THESE GUYS SHOULD REALLY LAY OFF THE CRYSTAL METH DURING HOGAN'S HEROES MARATHONS ON NICK AT NITE

Via Flopping Aces, I see that John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media has discovered Barack Obama's secret Nazi connection -- he's actually a brainwashed tool of the (German) company that publishes his books, and will do anything he's told by his publishers/masters!

The publicly funded Franco-German "cultural" channel Arte did not waste any time celebrating the dawn of a new era in transatlantic relations.... the channel broadcast a 70-minute-long special, live from Washington, with the highly imaginative title "A Black Man in the White House" [Un Noir à la maison blanche].... Host Daniel Leconte revealed that the [Bertelsmann F]oundation had even helpfully prepared "a little aide, a little white book" for the incoming president on how to conduct his relations with Europe. He was careful to interject that the "white book" had been prepared for both candidates.

In any case, Bertelsmann can be sure that Mr. Obama will read its "little aide, its little white book" very carefully. For ... the Bertelsmann Corporation happens to be the president-elect's principal source of income. It was Bertelsmann, namely, that agreed to pay Obama a reported $1.9 million in advances for a three-book deal that the then-senator-elect signed with its fully owned American subsidiary, the Random House publishing group, in December 2004.

...even as president, he will be paid far more by Bertelsmann than by the American taxpayers. For him to be taking advice from the Bertelsmann Foundation suggests conflict of interest on a magnitude that has perhaps never before been seen in the history of the American presidency....

It might be considered irrelevant today that Bertelsmann massively collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II....

Barack Obama's books have made a lot of money. So who's the powerful in that relationship? The author, not the publisher. He made the convention speech in 2004 that brought him fame. That's what made him a hot literary commodity.

And while I know it's hard for anyone who writes for Pajamas Media to understand this, big media conglomerates don't demand total intellectual loyalty, sworn in blood in a secret subterranean bunker. It's unlikely that Obama even knows about this "white book."

And guess who else has written for Bertelsmann? John McCain. His best-known books were Random House books. Would he have been beholden to the sinister Teutons? (His most recent book, however, was published by a division of the media giant Hachette, which is -- gasp! -- French.)

As for Bertelsmann, yes, there are some skeletons in the closet, including, as Rosenthal notes, collaboration with the Nazis during World War II (a fact the company acknowledged a number of years ago). This took place decades before Bertelsmann owned Random House.

Prior to that acknowledgment, the family that runs Bertelsmann did (as Rosenthal also notes) hire a World War II revisionist to write histories of the company and the family. But the independent commission that ultimately acknowledged the Nazi collaboration was purged of this historian.

(Ah, but, as Rosenthal says, that historian thought FDR had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor. And Jeremiah Wright thinks FDR had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor! And this belief is contagious via casual contact!)

Look, none of this is relevant to Barack Obama. Big media conglomerates don't have intellectual litmus tests. Obama's books are published by the company's Crown division -- which also publishes Ann Coulter, Michael Medved, and other right-wing authors. Various divisions of Random House publish the likes of Katha Pollitt, the late Molly Ivins, and Matt Taibbi -- and also Jonah Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly. Random House imprints have published both Jesse Helms and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Oh, and with regard to World War II, Random House continues to publish the works of Elie Wiesel, as well as the late Irene Nemirovsky and Victor Klemperer.