PrintOctober 26, 2008
Politico's Ben Smith fails to check
No one in America has catalogued Barack Obama's connections to far left radicals like Stanley Kurtz of the National Review. Today, Kurtz looks at an article written by Obama sycophant Ben Smith of Politico who incredibly, has taken the word of former New Party co-founder Joel Rogers that the radical, Maoist "fusion" party "didn't have any members:"
Extraordinary! Smith has never heard of Google? Perhaps he is search engine challenged - a condition no doubt, that will be dealt with by the new, compassionate health care industry under a President Obama.As for Obama's membership? [in the New Party]"We didn’t really have members," said Rogers. They also didn't have a ballot line in Chicago. So he said the line in the party newsletter appeared to refer to the fact that the party had endorsed him.Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt also said he was never a member.
Kurtz's devastating response is about what you'd expect; reams of evidence showing that not only did the New Party have "members" but that Barack Obama was forced to join the party in order to receive its endorsement:
With evidence that would make both Rogers and the Obama campaign out to be liars just two seconds away by using a simple Google search, Smith chose to take what Rogers said as gospel without bothering to look at the New Party website (recently scrubbed but hundreds of bloggers have screen captures of the damning evidence).Have you ever heard of a political party that has no members? Ben Smith has, and he believes. Based on a claim by New Party co-founder Joel Rogers that "we didn’t really have members," Smith seems to think he’s disposed of the issue of Barack Obama’s ties to the "dread New Party." In other words, Smith has accepted a transparently absurd statement by an intensely interested Obama supporter responding to a dangerous charge just before an election, while rejecting not only logic, but written evidence contemporaneous with the events in question. Smith has also ignored arguments at the heart of the New Party dispute. In his post on "The Obama Temptation," Mark Levin describes a press that disregards evidence of Obama’s past radicalism, mentions it only when it must, and then simply to dismiss those who raise it in the first place. Smith’s credulous, incurious, sarcastic, and transparently biased post fits the bill.Let’s have a look at the evidence in question. First and foremost, the spring 1996 issue of New Party News, the leading publication of the New Party at the time, clearly claims that Barack Obama is a party member. If the New Party didn’t actually have members, why would the chief party organ claim that it did? Again, logically, how can a political party exist without members?Rogers claims that the identification of Obama as a party member "appeared to refer to the fact that the party had endorsed him." That claim is inconsistent with the way the New Party News treats Danny Davis. Consider, first, this picture of Obama with Danny Davis and several others. Notice that the caption identifies three victorious "NP-endorsed candidates" standing alongside two "Chicago New Party members." How could those two non-endorsed, non-candidates be identified as party members if the New Party "didn’t really have members?"
Read the rest of Kurtz's take down of Smith for a demonstration of the difference between a journalist and something else.
