If you can take the truth, let me give just one example of Michelle Malkin’s reliance on half-truths and outright lies.

In “Culture of Corruption”, Malkin makes it a point to say that Michelle Obama “was literally born into the Chicago political corruptocracy,” suggesting that because her father was a volunteer precinct captain and held a city job, she had to be a party to cronyism and embraced the practice to get ahead. In fact, the biography of Michelle Obama that Malkin cites in making this dubious case argued the exact opposite– that the first lady’s experience in the “powerful political machine” of Richard J. Daley made her and her family “extremely cynical about politics and politicians” until they met Barack Obama. Obama’s political career was pushed in part by a coalition of people who had grown up in opposition to Daley and whose goal was breaking the Machine, but you’ll never read that in a book written by Michelle Malkin.

The fact is that Michelle Obama’s father, Frank Robinson, worked as a “Precinct Captain” because he no other choice. The majority of people serving as precinct captains did so because their jobs depended on it. Robinson, whom Malkin fails to mention had MS, had a family to raise and he did what the political machine demanded. Malkin’s hatchet job conveniently ignores the fact that doing “volunteer” work in Chicago was, in fact, the only way you could get a city job.

“To get a city job, you’d have to have some kind of recommendation from your ward committeeman,” says Don Rose, describing a system in which it was crucial to have a recommender, somebody watching out for you — your patron. Daley kept a file cabinet with a list of jobs in it and was said to know the names of everybody who held them. “We had some volunteers but the majority of the people were serving as precinct captains because their jobs depended on it,” says Cliff Kelley, a former South Side alderman who was familiar with machine culture. Most of the time, Kelley says, a person’s political activism, and the job he held, were inseparably linked.

Michelle Malkin’s personal attacks on Michelle Obama are just one example of her selective editing, innuendo and guilt-by-association tactics, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the McCarthy era. Every other aspect of this book deals with the subject matter in the same dishonest manner.

Michelle Obama’s comments in Chicago about racial issues have been taken out of context and conveniently ignore the fact that the city of Chicago was a bastion of racist politics. Unless you think that Mayor Daley was an open-minded liberal.

David Weigel over at Reason’s Hit & Run does a fairly good takedown of the story, pointing out the inconsistencies- oh hell, make it lies – of Larry Johnson.

Tony Dukes

Obama is not my man, but I cannot judge him based on this rumored tape until it is surfaced if it is there to be surfaced, but I can make my opinion based on his other associations and his views and policies, if this does turn out to be true, it will probably sink his campaign in my opinion.