Unmasking Obama--Jack Cashill My brother is currently reading and raving about how marvelous this book is. It is advertised on Conservative Treehouse. I went to look at Amazon reviews and found this well written, dense and comprehensive book. Well worth a read, I do believe. I hope the dude that wrote this review doesn't mind my posting (not that he would ever find out) but it is there for the taking on Amazon: 5.0 out of 5 stars Reflection: How the Coverage of the New Is the News Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2020 Verified Purchase Fair-minded people find themselves asking questions today about the news they receive: one U.S. president is accused of treason in an elaborate Russia hoax, and is then impeached over a 30 minute phone call with at least eight other people on the line. Another U.S president is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize – 11 days after his inauguration. These same people might also wonder about the news they don’t receive: 100 days of full-scale riots in 40 American cities that went largely uncovered, the disappearance of a 2005 picture of Barack Obama smiling next to Louis Farrakhan. Never heard of the last one? Read on. In his new book, Unmasking Obama, Jack Cashill answers these questions and a whole lot more. The book is a rational inquiry into the positive media coverage that Barack Obama enjoys and the people who make it possible – old reliables like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, and new entrants like Twitter, Facebook and Google. Opposed to these well-financed media giants are small, independent (often unpaid) journalists who question the reportage of the big boys. Cashill names these independents the samizdat, after Russian dissidents who struggled mightily to tell the truth about the Soviet Union: people like Solzhenitsyn, who were jailed, exiled and shot for their trouble. Spoiler alert: the American samizdat fares remarkably well against the giants who occupy the commanding heights of our political discourse. The real surprise of the book is not the gaping holes to be found in the coverage of Obama: it is the ease with which those holes are exposed. Our fair-minded person might be excused for thinking anyone can do this just by asking a few obvious questions. And he/she would be in the right of it. Unmasking Obama analyzes the mainstream media coverage of Obama on a number of fronts – The Red Front (Marxism), The Green Front (environmentalism), The Pink Front (feminism), as well as the response of the samizdat. In The Black Front (diversity), Cashill recounts how James O’Keefe caught ACORN on a series of videos happily cooperating in a scheme to obtain housing for underage girls in a supposed prostitution ring. ACORN responded by claiming that the first video was a “fluke”, a sentiment echoed by CNN. After waiting a day, O’Keefe shrewdly released a steady drip of similar videos taken from other ACORN offices, proving an irrefutable criminal pattern. Rather than report on the wrongdoings of ACORN, a Pulitzer Prize winner at The Washington Post published a personal hit piece on O’Keefe, predictably labeling him as a racist who was trying to suppress minority votes. The Associated Press picked up the same story line, as did ABC and CBS. Meanwhile, back at the real story, ACORN was being defunded by a Democratic House and Senate with a bill reluctantly signed by President Obama, who had close ties to ACORN. O’Keefe ultimately received a one-paragraph correction from the Post, which joined the wall of retractions he keeps in his office. In The Eastern Front (Russia), Cashill tells the story of Seth Rich, a computer programmer at the DNC, who was murdered outside of his home with two bullets in his back. Twelve days after Rich’s death, Julian Assange of Wikileaks began to release embarrassing e-mails from the DNC, courtesy of Russia. In a Dutch TV interview, Assange implied that Rich was his source and “our sources take risks”. Assange offered a $ 20,000 reward to find Rich’s killer. Rather than look at foul play, The Washington Post and Donna Brazile (the CNN reporter who got caught feeding debate questions to Hillary Clinton) speculated that Rich was the victim of a hold-up. Notwithstanding the fact that would-be robbers neglected to steal his wallet, his phone, his watch and an expensive pendant he wore. Journalist Brazile further speculated that Rich might have been caught on the wrong side of town – in a neighborhood where the median house price was $ 1 million. An incurious media remained satisfied with the robbery narrative. The murder has not been solved. (Full disclosure: footnote 21 on page 265 discloses that Fox retracted a conspiracy story about the murder of Seth Rich, although Sean Hannity did not.) In The Crescent Front (Islam), our fair-minded reader would learn that a picture of Obama taken with anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan in 2005 was suppressed for thirteen years. When the picture finally emerged in the blogosphere, the New York Times only reported it as a side-note in a larger article on the “religious fundamentalist” Farrakhan. Nothing to see here, folks. A pattern emerges. First, the mainstream media ignores the samizdat and tries to deprive their stories of oxygen. Then, they dismiss hard evidence as part of a “far right” conspiracy. If none of these measures kill the story, they accuse the samizdat of being a racist, climate denier or Islamaphobe, depending on whether the subject is the Black Front, the Green Front or the Crescent Front. Finally, a correction gets buried in the back pages. Unmasking Obama is no rant. A veteran of the culture wars and a member of the samizdat himself, Cashill documents his findings in 582 footnotes, approximately 20 percent of the book. I checked Cashill’s Facebook page and was disturbed to find that a review of Unmasking Obama was cancelled by Amazon. In an unwelcome case of life imitating art, Cashill published the review alongside the Amazon’s own criterion for cancellation. They don’t match. I published my review on Amazon and a few other sites. I don’t know if this piece will get through. If you see it, please respond with a comment or two. I just need to know that you are out there.