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Jon Meacham writes in Newsweek (web site) that Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was "a strong voice for racial justice" and political activist whose "writings on civil-rights and labor issues" had "prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee." Meacham is suggesting that Davis was the target of false allegations that he was a communist.

While he agrees that Davis was one of Obama's mentors, Meacham's handling of the communism angle is about as dishonest as it gets.

But at least the name of Frank Marshall Davis is finally getting into print in the mainstream media. It has taken months to get the truth out.

In the first place, as Meacham surely knows, Joseph McCarthy was a senator, not a congressman. The House committee had nothing to do with McCarthy. Second, Davis was identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), controlled and subsidized by the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB. As late as 1956, when he was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Davis was still refusing to deny that he was a communist.

Wouldn't it be helpful if Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, would make an elementary effort to get the facts right? But that is too much to ask when the presidency is at stake and the media-backed candidate is trying to cover up his controversial background.

All of this is of no significance or consequence if you believe that communism has been a blessing to the planet. But the editors of the Black Book of Communism, which documents about 100 million dead from this philosophy, would disagree.

And with Russia back on the march, a candidate's connection to an agent and apologist for Soviet Russia might strike many people as decidedly newsworthy, especially when that candidate initially refused to condemn Russia for its invasion of Georgia.

In Time magazine, (web site) David Von Drehle is a bit more honest. "Like his friend Paul Robeson and others, Davis perceived the Soviet Union as a 'staunch foe of racism' (as he later put it in his memoirs), and at one point he joined the Communist Party," he writes. Nevertheless, Drehle faults AIM for trying to paint a "radical" picture of Obama because of his association with Davis. He insists that "by the time they [Obama and Davis] met, Davis had been out of politics for decades, and 'mentor' may exaggerate his role in the young man's life. Still, it's clear that Obama did seek advice from the old man and that what he got was undiluted."

It is not a "radical" picture we paint. It is one of closely associating with an agent of one of the bloodiest and most destructive political philosophies of human history.

One of the key facts that Von Drehle ignores is that Robeson, like Davis, had been a secret member of the Communist Party USA. Also, by the time they met, 1970, Davis was still active in a CPUSA front called the American Committee for Foreign Born. So he wasn't "out of politics for decades." There's no evidence that Davis, who died in 1987, ever stopped being a communist.

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