Show 629 Book Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. Prager talks to author . Also God versus Socialism and A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy. Audio MP3

 

Show 629 Sement 1- Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

Dennis Prager talks to Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as a contributing editor for National Review Online. His new book is Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. 22 minutes.

Segment 2- Paul Ibbitson talks to author of God versus Socialism. 16 minutes

Segment 3- A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. Interview of author Wesley J. Smith. 17 minutes

 

Synopsis of Radical in Chief-  An in-depth examination of President Barack Obama and his policies by journalist and political commentator Stanley Kurtz.

 

STANLEY KURTZ is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as a contributing editor for National Review Online. He has also written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, and Commentary.

 

Is President Obama a socialist? Now, the definitive answer: Yes -- and the proof is hidden in his past

Barack Obama's opponents sense something more radical in his efforts to be a "transformational" president than mainstream Democratic Party liberalism. But is it fair to call him a socialist? Stanley Kurtz began his investigation into Obama's political beliefs with every expectation of answering that question "no." Now, however, after two years of digging into hitherto unexplored archives and other sources, he has changed my mind. "I am now convinced that the president of the United States is -- literally -- a socialist." In Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, he explains why.

 

As Kurtz reveals, from adolescence right through to his adult political career, Obama lived and worked at the very center of a socialist world. How is that possible? After all, before he ran for office, Obama was immersed in the universe of community organizing -- not "socialism." But that, writes Kurtz, is the link. Community organizing is a socialist world. The reason most people don't know that is that community organizers consciously disguise their socialism.

In fact, reveals Kurtz, Obama's colleagues and mentors were some of the sharpest and most influential stealth-socialist community organizers in the country. Moreover, his overarching political strategy is in large measure borrowed from these teachers. In Radical-in-Chief, Kurtz reconstructs the socialist back-story of community organizing -- and show how deeply Barack Obama remains immersed in that world. Much of the material Kurtz presents has been unknown up to now. All of it suggests that the truth about the president's political convictions is very different from what we've been told.

 

Among the revelations you'll read about here:

 

 How in the 1970's and 1980's -- an era when violent revolution came to seem like a pipe-dream -- America's socialists increasingly turned to community organizing as a way to socialize the country by degrees, through grassroots activism "from below"

 

How, in April of 1983, Obama's life changed forever when, during his senior year at Columbia University, he attended his first of many "Socialist Scholars Conference" in New York -- and there discovered community organizing and its stealth-socialist agenda

 

How Obama's attendance at Socialist Scholars Conferences fully acquainted him with the socialist organizing strategy of the day -- including the hope that elected officials would emerge from a broad-based (but socialist- directed) grassroots movement of the left

 

Obama's long association with an organizer training institute called the Midwest Academy -- whose archives reveal it to be a classic socialist "front group" acting as the coordinating center of a network of foundations, community organizations, issue coalitions, and campaigns

 

How Alice Palmer, the Illinois State Senator who hand- picked Obama as her successor in 1995, worked closely with the Midwest Academy -- a connection that explains a lot about Obama's political start

 

Obama's extensive ties to UNO of Chicago, a radical community organization that in the eighties was a kind of Hispanic counterpart to ACORN -- and how Obama supported and participated in its aggressive actions

 

How by combining a study of UNO of Chicago with an analysis of previously unknown documents from Obama's organizing days, we can reconstruct some of the stories Obama chose to leave out of his famous memoirs

 

The ACORN connection: How previously unknown documents reveal Obama's handling of the ACORN controversy during the presidential campaign as a deeply deceptive attempt to shield his radical past from scrutiny

 

How a rich cache of ACORN documents leads to nearly the whole of Obama's socialist political world -- the Midwest Academy, Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright included

 

New evidence that suggests that the connection between Obama and 60s terrorist Bill Ayers may long pre-date their supposed initial meeting in 1995 -- and that Ayers's post-election statements regarding his relationship with Obama are misleading

 

Why the importance of the Obama-Ayers relationship has less to do with Ayers's decades-old terrorist adventures than with the foundation-based partnership between the two in support of Chicago's socialist organizing network

 

Jeremiah Wright: Why the hidden basis of his connection to Obama lies in the socialist character of black liberation theology

 

How, contrary to Obama's claims that Wright was simply a religious influence, new evidence indicates that his relationship with Wright was thoroughly political from the start

 

How, during his time in the Illinois State Senate, Obama functioned as a powerful legislative ally to his early socialist organizing network

 

How modern 'stealth' socialism has changed -- and how it continues to influence the Democratic Party

 

What Obama's early legislative experience sheds light on his legislative style as President -- including the blatant use of fiscal trickery to pass health-care reform

 

How Obama's current policies and politics grow directly out of the nexus of socialist associates and theories that has shaped him throughout his adult life

In short, writes Kurtz, Obama has hidden his core political beliefs from the American people. And while many will simply assume that at some point Obama's early socialist phase gave way to a more traditional liberalism, the evidence plainly shows this assumption requires more of a stretch than the record allows. The conclusion is inescapable: "If Americans in 2008 had understood all that I present here about Obama's community organizing mentors and colleagues, I believe he would not be president of the United States today."

 

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