Oh For Goodness Sake: Dr. Drew is Crushing the Fogbowers

As you may know, I have been doing my best to school the folks who run and participate in the famous Fogbow website.  This website came to my attention, in part, because it includes wildly inaccurate information about me.

One of the most active members of Fogbow is Anna Stoddard.  Stoddard is a respected figure at Fogbow, but her name has been tarnished by her own errors and laziness.  For the record, I just caught Anna Stoddard, the author of the "Oh For Goodness Sake" blog lying about her first article on me.  She made the silly mistake of suggesting that I worked for Ann Coulter while Ann Coulter was an undergraduate at Cornell University. 

Now, Ms. Stoddard is spinning her mistake and indignantly claiming she "immediately" corrected her error. 

In truth, we both know that she left that error in place for over a year after I brought the mistake to her attention.  I know that she saw my outrage over her mistake over a year ago because she quoted from my article - without ever correcting the mistake I brought to her attention regarding her absurd suggestion about Ann Coulter employing me.  Today, she writes:  

John Drew came here and said I had misinterpreted something he said about being a teaching assistant of Ann Coulter. I did misunderstand what he had tweeted and I posted a correction to OFGS linking to John Drew's blog immediately.

I guess she is trying to argue that she just noticed my complaint about her silliness when in truth she has known about it for over a year. 

By the way, Stoddard also has not explained the even sillier idea that I did not know young Obama drove a red Fiat.  This second error is funny and revealing since you can easily tell from my article that the car I first saw Obama arrive in was owned (and driven) by his friend Hasan Chandoo. 

What should be alarming to everyone at Fogbow is Stoddard's willingness to lie in print to her friends at Fogbow to cover up her obvious mistake. 

As you might expect, the folks at Fogbow did not stand up long when I started turning up the heat - particularly their absurd claim that I said I was Obama's classmate or the bizarre assertion that I believe Obama is still a Marxist socialist based only on my 1980 debate with him. 

The most pathetic person in the Fogbow group is a fellow named Kevin Kesseler, 42, an unmarried math Ph.D. who lives up to the worst stereotypes you might imagine about him.  He has a massive gap in his resume, between 2009-2011, which is visible in his LinkedIn profile.  Last time I checked, he is bragging about his math model building company, Bespoke Modeling, which only had a one page web presence. 

The folks at Fogbow, particularly, the disbarred CA attorney, Bill Byran, believe that my take on young Obama's ideological extremism will be diluted by tossing in a thorough list of everyone else who ever interacted with young Obama.

I certainly welcome that debate.  Remnick's book verifies that Obama's true Occidental College roommate, Hasan Chandoo, was a Marxist, socialist.  The book quotes Margot Mifflin saying Chandoo was a Marxist.  I say Chandoo was a Marxist and that Obama was a more extreme Marxist than Chandoo.  I do not think any objective observer would buy Remnick's suggestion that Obama's Marxism was somehow unprogrammatic or unideological.  Remnick is a liberal Democrat partisan who seeking to protect Obama's image. The people he quotes are typically donors to the Obama presidential campaign.

I would expect Remnick and Obama's Democrat party friends to minimize the ideological extremism I saw in young Obama. 

All in all, I think Remnick underestimated how much additional information was available on Obama's radicalism, information later uncovered by both Jack Cashill in Deconstructing Obama and Stanley Kurtz in Radical-In-Chief.

One of the more notable guys contributing to Fogbow is a real sociology professor named Richard C. Rockwell who is known as Tolland RCR.  Prof. Rockwell, at the very least, should insist that the folks at Fogbow remove any suggestion from their website that I ever claimed I was Obama's classmate or that my take on contemporary Obama is solely based on meeting him in 1980-1981.  Rockwell used to be the Executive Director, The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. 

Richard C. Rockwell should know better than to tarnish himself, his academic institution or the Roper Center by tolerating the shoddy reporting and dishonest practices used by his friends at Fogbow.

If Fox New wants to host an Occidental College reunion, then I certainly hope I'm invited to share what I know about the young Obama's extremist ideology. I spoke at Occidental College regarding young Obama this summer. I welcome any opportunity to discuss Obama's Marxist socialist roots with those who knew him at Occidental College and those who are protecting him at the University of Connecticut or the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Dr. Drew Reacts: Debunking Leftist Fogbow Propaganda

I thought it would be a good idea to debunk the false statements made about me at the famous Fogbow website.  For a look at the real people and the real names of the folks posting anonymously at Fogbow, please check out the excellent YouTube video at LiveLeak called Who's Who of Blog Talk Radio and The Fogbow Obots aka Obama's Brown Shirts.

First, the Fogbow Obots assert that I have described myself as a "classmate" of young Obama.  This, of course, is completely untrue.  I have always made it clear that I was a graduate student from Cornell who was visiting friends from Occidental College when I met young Obama.  Nevertheless, this initial lie tells you a lot about the ruthlessness and disregard for the truth which seems common at the Fogbow website.

On the basis of this untruthful claim, the Fogbow people pretend to catch me in a lie simply by repeating my basic statements.  For my full report on meeting young Obama, see my first article in American Thinker called Meeting Young Obama. 

Second, the folks at Fogbow try to make me look foolish by saying that I believe Obama is still a Marxist socialist simply due to the brief exposure I had to his ideas when Obama was a sophomore at Occidental College.  They write:

Based on spending just a few hours with the President when he was 19 years old, in a relaxed social setting at an age when most students enjoy exploring and trying new ideas and thoughts, Drew concluded the President was and still is a radical Marxist.

I would have to be mentally ill to say that I base my take on Obama today simply on my face-to-face exposure to young Obama's ideological extremism.  My take on President Obama's abiding commitment to Marxist socialist thought is based on a combination of factors including 1) his ties to Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers and Sen. Alice Palmer in the 1990s, 2) the lack of a conversion story in the Obama presidential history which would indicate he dropped his youthful radicalism, and 3) the continuing rhetoric coming from Obama - as a candidate and as president - which indicates a profound commitment to a class conflict model of economic development and an out and out hostility to our traditional U.S. economic system. 

I have also provided detailed rebuttals to the inaccurate information being promoted by one of the members of the Fogbow website, Anna Stoddard, who is the blogger at "Oh For Goodness Sake."  For example, I immediately responded to Stoddard initial attack on me - which she posted on February 17, 2010 - where she made the bizarre suggestion that I worked for Ann Coulter while she was an undergraduate student at Cornell University.  You can see my response in this article at my own blog site. 

In addition, I also responded immediately to further bizarre comments made by Anna Stoddard on March 10, 2011 which made the even more bizarre suggestion that I should have known that Obama drove a red Fiat when, in truth, I made it very clear in my own work that the fancy car I saw Obama riding in when I first met him was owned by his wealthy Pakistani friend, Hasan Chandoo.  You can see my rebuttal to this silly idea in this article at my own blog site.  As far as I can tell, Stoddard is an elderly retired lady currently living in Mexico.  I think the silly mistakes in her blog show that she is spending too much of her retirement money on things that are killing her brain cells.

The folks at Fogbow like to position themselves as journalists who have a more accurate take on reality than their conservative opponents.  All I can say is that the Fogbow folks have a history of creating false documents and conducting dirty tricks.  Based on the gap between my real story and their out and out lies, I would think no one should take the folks at Fogbow seriously when it comes to getting the facts out about the young Obama.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Dr. Drew Gives a Rapid Response to New Irresponsible Attack by Error Prone OFGS Blogger

On the heels of my recent talk before the San Clemente Republican Women's Federated club, I learned that I was the recipient of another bizarre personal attack by Anna Stoddard, the elderly error-prone Oh For Goodness Sake  (OFGS) blogger. 

In this case, our expatriate, faux journalist completely misreads the work of liberal journalist David Remnick in the The Bridge.  Ms. Stoddard, for example, makes the tactical mistake of relying on the testimony of Mohammed Hasan Chandoo to refute my face-to-face observations of young Obama's revolutionary fervor. 

What Stoddard forgets is that in Remnick's book, Chandoo admits to being a Marxist.  Chandoo's girlfriend Margot Mifflin has reported that Chandoo was a Marxist.  Moreover, I can report to you that Chandoo was a Marxist.  It strikes me as delusional to assume that Chandoo - who really was Obama's sophomore year roommate - can be trusted to disconfirm young Obama's commitment to extremist ideology. 

For a great new article that puts young Obama's Marxist philosophy into a proper cultural context, please check out Micheal Leahy's just published article regarding the Indonesian roots of President Obama's radical perspective, "Obama's New Nationalism More Sukarno Than Teddy Roosevelt."

Accordingly, it strikes me as both silly and rather insane for Anna Stoddard to rely on Chandoo's comments in the Feburary 2010 piece by Ronald Kessler regarding my debate with young Obama as credible evidence that Obama was not a Marxist.

Give me a break!

FBI chronicler Ron Kessler is so cool that he even catches Chandoo lying over the course of his interview with Kessler regarding how frequently Chandoo has seen Obama since he has been in office.  The irony of the Kessler story is that Chandoo tries to undercut my report while revealing himself to be a less than honest resource.

The mistaken prone Stoddard also forgets that Obama friend Wahid Hamid also confirmed that young Obama's friends where Marxist socialists and that Obama was in sync with them ideologically.  This, of course, implies that both Chandoo and Obama were Marxists at Occidental College and verifies my comments to Kessler, two months prior to the publication of The Bridge, asserting that young Obama held to a radical, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist perspective. 

During my time with young Obama I got to see a real revolutionary face-to-face.  I engaged in a strenuous debate with Obama that was witnessed by both Caroline Boss and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo.  It was a debate in which I meant to change young Obama's world view by giving him more accurate information about the real world of international politics and social change. 

Absolutely no one else has come close to describing the thinking of young Obama in the vivid detail I have provided in my earlier comments and articles at American Thinker.  I was a student of Marxist economics and political science at the time I debated young Obama.  I do not see how I could have been mistaken about his level of intellectual development regarding the changing field of Marxist socialist theory in the early 1980s. 

Since my story has come out, it has helped spark a broad range of new Obama literature and has been featured in books by Michael Savage, Paul Kengor, Stanley Kurtz and Jack Cashill.   In 2008, I was a lonely, isolated voice seeking to save the nation from a presidential candidate who was too radical and too dishonest to serve our country properly and to lead us to economic prosperity.  In 2012, however, it is not just me anymore.  Opposition researchers will have many articles and books to review to understand the depth of the connections that link young Obama to radical Marxist thought all the way through Frank Marshall Davis, to me, to Alice Palmer and eventually to our nation's number one unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers. 

It is about time that the American people woke up to the frightening reality that President Obama has been holding us back and harming our progress by applying sort of silly and ineffective measures that could only please a Soviet Union planning bureaucrat.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Left Wing Blogger Now Asking Who is John Drew? Dr. Drew's Responses

Last year, I was surprised - and somewhat honored - to see that Anna Stoddard the blogger at "Oh, For Goodness Sake" put together a biography on me. The article is here

http://ohforgoodnesssake.com/?p=7349

I thought this forum was a good place to republish a public response to the issues raised by the article by Stoddard, an elderly retiree from New York now living in Mexico. For my immediate, same day, reaction to Stoddard's error-filled article see my story at Patriot Action Net.

The first thing to say is that I was Ann Coulter's T.A. which means I was responsible for grading her papers, grading her exams, and leading her small group discussion sections. I was actually working for her American government professor, Theodore J. Lowi. So, I was actually Lowi's teaching assistant and Coulter was one of my very first students. I think she can also communicate how she saw me evolve from being a young radical extremist into a being a moderate, non-Marxist social scientist. Poor Anna Stoddard, writing in Oh, For Goodness Sake, cannot seem to figure this out and never modified the text even as I brought this issue to her attention almost immediately after she first wrote her article.

(Literally, I called this error to her attention on the same day she wrote this awful smear job, but she did not even acknowledge this bizarre error until 9/19/2011.)

Second, I really was never rejected for tenure as Ms. Stoddard indicates in Oh, For Goodness Sake. The situation was worse than that. The folks at Williams took me off the tenure track in 1989 and really did not even let me compete for tenure. Their story is that my research was sub-par. The irony, of course, is that a month or so later I won the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation in the nation in my field. My story is that they were hostile to me because I was a man, Armenian-American, conservative and quite vocal in my complaints against affirmative action and those who doubted the wisdom of welfare reform.

The larger issue raised by Anna Stoddard in Oh, For Goodness Sake is my relationship with Obama. In truth, I only met Obama a handful of times. What is missing, however, is that Obama and I were part of an intense cultural sub-group due to our connections at Occidental College. My knowledge of him was built, in part, through my prior knowledge of Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, Caroline Boss, and others  - the young people who were active in campus politics driven by the Democrat Socialist Alliance at Occidental College. I took my status as a Marxist revolutionary thinker very seriously...and so did he. It not a small deal to live your life anticipating the Marxist revolution was coming down the road. The intensitiy of Obama's commitment to Marxism is why my girlfriend could refer to him as "one of us."

As she writes in Oh, For Goodness Sake, Stoddard also misses that I knew the Marxist professors Obama talks about in Dreams of My Father and I was dating the various structural feminists too. I knew the same foreign students and anti-apartheid activists.

By all accounts, my wife and I are taking grave risks because of my willingness to discuss Obama's early Marxist socialist ideology. If Anna Stoddard and her "Oh, For Goodness Sake" blog is the best that liberal Democrats can do to discredit my story, then I think I can stand up to anything thrown at me by http://www.attackwatch.com/  Seriously, we are okay. We have seen no threats against us. Why?  I think most Republicans already believed Obama was a Marxist and most Democrats do not think it is a bad thing in the first place.

Nevertheless, I'm still frustrated and puzzled by why I could not get this story into the media sooner. If it were not for Newsmax, Breitbart TV and talk radio, then I'm not sure it ever would have gotten to the general public.  Nevertheless, I learned in politics that it is important to respond immediately when you are under attack by an untruthful, error-prone person like Anna Stoddard writing in Oh, For Goodness Sake.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Catching Up with Mistake Prone "Oh, For Goodness Sake" Blogger: Dr. Drew Defends Himself, Again

I see that Anna Stoddard at "Oh, For Goodness Sake" has published a third article attacking my eye witness report on young Barack Obama's commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. See, http://ohforgoodnesssake.com/?p=16905 The good news is that I have moved up the scale from "...yet another bull-jiver" in February 17, 2010.

For the full story of my meeting with young Marxist Obama, see http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html

In response to the OFGS blogger, I feel a responsibility to report that I also remember I bumped into him in The Cooler on campus, I visited the apartment he shared with Chandoo and I saw him around the campus mail boxes. As I recall, on this last encounter, Obama and his roommate - Hasan Chandoo - asked me if I would be attending a graduation party with them. I think this minor increase in my reported contacts, from two to maybe five, is largely consistent with my earlier statements, particularly my statement that my insight into young Obama's true ideology depended on my role in the same "intense cultural sub-group" and not on the amount of time we spent together.

Aside from this admitted error, the Anna Stoddard relies heavily on quotes from David Remnick's book, The Bridge to attack my credibility. This is curious to me because Remnick's book came out on April 6, 2010. This was after my report on young Obama's Marxist-Leninist perspective was first published by Ronald Kessler at http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/obama-college-marxism-occidental/2010/02/08/id/349329 on February 8, 2010.

Ironically, Remnick - a liberal Democrat - confirms my take on the young Obama's ideology, relies on the same people I report hanging out with, and verifies the same social connections - including Obama's ties to Ms. Grauman-Boss and Mr. Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Remnick's book added to my credibility because he verified the gist of my story. This is probably how I moved up Stoddard's credibility scale from "bull-jiver" to exaggerator. I suspect that the correspondence between my report and the testimony in The Bridge is the major reason my story on meeting young Obama later appeared in books by Michael Savage, Stanley Kurtz, Paul Kengor and Jack Cashill.

Strangely, Stoddard has never corrected the absurd suggestion that Ann Coulter was teaching at Cornell and that I was employed as her teaching assistant. I'm shocked Ms. Stoddard never corrected this error. I think a contentious reporter would have figured out that Coulter was a student in my discussion section, a discussion section where I was a TA for Prof. Lowi.

Stoddard suggests that I tweeted that I "attended college" with young Obama. This, of course, is not true. I think it is obvious to any one familiar with Twitter that the tweet in question did not come from me. It came from another person who was asserting that I attended college with young Obama. (Democrats, however, may not fully understand how Twitter works in the wake of the Rep. Weiner scandal.)

There is considerable irony in the fact that Margot Mifflin, Chandoo's college-era girlfriend, is quoted on page 107 of Remnick's book confirming my take on the upper class look of young Obama. She reports that some students at Occidental College did not care for young Obama because he was "too GQ." Since Anna Stoddard's quotes from Remnick's book, I should have gotten more credit for the fact that my take on Obama appearance was later verified by Mifflin's comments in The Bridge.

Stoddard also reports Obama drove a “a funky red car, a Fiat” and suggests that I missed that fact. The reality of the situation is that I report in the American Thinker article that the owner of the luxury car was Obama's friend Chandoo. Stoddard's silliness is apparent in her own words:

In a recent article on American Thinker, makes a huge deal over Obama riding in a friend’s BMW, while Obama’s friend, Paul Carpenter recalls Obama drove “a funky red car, a Fiat.” Drew probably wouldn’t have known that small detail, because Drew was not a friend of Obama’s at Occidental, as he claims.

I will also stand by the report I have made that young Obama was not particularly close to the African-American community while he was at Occidental College. Stoddard cites the statements of Eric B. Moore. However, Moore did not stay in touch with young Obama after his transfer to Columbia University. Moore did not attend Obama's wedding. Chandoo, however, was there.

Meanwhile, Remnick's own book indicates that young Obama moved in with a white male friend when he transferred to Columbia University. Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, reports that he maintained ties with Hasan Chandoo. After leaving Occidental College, however, Obama does not mention continuing ties with even one of the African-American friends he supposedly made at Occidental College.

As an eye witness to the facts surrounding young Obama's ideology, I'm not surprised that the best the left can do to challenge my story is to launch inaccurate attacks on my credibility.  These attacks are easy to refute simply by referring to the research done by one of their own - David Remnick in The Bridge.  I'm thinking that this information will be helpful on the day that I become a target of Obama's new http://www.attackwatch.com/ website.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.