in their historic decision, that column suddenly has new meaning (and irony) for me.
In fact, Davis's belief in government-controlled health care went even farther. Prior to his work writing communist propaganda for the Honolulu Record, Frank Marshall Davis had been a columnist and founding editor-in-chief for the Chicago Star (1946-48). The Star was the Communist Party publication for Chicago -- known among locals as the "Red Star." There, Davis's fellow columnists included Senator Claude "Red" Pepper of Florida, who championed a 1947 bill to socialize medicine in the United States. That bill, which failed, was written by Pepper's chief of staff, Charles Kramer.
Who was Charles Kramer? Kramer was born Charles Krivitsky. He had been a self-proclaimed "progressive" who previously worked for FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In fact, we now know that Kramer was working for the KGB. He was an official Soviet agent, with the KGB codename "Mole." He was so bad, so suspicious, that J. Edgar Hoover himself personally wrote a letter directly to President Truman warning about Kramer.
Such were the kind of characters that Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, worked with to advance a government takeover of health care in the 1940s. They called themselves "progressives," but in truth, they were hardcore communists trying to advance Marxism, with a government takeover of health care as a crucial step.
And yet, there's more to the story.
Another irony of Frank Marshall Davis, in light of Obama's and the court's actions on health care, was his bold willingness to declare certain policies "constitutional" even when they clearly were not. Davis was never shy about that. In a June 1949 column, to cite just one example, he stated unequivocally, "That, it seems to me, is unconstitutional."
Well, let's bring this, too, up to date.
Thanks to the current actions of the Supreme Court, which declared Obama's health care bid "constitutional," Frank Marshall Davis is no doubt smiling from his grave. Alas, the old Communist Party crony's pupil, Barack Obama, has at long last fulfilled the dreams of Frank Marshall Davis: government-controlled "universal health care," sanctified by the Supreme Court as "constitutional," and declared a "tax."
It's eerie, chilling, but true. In his wildest dreams, Justice John Roberts couldn't imagine that he has fulfilled the ambitions not only of Barack Obama, but of Frank Marshall Davis and Communist Party USA.
How's that for hope and change? Amazing, truly amazing.
Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His new book is The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor. He is also author of Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.
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