To my surprise, Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama, couldn't be more relevant to the political struggle facing us today.  In 2020, as in 2008 (and throughout the two Obama presidential terms), the key to political power is what must be called "information warfare" (my term, not Jack's) between the mighty establishment media and the feisty conservative alternative media, which Jack likens to the samizdat underground commentary in the old Soviet Union.  It is the process of the unmasking of the phony propaganda peddled by the all-powerful establishment by the resource- and prestige-poor "Lilliputians" (an appropriation of Jonathan Swift's work that the satirist surely would approve of) that is the heart of the book.

The narrative history presented in Unmasking Obama is captivating.  Jack takes readers along with him as he was both a participant in the warfare and a historian of it, digging up parts of the elusive truth about the real Barack Obama in the face of derision and obstruction that came his way.  But Jack is far from the sole hero of the story of the warfare.  Because of his literary detective work, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill Ayers wrote the autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father, that first established Obama as a serious intellect, Jack enjoyed access to many of the most formidable truth-tellers about Obama.  The book's prologue, in fact, begins with a phone call Jack received in 2011 from a then little-known lawyer named Michael Cohen, acting as a lawyer for Donald Trump.

Unmasking Obama takes the reader through the major aspects of the fraudulent picture of Obama that was painted by the media and political establishments and details how the truth was uncovered and often partially suppressed by the retaliatory efforts launched in response.  It often resembles detective fiction in the drama of the struggle to get at the truth and the  struggle to prevent that.  I hesitate to call it beach reading, for it is not in any sense fluff, intended to while away time.  But it is vastly entertaining and thought-provoking, and the 218 pages fly by rapidly.

Today, exactly the same struggle is underway between the Lilliputians seeking to uncover who really is running the front-man candidacy of Joe Biden and the shadowy movement that is looting and destroying our cities and the coordinated might of the mass media that spends 95% of its time pushing a party line that Trump is an unprecedented threat to human civilization and Joe Biden an amiable and pragmatic centrist.

Future historians, if there are any left still interested and able to dispassionately understand how America came to the current point of crisis, will find the story told in Unmasking Obama a very helpful guide.  If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of the consequences of the real-time reports.  You don't have to wait that long, though.  It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.