Here's a video from Glenn Beck which seems to show interim White
House communications director Anita Dunn listing two of her
"favorite political philosophers" in a speech: Mother Teresa
and... Mao Tse Tung.
(Skip to 4:10 for the Anita Dunn clip)
Dunn initially juxtaposes the two to make it a joke. "Not often
coupled with each other," she says, to a few laughs. Dave Weigel
thinks the whole thing's a joke that everyone but Glenn Beck
gets.
At that point in the video, it is clearly a joke. But then Dunn
goes into a somewhat long history of Mao and Chiang Kai Shek in
1947 that's a little bit too bright, and a little too
hagiographic. It suggests that she was in fact not joking that
Mao is one of her favorite political philosophers. The joke was
the juxtaposition between him and Mother Teresa, not her beliefs.
Her love of Mao's political philosophy, unfortunately, doesn't
seem to be one of the speech's jokes.
If Anita Dunn does not understand what is wrong with citing Mao
as a favorite political philosopher, then she is out of her mind.
Is there anything in her background to suggest that she is indeed
this crazy? Or is this simply a clip taken out of context?
UPDATE:
Weigel notes in his blog post, and this Think Progress post
expands
on the point, that McCain and other right-wingers have also
been quick to use some of Mao's sayings, e.g. "it's always
darkest before it's totally black."
Of course there's an important distinction between reciting
aphorisms that are fairly universal and anyone could have said,
and drawing a lesson from the specific actions and thoughts of a
mass murderer as they pertain to mass murder -- which is what
Dunn does in the clip.
The more significant problem with interpreting this clip as
evidence that Dunn is a revolutionary communist is that it lacks
context. Beck played three or so full minutes of the clip on his
show, but even so there are still possible mitigating
circumstances.
For instance, it's possible that it's such a friendly and
ideologically-attuned audience that Dunn thinks she can get away
with making fine points about Mao without being questioned on the
larger point that she deplores him as a communist dictatory. It's
entirely possible -- I've certainly been at events where liberals
feel comfortable enough with the audience to discuss the
effiencies of communist health care systems without first
bothering to disclaim communism's atrocities. Similarly, I've
heard conservatives praise South American dictators for
implementing certain free-market reforms without mentioning at
the same time that they appreciate that the people they're
talking about were in fact dictators.
The other problem is that, as far as I'm aware, there's no other
information out there that suggests that Anita Dunn is the kind
of person who would talk about Mao's achievements, let alone be a
secret communist sympathizer.
Then again, she is the White House's communications director, and
the bottom line is that she's supposed to communicate her
political preferences a little better than this.
