Obama Lies, CNN Buys

For most of his life, Barack Hussein Obama has been a committed socialist. Now, he claims he isn't and never was. Of course, rather than investigate, CNN just takes his word for it.

Journalism at CNN: As the president launches his re-election bid by striking a more centrist tone, the partisan press is helping him whitewash his radical past. Teamwork or not, it'll be hard to bleach.

Exhibit A is CNN's Soledad O'Brien. Earlier this week, she hosted a segment that tried to de-link Obama from Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. The late Alinsky is the father of community organizing and the author of the far-left bible "Rules for Radicals."

O'Brien opened her piece by scolding GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich for warning Obama "will represent Saul Alinsky (and) European socialism" in a second term. "President Obama has never said that he was influenced by Alinsky," O'Brien insisted.

Of course he hasn't. He's not stupid enough to publicly link himself to a socialist. But the record is clear that he was in fact influenced by Alinsky, if only CNN's "journalists" would do their homework. Allow us to do it for them:

• Obama first learned Alinsky's rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel's website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)

• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois," in which he lamented organizers' "lack of power" in implementing change.

• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.

• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.

• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.

• Obama also taught Alinsky's "Power Analysis" methods at the University of Chicago.