For anyone wondering how low the bar has to go before Giuliani sufficiently prostitutes himself to the racist nut jobs that make up the Republican base, apparently it's pretty low.
Ex-New York City Mayor and former presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani’s recent string of inflammatory remarks about President Barack Obama continued on Friday when he told the New York Post the president has been under communist influence since childhood.
“From the time he was 9 years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist...”
Giuliani
points out that Obama's grandfather introduced him to Davis when the future President was 9. Apparently from that point on, all the rest is the natural culmination of that fateful meeting. Why any 9-year old would want to hang around with a
65-year old friend of his grandpa for any inordinate length of time, let alone permit himself to be indoctrinated by outmoded Stalinist rhetoric from an old man in 1971, is never satisfactorily explained.
Of course, this nonsense is guffaw-worthy to anyone except the rabid Republican right, who point to multiple mentions of Obama's grandfather's friend "Frank" in the President's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father":
In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama mentions a friend of his grandfather named Frank, who was later identified as Davis.[35] Davis told Obama that he and Stanley (Obama's maternal grandfather) both had grown up only 50 miles apart, near Wichita, although they did not meet until Hawaii. He described the way race relations were back then, including Jim Crow, and his view that there had been little progress since then. As Obama remembered, "It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created."[36] Obama also remembered Frank later in life when he took a job in South Chicago as a community organizer and took some time one day to visit the areas where Frank had lived and wrote in his book, "I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theatre, waiting to see Duke or Ella emerge from a gig."[37]
Sounds pretty innocent, huh? You might be surprised (or then again, you might not) to learn that the far right, neck-deep-in-the-sticks, Keyboard Kommandos who make up the Republican base have infused this fond mention of his grandfather's pal with a terrible significance, such that this same Frank Davis became the naive young Obama's Svengali, a Grima Wormtongue of sorts, poisoning the future President's mind with exhortations to Stalinism and collectivization (yes, that would be the same President who spent the better part of this Saturday morning trying to sell Americans on the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade agreement). Some of the more enterprising denizens of the paranoid fringe right have created an alternative, parallel universe autobiography in which they claim Davis is Obama's
real biological father. For
$14.95 plus four bucks shipping and handling you can see the whole shocking reveal on DVD:
The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama's real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama's world view during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multi-cultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?
This fascinating narrative is based in part on 2 years of research, interviews, newly unearthed footage and photos, and the writings of Davis and Obama himself. Dreams from My Real Father weaves together the proven facts with reasoned logic in an attempt to fill-in the obvious gaps in Obama's history.
The film also claims that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, was a porn artist,
posing for nude photography. According to
some sources, several million copies of the DVD were mailed to Republican voters in swing states of Ohio and Colorado, prior to the 2012 election.
Of course, to occupy this curious space to begin with you have to assume that Barack Obama, Sr. either didn't exist or is simply a pawn in one of the most elaborate hoaxes devised by human ingenuity, one that has managed to baffle the combined investigative media and intelligence services of the entire world.
Sadly, this bizarre, magical thinking appears to represent the current mental state of the political party now in control of both Houses of Congress, and those from the same Party who covet the Executive Branch must genuflect to this quackery if they are to receive the blessing of the Republican Primary voter.
In latching onto the "Communist plot" trope, Giuliani is hardly doing anything original; however, his apparent running off the rails is part of a larger strategy methodically pursued by those who hold the real reins of power in his Party. Any effort by this President to address the imbalance between workers and Big Business, from re-writing the overtime rules to benefit more workers, to modifying the tax code to address income inequality and corporate tax giveaways, must always be met with instant opposition, demonization and slander. The "foreigner" and the "communist," variations of Obama's "otherness," dovetail with the larger goal of portraying his actions as "anti-American" (which is why Giuliani breached this saga with comments that "Obama doesn't love America.") Because the corporations that control the Republican party can't afford--under any circumstances--to allow more fairness in the country's distribution of wealth to become an American value.