A Misguided Attack on Stanley Kurtz's Radical-in-Chief and Other Anti-Obama Books

From Ron Radosh, at Pajamas Media:

I knew that Stanley Kurtz’s new and important book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, would be the subject of attack. I predicted that at first, the mainstream press would either ignore it or, if they found that they could not, would seek to go on the offense by comparing it to the score of rather knee-jerk screeds written against Obama by other conservatives, many of them rather easy to ridicule, dismiss, and demonize.



Clearly, Kurtz has his hands full, having to try to distinguish his contribution from the rest of the pack and hope that it is taken seriously. I have tried to do my own on its behalf by writing a serious review of the book that will be published in the next issue of National Review. I hope readers buy that issue if they do not subscribe, and take my arguments about it into consideration. I go so far as to write in my conclusion that if the work Kurtz has done for this book had been able to be accomplished during the 2008 campaign, “Barack Obama would not have been elected President because he is simply not who he claimed to be.”



Those who actually bother to read Kurtz’s book know immediately that he bases his analysis on rigorous scholarship, a careful look through the archives of various political groups with which our president has been associated with and influenced by throughout the years. No one else has done this work. The other volumes criticize Obama by talking about his record and his views. Some of the authors easily score points — after all, the Obama administration is not hard to criticize — but at times, they are way off base and issue arguments not backed up by real evidence.



Now, the centrist conservative commentator John Avlon has written a column he calls “The Obama Haters Book Club.” I usually find Avlon to be someone who makes shrewd and sound observations, and I have in past blog posts linked to him and singled out some of his earlier articles for praise.



What he does in this particular column, however, is purposely link together virtually every anti-Obama book as all being the same. As he puts it, “at this point the titles all blur together in a manic mad-lib, always accusing Obama of something close to war-crimes against the American people.” He next attacks the motives of the authors, writing, “You might not be able to distinguish between the self-published pathology and the semi-professional polemics — they are all fear-mongering for personal and partisan profit. And that’s the larger point.”

More at the link.



Ron Radosh is an old school kinda guy, from David Horowitz's generation, so it's interesting that he'd give Jon Avlon such credibility. I don't. Avlon's a typical leftist-claiming-to-be-centrist. Folks like this are socialist enablers at the least. The Avlon essay's here. I've read at least four previous anti-Obama books. And while Kurtz's Radical-in-Chief is a standout, the overall quality of the research on Barack Obama has been excellent. Critics dismiss these works --- for example, Michelle Malkin, Aaron Klein, Pam Geller and Robert Spencer --- for opening up the truth on a presidency that's been wrapped in mystery and lies. Amazing, really. But typical for leftists.



See also, "Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism."