Chuck Todd and other media dimwits

By Cliff Kincaid

As "Dumb and Dumber To" hits theaters, Newsmax has headlined an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd: "Six Years Later, We Still Don't Know Obama." He's hawking his book about Obama titled The Stranger.

In effect, Todd, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," is saying he can't figure Obama out. He's pleading ignorance.

This fellow has been covering Obama for six years and still claims to not understand him? A quick review of the Kindle version of his new book shows that he's bought into the "Obama is a liberal" line. However, Todd acknowledges Obama is "perhaps the most liberal president to take office since Franklin Roosevelt...." That's saying something, but it's not enough.

The claim about Obama being a "stranger" is just another excuse for the media not doing their jobs when he first ran for the presidency in 2008. It is Todd's way of saying to the American people, "We didn't anticipate what a disaster he would be for the country; we really didn't understand him or his agenda."

I'm not buying it.

Todd doesn't want to admit it, but Obama has had a Marxist agenda, as reflected in his vow to "fundamentally transform" the United States. This isn't liberalism.

His blind spot toward Obama also applies to "liberal" media bias.

According to Newsmax, "Todd also discussed the perception that the media has a liberal slant." But he claimed there is only a "cultural bias," stemming from the "the fact that the news media is headquartered in New York City."

I haven't read the whole book, but I bet he doesn't breathe a word about Obama's communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Otherwise, how could he tell radio host Hugh Hewitt, "...there's not an ideological core to him [Obama]."

There certainly was an ideological core to Davis, a member of the Communist Party and suspected Soviet espionage agent. He helped raise Obama in Hawaii.

This is getting to be an old story – more than six years old – about our efforts to tell the truth about Obama's Marxist, communist, or socialist connections.

Paul Kengor's book, The Communist, documents Obama's deep relationship with Davis. Kengor acknowledges that it is a "riddle" as to how much of the Davis Marxist worldview was passed on to Obama, who mentioned Davis in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, as just "Frank."

But the influence of Davis on Obama cannot be ignored, as our media consistently have done.

Another apparent "stranger" to Todd and much of the media was Van Jones, appointed as the "Green jobs Czar" in March 2009 of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. When Trevor Loudon broke the story of Jones' communist background, which was picked up by Glenn Beck, Chuck Todd dismissed it, saying he "was not a big guy in the White House administration" and asked, "Is that the best use of the time of the mainstream media?"

Jones, who now works for CNN, was a member of STORM – Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement. It sounds like something more than a "liberal" organization.

Indeed, Jones was soon pushed out of his White House job.

But Todd says covering that was a waste of time. By the way, Jones had been picked for the job by Obama and his close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, another "mystery" for the media. It turns out that Jarrett's father, Vernon Jarrett, was an associate of Frank Marshall Davis.

It looks like Todd has been spending his time on other matters, and it appears they have nothing to do with the nature of Barack Obama and his administration.

In September, Todd said about Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder, who has poured gasoline on the flames of the Ferguson riots, "...what's interesting about him, he is a very non-political person. And I think people used to mistakenly think that this guy was this long-time political operative who happened to be an attorney general. That's not him at all."

Holder has been involved in both the Clinton and Obama administrations in facilitating the release from prison of communist terrorists and their lawyers, such as Linda Evans, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, and Lynne Stewart.

The Davis matter is perhaps the most important, since it sheds light on what Todd considers the Obama enigma.

On April 7, 2008, we noted that Davis wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. "Smash on, victory-eating Red Army," he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries.

Davis was a poet, as well as a marijuana smoker, pornographer, and child molester.

Isn't it strange that the media will cover decades-old allegations about Bill Cosby, a black entertainer, raping women, while the relationship of our first black President of the United States to a pedophile is taboo?

But let's face it: much of the conservative media missed the boat as well.

I checked Hugh Hewitt's website for any mentions he made of Frank Marshall Davis before the 2008 presidential election. He had ignored our stories, such as our February 18, 2008, column, "Obama's communist Mentor."

Instead, he cited a misleading Associated Press account of Obama's relationship with Davis.

We commented on the AP story at the time, noting that it failed to mention "the smoking-gun evidence that the mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a Communist Party member."

There is a serious problem when even the conservative media rely on liberal media sources for their information, rather than credit those who do the original research and uncover the hard facts.

Trevor Loudon broke the Frank Marshall Davis story that we picked up, giving him credit, while we confirmed the account with a source in Hawaii friendly to Davis. It was the one story that could have derailed Obama's presidential run.

It was the equivalent of finding out that 2008 GOP presidential candidate John McCain had been mentored by a Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman. You know the liberal media would have jumped on that.

So here we are, six years later, and Chuck Todd of NBC News is trying to insist that Obama is still a mystery.

It's getting tiring reading pathetic excuses for the failures of the major media.

© Cliff Kincaid