It Doesn't Matter If the Obamacare Defunding Gambit Fails

My article from the Sept. 27, 2013, issue of American Thinker:

Matthew Vadum with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Awesome)

It Doesn't Matter If the Obamacare Defunding Gambit Fails

By Matthew Vadum

The current campaign to deprive President Obama's health care leviathan of the life-sustaining tax dollars it needs for full bureaucratic metastasis is what left-wingers call a consciousness-raising exercise. 


It matters next to nothing if current Republican efforts succeed in immediately defunding Obamacare.  That's because this is just the opening round of what promises to be a protracted struggle to restore sanity to the American health care system.  A temporary defeat at one juncture on the road to repeal isn't really a defeat at all, provided that it serves a larger purpose.  Obamacare, after all, wasn't enacted in a day and it won't be repealed in a day.


Both the Ted Cruz talkathon and the brinksmanship over the stop-gap government funding measure (called a "continuing resolution") epitomize purposeful political theater. 


Ignore the blatherskite spewing from GOP establishment talking heads like Karl Rove:  there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing political things strictly for public consumption even when there is a less-than-direct or less-than-obvious relationship between the things done and the desired results.  It's not somehow dishonest or dishonorable to do this, contrary to the protestations of the pompous pundits who suck up air in the Washington echo chamber.


In this age of instant everything, we tend to forget that politics isn't always about concrete, instantaneous results.  It's about symbolism.  It's about focusing the attention of people in order to educate them.  It's about framing the issues properly, telling stories, and planting memes in public spaces, allowing them to spread like dandelion seeds on a passing breeze.  That's how Americans were brainwashed into believing that Republicans are the "party of the rich" and gazillionaire George Soros's Democrats are the caring party of compassion.


But intellect by itself doesn't always serve champions of limited government well.  Sometimes showmanship and connecting with people on an emotional level is required to make good things happen.  All good salespeople understand this.  

Obama Prepares to Community-Organize America

My article from the Jan. 22, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama Prepares to Community-Organize America

By Matthew Vadum

In his latest unprecedented move in American history, President Obama announced he is converting his campaign apparatus into a permanent in-your-face campaign aimed at furthering Obama’s divisive, radical politics.

The new tax-exempt advocacy group, Organizing for Action, will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said last week.

In the same vein, in his second inaugural address yesterday, Obama bullied the opposition. Reinforcing his long-running “spread the wealth” theme, the president hectored successful people, declaring that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”

Obama also seemed to signal in his mercifully brief oration that he’s going to go all-out to make government bigger.

Americans, he said, “reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”

Now, like a Third World caudillo, Obama will be able to pursue his policies from inside government and from outside through his OfA thug army.

OfA is a less violent version of Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, or of the government-supported goon squads that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers use to harass and intimidate their domestic opponents. OfA units brought muscle to the recent fight in Wisconsin over that state’s out-of-control government labor unions. OfA has bludgeoned Democrats that Obama deemed insufficiently left-wing, especially red-state congressional Democrats who had been wavering on the issue of Obamacare.

My appearance on Fox News Channel's "Hannity"

I made "Hannity" the TV show -- at least in the form of video footage.

This video shows a clip from Thanksgiving (Nov. 22, 2012) that contains one of my segments from the documentary "District of Corruption." In it I'm talking about ACORN and Saul Alinsky.



(hat tip: Big Government)

Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American

Here's a new piece of mine that was published today by American Thinker.

Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American 

By Matthew Vadum

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. 
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. 
A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives.
"When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote," said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C.  "They know how to vote."
Like Madison, Barack Obama grasped this basic truth when he worked for ACORN's Project Vote affiliate in 1992.
"All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly," the future president said.  "If we're registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who's responsible."
Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor.  It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money.  It's about raw so-called social justice.  It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.
Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
In an infamous 1966 Nation magazine article, the radical university professors urged that the welfare apparatus be used to destroy the American system.  Borrowing a phrase the ultra-leftist Leon Trotsky used in one of his many anti-Stalin tracts, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), they titled their blueprint for radical change "The Weight of the Poor."

Sarah Palin is Right: If Tea Partiers Were Terrorists, Obama Would Pal Around With Them

It is a time-honored radical tactic to accuse your enemies of what you do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, who on this issue is a voice of sanity and common sense.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

Well, the president’s speech in Arizona as he asked folks to start ratcheting down the rhetoric was all talk. He wasn’t sincere in that. And that’s typical Barack Obama, unfortunately. That is typical of our president where it’s blah, blah, blah. You know, it’s all talk and no real action. Otherwise, he’d be on Biden and tell Biden to tone it down a little bit. Yeah, right. Independent patriotic Americans who desire fiscal sanity in our beloved nation being called terrorists, heck, Sean, if we were real domestic terrorists, shoot, President Obama would be wanting to pal around with us, wouldn’t he? I mean, he didn’t have a problem palling around with a Bill Ayers back in the day when he kicked off his political career in Bill Ayers’ apartment and then, you know, shaking hands with [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez and saying, he doesn’t need any preconditions with meeting dictators or wanting to read U.S. Miranda rights to alleged suspected foreign terrorists. No, if we were all domestic terrorists, I think President Obama wouldn’t have a problem with us.

Of course Palin, who has bigger cojones than most Republicans in Congress, is right.

It’s time for a quick refresher course on all the terrorists and terrorism supporters President Obama is buddies with.

As reported in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, Obama worked for ACORN, which until recently was America’s largest urban terrorist group. ACORN, along with its thug allies in SEIU who beat up opponents at town hall meetings, routinely uses violence, physical intimidation, and extortion in its long-running war against American businesses. Obama had such a mastery of agitation he taught Saul Alinsky’s subversion techniques at the University of Chicago.

Obama’s political career was launched at a fundraiser held in the Chicago home of unrepentant Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers, who to the present day refuses to renounce the use of violence to achieve political objectives, participated in a plot to bomb a military dance that would have killed hundreds of people if it had succeeded.

As I note in Subversion Inc., informant Larry Grathwohl witnessed Weather Underground leaders planning to slaughter the one-tenth of the U.S. population they expected would turn out to be “diehard capitalists” incapable of reeducation. These are the kind of people the president of the United States calls friends.

Obama and Ayers also sat together on the boards of the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge where they funneled money to ACORN and other anti-American groups.

Obama belonged to the church of Jeremiah Wright whose fiery anti-American sermons make even liberals wince. Wright blamed America for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and accused the U.S. government of inventing the HIV virus “as a means of genocide against people of color.” And under Wright’s leadership, his church’s newsletter reprinted a terrorist political manifesto by Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook.

Obama accepted as a fundraising “bundler” Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink, a radical group that specializes in attacking wounded U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and makes no effort to conceal its ties to America-hating terrorists worldwide. Code Pink is also working with the Muslim Brotherhood which it hopes will succeed into transforming Egypt into an Islamofascist dictatorship.

Obama welcomed Cornel West, an African-American studies professor at Princeton University, to his campaign team in 2008. West denounces his native land as racist and patriarchal. He has described himself as a “progressive socialist,” and has written that “Marxist thought is an indispensable tradition for freedom fighters.” He visited Venezuela in 2006 and praised the brutal government of leftist strongman Hugo Chavez.

Obama also welcomed Robert Malley as a foreign policy advisor on his campaign staff. Malley was forced out after it was revealed that he had been meeting with the terrorist group Hamas, which has called for attacks on the United States.

Obama was a friend and frequent dinner companion of Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American and former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) spokesman. Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. Khalidi held a fundraiser for Obama’s ill-fated congressional bid in 2000.

No one is more pro-terrorist than President Obama.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

Obama officials admit POTUS was lying about default

President Obama has no intention of allowing the U.S. government to default on its financial obligations regardless of whether the government's borrowing limit is raised, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business reports.

This means that the president has been bargaining in bad faith with congressional leaders by raising the specter of a default, knowing full well he won't allow it to happen. This is another way of putting it: the president has been lying to the nation.

As Gasparino writes

While officials from the Obama Administration raised their rhetoric over the weekend about the possibility of a debt default if the debt ceiling isn't raised, they privately have been telling top executives at major U.S. banks that such an event won't happen, FOX Business has learned.
In a series of phone calls, administration officials have told bankers that the administration will not allow a default to happen even if the debt cap isn't raised by the August 2 date Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the government will run out of money to pay all its bills, including obligations to bond holders. Geithner made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows saying a default is imminent if the debt ceiling isn't raised, and President Obama issued a similar warning during a Friday press conference after budget negotiations with House Republicans broke down.

It's business as usual for Obama. The truth is just an obstacle on the road to socialist utopia.

Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky would be so proud.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

Economic Terrorism’s Big Comeback

(originally published at Front Page Magazine, a publication of David Horowitz Freedom Center)


Economic Terrorism’s Big Comeback

By Matthew Vadum

Radical activist groups associated with President Barack Obama have launched a campaign of economic terrorism and sabotage – possibly with his blessing. Mortgage and student loan strikes, crippling bank boycotts, intimidation, and who knows what else are all on the agenda.

The idea of leftists using terrorism to achieve political objectives isn’t new. Leon Trotsky supported the use of terrorism to advance so-called social justice. Decades before an ice-axe found its way into his skull, Trotsky argued in Dictatorship vs. Democracy that Communists who reject “terrorism in principle” weren’t bona fide Communists. Years before that, he justified “proletarian terrorism” because the capitalist state itself, with its “entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror.” In the upside-down world of Marxists, radical activists’ frightening, violent, in-your-face tactics are thought of as merely fighting fire with fire.

Historian Michael Zak gives Vadum's Subversion Inc. book a big thumbs up

Historian Michael Zak (of Grand Old Partisan) likes my book Subversion Inc.

Zak is author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party.

Here is an excerpt from a post of his on my book:

Matthew Vadum has described it as a “brilliantly orchestrated criminal organization” that is “part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization.” Banks and other corporations have paid it billions of dollars in protection money, while the government pays it billions more. Law enforcement cannot keep track of its opaque, endlessly shifting, illicit operations. Anyone who gets in the way is subject to “thuggish tactics.” Nice business you got here. Would be a shame if a flash mob attacked it at, say, 10am tomorrow morning.

This is not the Mafia, but an organization just as insidious, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. These “modern-day pirates” helped make Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States. Wait, it gets worse. The Obama administration is setting up what Michael Barone termed “gangster government.” You now being governed Mafia-style, with business shakedowns and disregard for the law, cronies being enriched while opponents are crushed.

As the song goes, “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” Vadum's new book, Subversion, Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, answers that question.

Saul Alinsky, godfather of community organizers, learned his craft from Chicago gangland organizers. During the 1930s, he became an associate of Al Capone's chief hitman, who introduced him to Frank Nitti.

No surprise that Alinsky became, in Vadum's words, "a pragmatic, businesslike gangster," whose rhetoric is permeated with violent imagery. [...]

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, Machiavellian pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book at Amazon. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

USS Cesar Chavez? Why not the USS Saul Alinsky?

Incredibly, the U.S. Navy has decided to name a cargo ship after the guy who came up with the Obama campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!" That man is the late labor agitator and community organizer Cesar Chavez. Chavez's union, the United Farm Workers, used the saying he coined as its official motto. (In Spanish, "¡Sí se puede!")

The decision to name a Navy ship after this radical is remarkable not only because President Obama's teleprompter has the phrase "Yes, we can!" burnt into it from the phrase's overuse, but because the far-left leader was a disciple of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez, who died in 1993, worked for the Community Service Organization from 1952 to 1962. CSO was a pressure group created by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. Chavez has been lionized by the left because he hated capitalism and shared Alinsky's contempt for the American system. The man even sounded like Alinsky, insisting he loved America while working to undermine its institutions. Chavez said

Until the chance for political participation is there, we who are poor will continue to attack the soft part of the American system - its economic structure. We will build power through boycotts, strikes, new union - whatever techniques we can develop. These attacks on the status quo will come, not because we hate, but because we know America can construct a humane society for all its citizens - and that if it does not, there will be chaos.

"There will be chaos?" Prediction or threat? You decide.

Chavez is also connected to ACORN founder Wade Rathke, a fact I reported in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

When Rathke was employed as an organizer at ACORN's parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), he was trained by a man named Bill Pastreich who had studied Alinsky’s in-your-face organizing techniques. Pastreich had also been employed by Chavez's United Farm Workers.

Is it just a matter of time before the Obama administration commissions the USS Saul Alinsky? No doubt it will be a destroyer.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.


(originally posted at NewsReal blog)

Please buy my book!

I have a preview article out on my new book, Subversion Inc.

Read the article here. (PDF)

Here is the beginning of it:

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN.

But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now

ACORN, which until it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year was America’s largest poor people’s group, was founded on political violence and intimidation.

ACORN grew out of another notorious group called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s seminal article “The Weight of the Poor” was published in the Nation magazine. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy called for activists to double America’s welfare rolls in order to destabilize the American system of government. Placing impossible demands on states and localities would force them to ask Congress for a guaranteed annual income scheme and thereby set in motion the transformation of America into a socialist state.

NWRO grew out of the organizing efforts of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky and other veteran radical agitators. Cloward and Piven also helped bring NWRO into the world. They acknowledge they “were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstrations.” [...]

Buy the book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out Tuesday, May 10. Pre-order it now! If you'd like an autographed copy, order it directly from WND Books here.

Obama threatens reporters for -- reporting!

It is so typical of Saul Alinsky-inspired thugs to lash out and threaten reporters when information they don't like gets reported.

The Obama administration did exactly that and punished San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci when she dared to release a video of protesters interrupting an Obama speech at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel. Obama's people kicked Marinucci out of the reporting pool for doing her job and threatened other pool reporters.

Although radical leftists like Obama relish ridiculing their adversaries, they cannot tolerate it when the same is done to them.

Read more about the brutal tactics of Alinskyites in my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

From the twisted mind of Obama green jobs czar Van Jones: America has a culture of death because we use fossil fuels

First, global warming con man Al Gore compared companies' search for energy to "junkies looking for another vein." Now self-described communist, Obama pal, and 9/11 truther Van Jones one-ups the master. Jones advances the original but totally absurd argument that oil is "death" and that because we use oil our society is death-centered. At the recent Commie Con Power Shift conference Jones passionately declared:

We have an energy system, a civilization powered by death. Fueled by death. Why do they call them fossil fuels? We act shocked, having pulled death out of the ground, that we get death out of the skies. Let's stop fueling death.

This is an argument fashioned for ignoramuses and morons, who are, of course, Jones's natural constituency.
 Let's think about his argument. Because we put "dead" stuff like petroleum to productive use instead of leaving it in the ground where it remains useless to human beings, we are exhuming death and shouldn't be surprised that we "get death out of the skies."

What does that last part even mean? How are we getting death out of the skies? Don't we have to wait for most of our food, whether vegetables or meat, to be dead in order to eat it? Doesn't virtually every living thing on the planet eat things that are dead? Should we be allowed to consume only living things such as yogurt and inanimate things such as water?

How does Jones come up with this bombastic drivel? And to think, Jones criticized my writing, the wordcraft of a professional who has been writing and getting paid for it for almost a quarter century, calling my work "purple prose." This is what Alinskyites like Jones do: they ridicule because they believe, as Alinsky taught, that ridicule is a powerful tool. Saul Alinsky's fifth rule of "power tactics" from Rules for Radicals is that ridicule "is man’s most potent weapon.” It is a rhetorical weapon of mass destruction. “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule,” he wrote.

“Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” It is comparatively easy to get away with threatening the enemy. “You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger.” The problem with this thinking is that once you understand what an Alinskyite like Jones is trying to do, it's fairly easy not to be bothered by such an attempt at ridicule. You can revel in it and throw it right back at him. And you should.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.


(originally posted at NewsReal)

Cynical Budget Deal Funds ACORN Wannabe Poverty Pimp Groups

I found yet another reason for conservatives to hate the budget deal.

The compromise spending legislation now before Congress funds ACORN-like radical activist groups to the tune of a whopping $680 million in fiscal 2011.

Bear in mind $680 million is virtually nothing compared to the trillions of dollars the feds regularly flush down the toilet but these nasty, parasitic pressure groups that want to bring "hope and change" to America can do a lot of damage to our society with that money. They've been trying to transform America for the worst and using your tax dollars to do so ever since left-of-center community groups started getting government funding under Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty."

As Suzanne Perry reports in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Community Services Block Grant program is on track to take in a good chunk of change.

The program, which provides money to a network of community-action agencies across the country, would get $680-million for the fiscal year that ends September 30, according to details of the bill provided by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

As I detail in my upcoming book, Subversion Inc., President Obama always takes care of his friends.

The Community Services Block Grant program provides federal money "to states and organizations for projects that offer education, employment, health care, housing, and other services to low-income people," according to Perry. "Most of that money goes to about 1,000 community-action agencies across the country that manage local antipoverty projects."

It might as well be called the "Saul Alinsky Memorial Slush Fund."

And get this: budding Alinskyite class warriors can even earn a diploma in rabble-rousing! Community Action Partnership offers "Certified Community Action Professional," or CCAP designations, to today's community organizers.

Maybe it's a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval for left-wing thugs.

The Smallness of Saul (Alinsky), a book review

(this article by Matthew Vadum was originally published in the October 2010 issue of the American Spectator)


Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky

By Nicholas von Hoffman
(Nation Books, 214 pages, $26.95)

"Although Alinsky is described as some kind of liberal left-winger in actuality big government worried him," writes Saul Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman in his gossamer memoir,Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. "He feared the gigantism of government, corporation and even labor union."

Von Hoffman is trying to recast Alinsky as a government-fearing libertarian in order to make his communistic beliefs more marketable. It's a project doomed to failure.

Alinsky's right-hand man 50 years ago, von Hoffman paints an almost unrecognizable portrait of the Industrial Areas Foundation founder, depicting him as an idealistic fighter for the little guy, a champion of democracy. This is a Sisyphean task because Alinsky's thuggish tactics, which Americans rightly regard as outside the legitimate political process, provide incontrovertible evidence of his small-c communism. Nonetheless, von Hoffman deems it necessary to downplay Alinsky's ugly real-life views because they call into question the legitimacy of community organizing and today's political leaders who emerged from that radical, un-American tradition. Today's most famous community organizer, of course, and the reason for the recent surge in interest in Alinsky, lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Von Hoffman is an accomplished journalist who wrote Citizen Cohn, a brutal, nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's counsel Roy Cohn. Cohn's prosecutorial skills sent Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Von Hoffman, like so many Communist sympathizers, assumes falsely that the Rosenbergs were innocent and crucifies Cohn for doing his job.

Von Hoffman is mightily peeved that the right dared to discover Alinsky. He invokes the fifth rule of "power tactics" in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals -- "ridicule is man's most potent weapon" -- heaping scorn on the "right-wingers" and "tea baggers" who have discovered the power of Alinsky's agitation techniques. "They are buying Rules by the thousands, which should be making Saul happy wherever he is, and are using it as their 'playbook' after adjuring each other to skip the parts containing its nonexistent Marxism."

A few months before von Hoffman's book came out, Reason magazine's Jesse Walker bought into von Hoffman's fantasy. He seemed to suggest that if Alinsky, who died in 1972, were alive today he might even have had a soft spot for the Tea Party movement. "Alinsky, after all, was always a decentralist at heart." He "distrusted government planners, and while he was by no means opposed to redistribution in itself he was an acute critic of the welfare state as it functioned in practice." Perhaps reading Alinsky's writings would disabuse Walker of this notion. Yes, Alinsky was uncomfortable with aspects of the welfare state apparatus but only because he saw the welfare state as a half-measure. He wanted a complete reorganization of society and didn't trust bureaucrats -- "buttinskies" in von Hoffman's words -- to carry it out.