Thankfully, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani shows no sign of backing down. To reinforce his claim that Obama did not “love this country,” Giuliani explained his thinking to the New York Daily News.

“I don’t [see] this President as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” Giuliani told reporter Celeste Katz. “Logically, think about his background.. . . The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old.” 

The communist in question, as Giuliani clarified, was Frank Marshall Davis. In fact, Obama was likely ten years old when his grandfather Stanley Dunham introduced young Barry to Davis, but otherwise Giuliani was correct. In so saying, he may well have been the first prominent political figure of either party to mention Davis in public, a testament to the dread of being branded racist that paralyzes the political class. For that matter, the New York Daily News is the rare mainstream media outpost to mention Davis, a collective oversight that flirts with conspiracy.

Although Obama’s mother and grandfather both leaned strongly to the left, Davis, as Giuliani suggested, was the first capital “C” Communist to influence Obama. Davis, as they say, had some “issues.” He was not only a Communist, but also a bisexual pornographer and nude photographer with at least a fictional taste for underage sex partners.

“Here are the facts and they are indisputable,” wrote historian Paul Kengor in his insightful book, The Communist -- Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, “Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, card-carrying member of Communist Party (CPUSA). His Communist Party card number was 47544.”   

As Kengor observed, Obama dedicated 2500 words in Dreams to Davis, who “surfaces repeatedly from start to finish, from Hawaii to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Kenya . . . from the 1970s to the 1980s to the 1990s.”

As critical as Davis was to the formation of the fatherless Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss managed to write a 10,000-word piece for the Washington Post on Obama’s early years in August 2008 without a single mention of Davis. In the runup to the election, when the Maraniss article was published, the many Obama enthusiasts in the Post audience no more wanted to read about Davis’s unseemly hobbies than Maraniss wanted to write about them. Win-win.

Obama and his admirers in the media understood that this was a relationship best kept under wraps. Davis never renounced his Communist past. As his FBI file reveals, the Hawaiian Communist Party simply went underground and infiltrated the Democratic Party.

Maraniss could barely bring himself to talk about Davis even in his lengthy 2012 biography of Obama’s early years, Barack Obama: The Story. He suggested, in fact, that Obama included “Frank” in his memoir Dreams from My Father because he “tended to focus on characters who could accentuate his journey toward blackness.”

Given the depth of his research, Maraniss had to know what he was hiding. Davis, in fact, played such an essential role in Obama’s formation that, as Maraniss admitted in the biography, he became “a subject of some of [Obama’s] teenage poetry.” Obama has had at least two poems about Davis published. “An Old Man” appeared in his prep school’s literary magazine. “Pop” appeared in Occidental College’s. “Pop” tells how Davis and the underage Obama got drunk together and hints perhaps at a sexual dalliance as well.

These poems may have been part of a trilogy. A few years prior, Davis had written a poem called “To a Young Man,” which also described the relationship of a naïve young man with a cynical old man but from the older man’s perspective. A close textual reading leads one to suspect that Davis wrote all three of these poems, including the two fronted by Obama. 

When Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum showed Obama “An Old Man” in 2008, Obama responded, "That's not bad. I wrote that in high school?" He recovered quickly, adding, "It sounds in spirit that it's talking a little bit about my grandfather." No, the poem in question, the “it,” was not talking about Stanley Dunham. The named author of the poem was talking about Davis. The two were that close.

In his Obama biography The Bridge, New Yorker editor and Obama fanboy David Remnick dismissed the charges of “communist” and “pornographer” against Davis as mere noise from the “right-wing blogosphere.” He preferred to introduce Davis as an “aging poet and journalist” whose relationship with Obama was of “no great ideological importance.” In one of those unguarded moments that shine a bright light on the liberal brain, Remnick described Dunham’s introduction of his grandson to this Communist, pornographer and possible pedophile as “one of the more thoughtful and consequential things Stanley did in his role as surrogate grandfather.”

Okay, enough of these irrelevancies, let’s get back to the real news, Scott Walker’s senior year at Marquette.