I am a proud Lilliputian.
Jack Cashill’s wonderful new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, has put me and all my colleagues in conservative media and punditry in the appropriate weight class in his sometimes whimsical, yet always powerful, analysis of the Obama administration.
Cashill accurately equates those of us who have fought for years to dig facts out about the amazingly opaque man, Barack Obama, and his administration with the little inhabitants of Lilliput. Occasionally, we succeed in locating a revelation here or there amidst the murk, busily working away like those diminutive characters in Jonathan Swift’s classic, Gulliver’s Travels. The characterization is especially apt considering the power of our opposition in the monolithic Deep State, which heralded Obama as the next Coming of the Messiah. Those Deep Staters in government, along with their media, Hollywood and Big Tech confederates, did everything possible to protect Obama from scrutiny.
The book does an excellent job of laying out the political/media landscape – the nature and tactics of both those on the political left hell-bent on protecting the beloved Obama and those on the political right seeking to expose him and his agenda. The book is largely an exposition of the corrupt modern mass media. But it is much more.
Cashill is no fawning observer of the “right-wing” media, of which he is highly critical. He is careful to separate those whom he sardonically calls the “Responsible Right” from the truly intrepid “Samizdat” right-wing media, borrowing a phrase used for the brave reporters in the former Soviet Union who risked everything to get the truth out about that oppressive tyranny. The Responsible Right journalists are the often sneering and always staid upholders of the conservative status quo, not wanting to be dismissed in Georgetown salons as “fringe lunatics.” The Samizdat journalists are those who have doggedly sought to expose the malignant nature of Obama and his backers, while facing the opprobrium of their “betters” in the Responsible Right.
Describing the state of modern media, Cashill writes, “During the Obama years, an asymmetrical war was waged for control of that critical first draft of American history. There is no fair way to record that history without first acknowledging the war.” This is what Cashill, an amazingly prolific author with many prior books about Obama to his credit, does so ably – describing that incredible political-media war, which is no less significant than the shooting wars in which our country has been engaged for its profound effects on our nation’s course and future.
Cashill breaks down the book categorically by the various leftist fronts that are attacking traditional, conservative America – helpfully assigning most chapters’ categories a color code to denote the particular front under examination. For example, the chapter entitled “The Green Front” describes the “climate change” movement under Obama and its war on the free market under his one-time “green jobs czar,” the self-professed Communist, Anthony “Van” Jones. “The Rainbow Front” addresses the advance of the LGBT agenda under Obama, allegations about Obama’s own sexual history by the likes of Larry Sinclair, and his complete policy reversal on the sanctity of marriage as being between “one man and one woman” when it became politically expedient to do so. “The Black Front” describes Obama’s political weaponization of his own race, and his push to divide America along racial lines, with the complicity of the mass media. Then there is the Pink Front, the Brown Front, the Red Front and so on.
Jack Cashill is one of my favorite authors and an unrivaled observer of the contemporary political scene in America. His clear, unpretentious writing style doesn’t hint of his impressive academic background, having earned a PhD from Purdue University in American Studies.
He writes for Everyman, and has been doing so for decades, having written extensive works on Clinton administration figures and events, such as Ron Brown’s Body: How One Man’s Death Saved the Clinton Presidency and Hillary’s Future and TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up and the Conspiracy. As I wrote in 2018, Jack’s research and revelations about the 1996 crash of TWA 800 should have compelled the Trump administration to re-open the investigation into that disaster and into the whitewash of its “official investigation.”
The depth of Cashill’s knowledge and powers of insight into what enabled Barack Obama to facilitate the advance of the various fronts in the “progressive” movement seeking to destroy traditional American institutions is truly impressive. His analysis picks out the various common strands in each of the Leftist interest groups that the Obama administration tied together in order to advance them in tandem. Cashill’s academic skills and training are evident in a subtle way, never boring the reader.
Those of us like myself who are in the weeds of researching corruption, trying to unearth facts about Leftist machinations, often don’t have time to see the big picture of the jigsaw puzzle. We often have to leave it to strategic analysts like Jack Cashill to assemble those pieces into a larger, comprehensive mosaic and present it to the American people in books like Unmasking Obama as part of the battle to write that “critical first draft of American history.”
One might quibble a bit with the book’s title, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, because from a Leftist perspective, Barack Obama succeeded in advancing the “progressive” cause beyond the Left’s wildest expectations. Just look at where we are today. Recently, the Supreme Court effectively changed the legal definition of “sex” so that, in fact, grown men will be allowed to call themselves women and join the girls in the bathroom. An organization called Black Lives Matter, run by self-described “Marxist-trained” militants, has major U.S. corporations, and seemingly every other American institution, in an extortionist grip, shaking them down for hundreds of millions of dollars. Black-clad violent thugs under the Antifa umbrella are allowed by Democrat mayors and governors to run rampant through our cities, burning, looting and assaulting with impunity.
Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency is due for public release on August 18 and available now for pre-order on Amazon. It is a must-have in the collection of anyone with an interest in American politics, or anyone who simply cares about the future of this great nation and the incredible transformation it has undergone since a man named Barack Obama came on the scene in 2008.
Meantime, we Lilliputians will do our best to continue exposing what is happening and what has happened. After all, what other course is there?
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 33 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, and The Federalist. Follow him on Parler and Twitter at @BillMarshallDC1. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)