All I wanted to do last week was enjoy my vacation. Instead, I was assaulted by another breathtaking statement from the president of the United States, provided courtesy of an official White House press release. The occasion was a July 25 meeting between President Obama and the leader of communist Vietnam. Obama stated: "President Sang shared with me a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."

This, of course, is utter nonsense. Ho Chi Minh was a committed Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who cut his teeth at Moscow’s Lenin School. He became one of the Soviet Comintern’s most successful agents. Among the testimonies to his efforts are the countless boat people from Vietnam who now live in America (many of whom voted for Obama).

In 2010, I published a book called Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. There, I shared numerous lines cooked up by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to dupe liberals. One of them was precisely the line Obama echoed on July 25. CPUSA and its mouthpieces regularly compared Ho Chi Minh to the American Founders, claiming he was fighting for the ideas not of the Bolshevik Revolution but of the American Revolution. This line was employed constantly, and it worked magically with wide-eyed liberals. . . .