Anita Dunn (Obama Advisor) Hearts Mao

Another (!) Communist Advisor / Sympathizer in Obama's inner circle.

Why am I not surprised ?

Anita Dunn and Mao Zedong    [Hans von Spakovsky]

Glenn Beck showed an absolutely damning video of Anita Dunn on his show yesterday. As everyone knows, she is the White House communications director who has declared war on Fox News. The video shows Dunn giving a speech in which she highlights the two most important political philosophers shaping her outlook on politics: Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa. The first “political philosopher” Dunn is praising was a tyrannical dictator who imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of his own people. In fact, it is estimated that the Chinese Communists — led, inspired, and controlled by Mao — have killed 65 million Chinese citizens since 1949 through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Gulag system of slave-labor prisons (the “Laogai” system) that Mao implemented.

Imagine what would happen if a White House communications director cited Adolf Hitler as one of her favorite political philosophers. Not only would it be an above-the-fold, front-page story in every major newspaper in the country, but there would also be outraged howls in the editorial pages. Mao killed more people than Hitler — they were two of the three worst mass murderers of the 20th century (the third being Joseph Stalin). However, the revelation of Dunn’s comments will probably be greeted by the mainstream media with a big collective yawn.

Re: Anita Dunn and Mao Zedong   [Andy McCarthy]

Let me just add two points to Hans's post.

1. While Dunn's anabashed affection for the most execrable mass-murderer in history is shocking, the Maoists in Obama's attic are not a new story — just a story obstinately ignored by the mainstream media. Before the election, I wrote a column ("Another Communist in Obama's Orb") about Obama pal Mike Klonsky. Here's a sampling:

Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website....  Klonsky’s communist pedigree could not be clearer. His father, Robert Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the mid-Fifties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the United States government — a violation of the Smith Act, anti-communist legislation ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court. In the Sixties, Klonsky the younger teamed with Ayers, Dohrn, and other young radicals to form the Students for a Democratic Society. It was out of the SDS that Ayers and Dohrn helped found the Weatherman terrorist group.

Klonsky took a different path, albeit one that led inexorably to a new partnership with Ayers, which Obama mightily helped underwrite. Upon splitting off from the SDS, Klonsky formed a Maoist organization, first known as the “October League,” which ultimately became the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” Klonsky was CP(ML)’s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao’s regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky’s party as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people.” Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education. After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speechbefore Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom. 

2. At his blog, Roger Kimball offers trenchant thoughts on Dunn and Mao:

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 found 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 Untied 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?

Fox and CNN   [Jay Nordlinger]

The White House communications director, Anita Dunn, contrasted Fox News with CNN: Fox News is just a Republican opinion outlet, she said, while CNN is a real news network. Of Fox, she said, “Let’s not pretend that they’re a news network, the way CNN is.” She said this on CNN, of course. (In the 1990s, conservatives used to refer to it as “the Clinton News Network.”)

 

I got to thinking. Fox has some opinionists, such as O’Reilly and Beck. Fox also has news anchormen and correspondents.

 

CNN has those, too. One of the CNN anchors is Anderson Cooper — he’s their star, as I understand it. The hurricane guy. When the “tea party” protests got going earlier this year, Cooper interviewed David Gergen. Gergen said, “They [Republicans and conservatives] still haven’t found their voice, Anderson. This happens to a minority party after it’s lost a couple of bad elections, but they’re searching for their voice.”

 

Then Cooper said, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” He said this smirkingly.

 

He was referring to a sexual practice defined by the Urban Dictionary as follows: “the insertion of one man’s sac[] into another person’s mouth.”

[note:  sounds like something Anderson Cooper would know about from firsthand experience !]

 

Would a Fox News anchor ever, ever say anything like this — ever? Can you conceive it? But that is what CNN anchormen do, apparently. When people tell you that CNN is a real news network, whereas Fox isn’t — I would just smile at them.

 

P.S. It was Anderson Cooper, the mainstream news anchor, who started the derogatory references to anti-Obama protesters as “teabaggers.” Democratic pundits and politicians quickly picked it up. (I wrote about this in a recent issue of National Review.)

 

P.P.S. Another CNN anchorman, Rick Sanchez, spread racist quotations allegedly from Rush Limbaugh. These quotes were fabrications, meant to damage Limbaugh. Do Fox anchormen engage in slander and defamation?

 

P.P.P.S. Anita Dunn tried to pass off her tribute to Mao as something she once heard from Lee Atwater. Has Lee Atwater become the Democrats’ standard — the arbiter of Democratic discourse? What an interesting turn of events.