a scandal shelved
Ron Chusid's Liberal Values mentioned another conservative attempt at creating an Obama scandal--based on this photo showing a portion of the White House library:
Kathy Kattenburg mentioned at The Moderate Voice that the right-wing blogosphere was oh-so-concerned (thanks to Rob's hyperventilation at Say Anything Blog) about a few books on communism and socialism and what they allegedly indicated "[i]n the context of Obama's economic policies." As the flames of paranoia were being fanned by some, others were busy finding out the facts: WaPo noted that the books have been in the White House library since 1963, and Matthew Yglesias observed that the book on communism shown in the photo was written by an anti-communist author.
Rob issued a semi-retraction, but his charges will no doubt continue ringing through the Right's media echo chamber for years. (Remember the tales about crack pipes, condoms, and cock rings on the Clinton Xmas tree? Yeah, it'll be just like that.)
Getting back to a central pillar of Rob's analysis, Chusid wrote later in his piece:
Of course the presence of books in one's library tells nothing about one's political or economic beliefs. [...] A photo of my home library would show books by Karl Marx as well as Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand, along with books by authors with views in between.
Like Chusid, communism and libertarianism sit shoulder-to-shoulder on my shelves as Marx and Engels are bracketed by Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Since I tend to group my books by subject matter, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye share a shelf with Osama bin Laden--they're all fundamentalists, after all--and my Bibles sit between Graves' Greek mythology and the Arthurian legends.
While I admit to a certain fondness for pairing books with their rebuttals (Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind; Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America and Jack Huberman's 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America; Ann Coulter's Godless along with Soulless and Brainless; Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Dan Savage's Skipping Towards Gomorrah) I generally try to be more subtle that merely putting Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh side-by-side...although I did that, too.
It's fun to watch people's expressions as they scan my bookshelves, looking for a clue...