Now we start to see the real Barack Hussein Obama. His work with Bill Ayers to radicalize Chicago schools was spelled out in detail this week in a Wall Street Journal piece by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Most of you will remember Ayers and his now wife, Bernardine Dohrn, as among founders/leaders of the radical and violent Weatherman, aka Weather Underground Organization, which bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon about 30 years ahead of Al Qaeda. Ayers and Dohrn have now been adorned with “respectability” as faculty members at, respectively, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Apparently prosecutorial misconduct enabled them to avoid having to serve prison time. However, they were terrorists as that term is used today, and they remain radical: not very long ago Ayers said publicly that he regretted not doing more as a Weatherman.
Obama’s first political campaign began with a party in the home of Ayers and Dohrn.
More elaboration by Kurtz on Obama’s radical background, titled “Senator Stealth,” was the cover story of the September 1 issue of National Review. A September 7 blog at The Spectator (London) by Melanie Phillips, titled “Revolution You Can Believe In,” discusses more of the same; click here.
I hope we all have reason in a few weeks to be thankful for long presidential campaigns. That observation will produce many a questioningly furrowed eyebrow, so I ask, How long has it taken for Americans to know anything about Obama beyond his fine speeches?
Truth and fairness have been disserved by an overwhelming majority of the mainstream media. So the real Obama has been scandalously slow to emerge from beneath a heavy overburden of manure and pretense.
Mark Twain famously observed, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” I’m not quite ready to argue that overthrow of our government is the objective of any Obama backers, as it was of Sgt. Raymond Shaw’s mother in "The Manchurian Candidate," but it all gets more gravely worrisome by the day.
Several respected friends have been Obama supporters from the get-go. So impressed was one of those that he told me, “In the end, I could not care less about the messenger – Obama, Clinton, McCain. Rather, it is the message that matters.” I have challenged a few of them to give me a single name of anyone in Obama’s background whom one could consider respectable at any level of political leadership. Anyone, that is, before Obama emerged as the Darling of Message for his party and the fawning mainstream media. None of these friends has delivered, nor have I found any such name in rather extensive reading and research. Not one. Zilch.
Obama is so bereft of any public record (aside from his far left but otherwise brief and unremarkable legislative record), about all we have to assess him are his associates. Those include scumbags like Tony Rezco and the usual assortment of corrupt Chicago politicians; radical extremists like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn; and, last but not least, his America-hating wife Michelle. Not a name among ‘em most would want mentioned in the same paragraph with our own.
Chicago political corruption, by the way, provides a particularly embarrassing contrast between Obama and the opposition. GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin rose to high office in Alaska by taking on political leaders in her own party whom voters considered corrupt. Obama made his mark in Illinois politics by using lawyers to remove opponents from the ballot and, when he had opportunities to help clean out corrupt officeholders, he either didn’t have the huevos or, more likely, he and they were all one happy family.
A man with Obama’s cronies, not to mention his new idolaters on the left fringe, is a serious threat to the Republic.