A Maoist in the White House? - Glenn Beck thinks so

Glenn Beck has dug up what is said to be proof of President Obama's dangerous radicalism in the form of this video of White House communications director Anita Dunn invoking Mao Zedong as one of her "two favorite political philosophers." But after watching the clip, my conclusion is that she isn't talking about political philosophy and she doesn't know squat about Mao.
Beck makes much of the mass murder produced by the Chinese tyrant. But Dunn wasn't talking about anything concret he did, good or bad. She was merely quoting a banality about choosing your own path: "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

Dunn was not talking about goals; she was talking about strategy. And what she said about strategy was pretty vacuous.

She's not the first Washington figure to quote evil totalitarians. During the campaign, John McCain was fond of quoting Mao to the effect that "it's always darkest just before it goes totally black." Conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist has been known to quote Lenin about combating enemies: "Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses." But I don't think either of them is a closet Communist.

As for the wisdom she invoked, it seems obvious that Dunn was being tongue-in-cheek, since the other of her favorite political philosophers is not a political figure at all--Mother Teresa.

And it's entirely believable that, as she claims, she got the Mao line not from a biography of Mao but from something written by the late Republican political strategist Lee Atwater. I asked China historian Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania if he recognized the reference, and he said, "The quote is certainly not familiar to me, nor does it sound like Mao."

Dunn, whatever Beck imagines, is the antithesis of a revolutionary guerrilla--a veteran Washington establishment operator who has worked for such centrists as Bill Bradley and John Glenn. Clearly, she's spent far too much time over her career having power lunches with capital big shots and not enough time studying the history of 20th-century China. If she knew anything about Mao, she'd know better than to say something nice about him.

So the best explanations for her words are shallowness and ignorance, not a fondness for communism. I'm pretty confident Dunn has as about much in common with Mao as she does with Mother Teresa.