David Kupelian's War On Obama

WorldNetDaily's managing editor has no problem with peddling misleading claims and outright lies about the president if it forwards his anti-Obama agenda.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 5/30/2013

Kupelian presumably was an architect of WND's increasingly deranged and desperate four-year war on President Obama, which aimed for Obama's personal destruction by peddling increasingly discredited claims about his "eligibility" to be president (the discrediting of which WND hid from its readers) and ultimately descended into repeating sleazy, unsubstantiated rumors about Obama's sex life. The only thing that ended up getting destroyed was what little credibility WND had.

David Kupelian

By contrast, Kupelian insisted that Obama really is a Manchurian candidate (despite WND promoting the idea that McCain was just a few years earlier), declaring that "Barack Obama was programmed for years by his atheist, Muslim father, by the communist sex pervert Frank Marshall Davis, by con man Tony Rezko, by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and others – most of all by black liberation theology screamer Jeremiah Wright."

Kupelian tried to justify his birther obsession in a 2009 column with a litany of claims that had been discredited even then. He then tried to discredit the discrediters by playing guilt-by-association, asserting that FactCheck.org's debunking of right-wing attacks on the birth certificate can't be trusted because "FactCheck.org is part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, which critics point out is linked to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge organization where Obama worked for several years with former 'Weather Underground' terrorist William Ayers." But Kupelian offered nothing to contradict anything FactCheck wrote.

Kupelian also neglected to mention WND's own reporting the previous year that the "[a] separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic" -- the exact same conclusion that FactCheck.org made. (After numerous commentators pointed that out, WND felt compelled to add an "editor's note" to the article essentially declaring that "authentic" didn't mean what WND originally claimed it to mean.)

Cranking up the hate

For the 2012 presidential election, Kupelian ramped up the hate. Kupelian writes in a June 2012 WND column:

Obama admits in “Dreams From My Father” that, during college, he was attracted to the “Marxist professors.” Indeed, the Marxist student leader at Occidental College at the time, John Drew, says Obama was far more radical than even Drew was, actually believing that Marx’s prophesied proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism was imminent in the United States. Today Drew, who has long since repudiated his former radicalism, says that even in his Marxist days he attempted to rein in Obama by trying to persuade him to work within America’s political system to bring about the Marxist transformation they all desired.

After college, Obama followed in the footsteps of Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky and went on to practice and teach Alinsky’s revolutionary street-organizing methods.

In fact, Drew had precious little personal interaction with Obama at the time -- he had graduated from Occidental before Obama enrolled there, and the two met only twice on social occasions when Drew came back to visit Occidental. That makes him a dubious judge of how "radical" Obama purportedly was at the time.

Further, Saul Alinsky was not a Marxist. He said in a 1972 Playboy interview: "I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism."

And in his book "Rules for Radicals," Alinsky disparaged Lenin as having "said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns!" He also mocked those who like to quote "Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara," who he said were "as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport."

But Alinsky serves as an effective bogeyman for the uninformed readers that Kupelian caters to, so his invocation of Alinsky didn't need to be truthful.

Kupelian flat-out lied in an Aug. 9 column when he claimed that President Obama's re-election campaign was trying to "suppress, in that pivotal swing state, the votes of America’s military men and women – people who traditionally lean conservative and vote Republican" by filing a lawsuit in Ohio over early-voting laws that allow members of the military three days longer to vote early than civilians. In fact, the goal of the lawsuit was to extend civilian early voting to that of the military, not reduce the military deadline to the existing civilian one.

The funny thing is, Kupelian sort of conceded that by admitting that pretty much everyone else, which he disparagingly characterizes as "the vast, perpetually mesmerized pro-Obama media," as well as "the establishment’s arbiters of All Truth On The Internet, Snopes, Politifact and FactCheck," all disagree with that assessment.

But Kupelian has never been one to let facts get in the way, so he stumbled forward with his anti-Obama attack, proclaiming that "The REAL issue at stake here, the one virtually no one is talking about, and the reason it hurts the military if the judge forces Ohio to open all its polling places for all voters for the final three days, is the legal precedent that will be set – namely, that our soldiers cannot constitutionally be given a break, a few extra days, to get their votes in."

Kupelian was not yet done misleading, however:

Then in 2010, ex-DOJ attorney M. Eric Eversole spoke out against the Obama Justice Department for its failure to safeguard the military vote.

Although Congress had passed in 2009 a law mandating that military personnel overseas be given sufficient time to participate in U.S. elections, the DOJ’s Voting Section was ignoring the new laws, potentially allowing thousands of uncounted ballots to fall through the cracks, said Eversole, a former litigation attorney for the DOJ Voting Section.

Eversole was hired by DOJ under the Bush administration during the period the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility said that officials were improperly considering political affiliation when hiring career attorneys. What Eversole and Kupelian portray as the DOJ purportedly "ignoring the new laws" -- for which Eversole provided no substantial evidence -- was actually the DOJ working with states that had not changed their primary voting deadlines to conform with the new law in order to preserve the intent of the law.

Prior to the 2012 presidential election, Kupelian looked into "my crystal ball" and predicted all sorts of calamities if Obama was re-elected, including "Depression and mental illness," "de facto secession," and last but not least, political violence:

If Obama in a second term accelerates his relentless assault on the American system, there may be some who conclude all is lost and that their only response is to commit violent acts in the misguided belief they are channeling America’s founding generation – refreshing “the tree of liberty,” as Jefferson said, with “the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Of course, such miserable actions will fail to achieve any good result, innocent people will suffer, the perpetrators will rightly be reviled (along with millions of others), and the net result will be a level of government repression unprecedented in the modern age.

Of course, Kupelian doesn't mention that the type of person who would be prone to anti-Obama violence is also likely an avid reader of the anti-Obama propaganda at WND.

Needless to say, Kupelian didn't take it very well when Obama won re-election, as he wrote in a Dec. 19 column in which he depicted Obama's re-election as part of "the coming tribulation in America":

My 23-year-old daughter called me mid-evening on Election Day, right after it became apparent that the unthinkable had occurred – that Team Obama would have another four long years to transform and dismantle all that Americans loved, all that we fought for, all that we “built.”

“Dad,” she said urgently, “what the hell just happened?”

I confirmed the bad tidings she was hearing on Fox News and explained the vexing electoral math. And then, after dialoguing briefly about the implications of this election, I was moved to more-or-less apologize to her: “I always wanted to leave behind a good country for you and your brother to grow up in, but it isn’t looking that way right now. This is really bad. I’m sorry.”

Does Kupelian think that if he had told more lies and peddled more smears about Obama, that the president would have lost? Is that what he's sorry about? Has he considered the possibility that Obama's re-election was a message to him and others who would rather lie and fearmonger instead of behaving responsibly by telling readers the truth?

Blaming stress on Obama

“I think Obama is challenging everybody’s sanity,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed recently. “Obama [is] literally pushing people to snap, attacking the very sanity of the country!”

Rush may be on to something – because a little-reported but crucial aspect of America’s ongoing “fundamental transformation” is that the sheer stress of life is driving tens of millions to illness, depression and self-destruction. It’s all documented in the groundbreaking April issue of Whistleblower, titled “STRESSED AND DEPRESSED: The unreported health crisis of the Obama era.”

One of those "stunning trends" WND apparently wants to pin on Obama: "More U.S. soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat, and suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death in America." Apparently, lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- neither of which was started by Obama -- have nothing to do with that statistic.

Kupelian's essay on the subject made the link even more explicit:

After all, let’s face the hard facts: We just re-elected perhaps the worst president in history, someone manifestly obsessed with dismantling traditional, free-market capitalist America and transforming it into a socialist nanny state. That in itself is highly stressful – at least for the roughly half the population that still understands socialism always leads to a profound loss of freedom and prosperity.

Then there’s today’s relentless economic pressures: high unemployment (the actual rate is at least double that of the “official” government rate), foreclosures and bankruptcies, a stagnant growth rate, 11,000 new people signing up for food stamps every single day, rising taxes for the entire middle class whose net worth is simultaneously shrinking, ever-higher prices for food, gas and other essentials – and overshadowing it all, a galactic national debt burden, courtesy of a wildly out-of-control government unrestrained by either the Constitution or common sense.

That, too, is very stressful. Top it all off with an administration continually abusing the public for the sake of enlarging and consolidating its political power – for instance, by purposely making the “sequester” cuts hurt Americans, even our active-duty soldiers, as much as possible.

Make no mistake: This sort of stress on Americans is not only intentional on the part of Team Obama – it is strategic. Remember, these people are revolutionaries (that is, engaged in “bringing about a major or fundamental change,” as Merriam-Webster puts it) and utterly committed to replacing one societal structure – America’s constitutional, limited-government, free-enterprise system – with another – a socialist, wealth-redistributionist system run by an all-powerful government.

Such a radical change cannot be accomplished while Americans are calm, happy, content and grateful for their blessings. Citizens must be unhappy and stressed out. Indeed, widespread popular discontent has always been the required fuel for leftist transformation.

Just reading a few pages into Saul Alinsky’s notorious “Rules for Radicals,” one encounters repeated confirmation that the very key to radical “change” is keeping the populace angry, encouraging their grievances, stoking their resentments and making sure they are continually upset. That is the primary psychological dynamic of “community organizing” – and America today is led by community-organizer-in-chief Barack Obama, a long-time master practitioner and instructor in Alinsky’s neo-Marxist agitation methods.

Top radio talker Rush Limbaugh recently picked up on this normally unspoken aspect of Obama’s modus operandi: “I think he wants people to snap,” opined Rush. “I think Obama is challenging everybody’s sanity. Obama [is] literally pushing people to snap, attacking the very sanity of the country.”

Kupelian also wrote that "during eras when society and families are stable, unified and fundamentally decent and moral – as, say, America during the 1950s – the stress level for each person is minimized, or at least not compounded by a perverse society." Yeah, blacks in the 1950s weren't feeling any stress about being systematically discriminated against, did they?

Kupelian's solution to all of this Obama-induced stress involves an old friend:

Like the constantly inculcated attribute of “resilience,” the military has also found the practice of “mindfulness” to be extremely helpful in overcoming stress. And the gold standard in this growing field is “Be Still and Know,” a simple and time-tested awareness exercise that been used in all five armed service branches for many years.

[...]

“Be Still and Know” was developed by Roy Masters, who at 85 is the patriarch of stress experts, having taught this method since 1960 to millions, his fans including everyone from movie star John Wayne to Internet journalist Matt Drudge. He also hosts talk radio’s longest-running counseling show, “Advice Line,” on Talk Radio Network. The author of 18 books, Masters was featured on the Sean Hannity Show to discuss his newest book, “Hypnotic States of Americans.”

Recently, all four of the audio exercises on the “Coping Strategies” CD have been released in a new civilian version on a dedicated MP3 player called, “The Cure Stress Device.”

“In today’s high-tech, wireless world,” said Masters, “a little, self-contained audio device the size of a credit card seemed like the best delivery system possible.”

In a recent message he tweeted, Masters summed up more than 60 years of work in just 140 characters: “Learn to endure cruelty and injustice without resentment and after the stress has passed you will find the fulfillment you have been seeking.”

Kupelian never gets around to mentioning it -- disclosing conflicts of interest? Bah! -- but he used to work for Masters. Kupelian edited a magazine for Masters' organization, the Foundation of Human Understanding, that appears to have served as a prototype for Whistleblower.

Masters may not be the best person to take relaxation tips from. He and his FHU has been accused of cult-like tendencies over the years; his followers have been called "Roybots." Masters moved his operations to Grants Pass, Oregon, in 1982 -- followed by 2,000 of his supporters, who proceeded to attempt to take over the town; that prompted a boycott of Masters-related businesses by some local residents. A July 1992 episode of Geraldo Rivera's TV show featured a former FHU member who said of the group: "The role of women is to be very submissive, quiet, never questioning, not thinking, no decisions." The ex-wife of one of Roy Masters' sons denounced Masters on a 1999 TV show, citing a "long history of Masters' denigration of women."

Plus, as WND news editor Joe Kovacs inadvertently confirmed, WND's original headquarters was located on a ranch owned by Masters' FHU near Grants Pass.

So we have your usual WND non-disclosure of conflicts of interest and a whitewashing of the ugly truth about the man who Kupelian apparently idolizes. Par for the course at WND -- Kupelian helped build it, after all.