Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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Like I felt about Ron Paul, it does matter who one associates oneself with. Now that doesn't mean that any candidate will not attract moonbats, that's a given. The question becomes, how far is the candidate interacting with them?
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YThjYTU1ZDBjNmQ2YzcwNzU1MmYwN2JiMWY0ZGI0NDA=
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YThjYTU1ZDBjNmQ2YzcwNzU1MmYwN2JiMWY0ZGI0NDA=
April 11, 2008, 6:00 a.m.
The Company He Keeps
Meet Obamas circle: The same old America-hating Left.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe its because theyre so comfortable around him.
He presents as the transcendent agent of change. Sounds platitudinous, but its really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the medias Chosen One, he hasnt had to.
But hes not, as some hopefully dismiss him, a charismatic lightweight with a gift for sparkling the same old vapid cant. Judging from the company he chooses to keep, Obamas change would radically alter this country. He eschews detail because most Americans dont believe were a racist, heartless, imperialist cesspool of exploitation. The details would be disqualifying.
MICHELLE
So, instead, we get glimpses. The most profound influence in his life, his wife Michelle, is notoriously less circumspect than her careful husband about where shes coming from. Her college thesis, which Princeton tried to keep under lock and key, testifies to a race-obsessed worldview. She may have refined it, but shes never grown out of it.
After four years at one of Americas most esteemed academic institutions, Michelle recoiled at the thought of further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. That the sky has been the limit for her, that she has managed to ride the periphery from Princeton to Harvard Law School, to one of the countrys top law firms, and to a plethora of prestigious institutional positions, has not much altered her perspective. Through the windows of her mansion on Chicagos south side, American society still appears as a caste system.
The United States, says she, is just downright mean. Never, prior to her husbands presidential run, had she had a reason to feel proud of it, she told a campaign throng. But by last November, with Baracks pursuit of the brass ring catching momentum, she suddenly got plenty proud. And confident: so much so that she was moved to tell MSNBC, Black America will wake up and get it unite and carry him over the finish line.
THE REV. WRIGHT
...
Obama and his supporters brusquely dismiss the drawing of sensible inferences from these gestures of admiration as guilt by association. In point of fact, though, the Obamas didnt just associate with Wright. They subsidized him to the tune of over $20,000 not exactly chump change from a couple without great means or any history of philanthropy to speak of. And until recent public attention to the pastors noxious rants threatened to derail his White House bid, Sen. Obama kept Wright officially on board as part of his campaigns African American Religious Leadership Committee.
BILL AYERS AND BERNADINE DOHRN
With this as background, is it really all that startling that Sen. Obama enjoys a friendly relationship with Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of terrorists?
I want to be clear here: Not terrorist sympathizers. Terrorists.
...
It was at the Chicago home of Ayers and Dohrn that Obama, then an up-and-coming community organizer, had his political coming out party in 1995. Not content with this rite of passage in Lefty World where unrepentant terrorists are regarded as progressive luminaries, still working only to educate both Obamas tended to the relationship with the Ayers.
Barack Obama made a joint appearance with Bill Ayers in 1997 at a University of Chicago panel on the outrage of treating juvenile criminals as if they were, well, criminals. Obama apologists say, So what? People appear with other people all the time. Nice try. This panel was orchestrated by none other than Michelle Obama, then an Associate Dean of Student Services. Ayers didnt happen to be there he was invited by the Obamas to educate students on the question before the house: Should a Child Ever Be Called a Super Predator?
And heres how the Universitys press release chose to describe this would-be super predator:
William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isnt suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?
Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice[.]
The other panelists included Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama who is working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system. The goal was to promote change, to actuate the vision of Chicago reformer Jane Addams, whod sought the establishment of a separate court system for children which would act like a kind and just parent for children in crisis. Never mind the crises theyd caused the victims of their wanton murders and mayhem the fault for those, surely, was our downright mean society.
...
RASHID KHALIDI
In the interim, Ayers and Obama had teamed up for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charitable organization. Together, they voted to donate $75,000 of the largesse they controlled to the Arab American Action Network. The AAAN was co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a longtime supporter of Palestinian resistance attacks against Israel, which he openly regards as a racist, apartheid state. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Khalidi peremptorily denies having been a PLO operative or having directed its official press agency for six years (from 1976 to 1982). There can be no gainsaying, though, that he was an influential apologist for Yasser Arafat, the terror master who spawned two Intifadas and ordered the murder of American diplomats.
In the mean, besotted United States, of course, being a terrorist, a terror apologist, or simply raging at the machine qualifies one for a cushy academic soapbox. Thus did Khalidi eventually land on his feet at the University of Chicago, where he ran in the same circles as Associate Dean Michelle Obama, Law Professor Barack Obama, University of Illinois-Chicago Education Professor Bill Ayers, and Northwestern Law Professor Bernadine Dohrn (who prepared for a career in instructing future officers of the court with a stint in federal prison for flouting a judges order that she testify in a grand jury investigation into the Weathermens infamous Brinks robbery-murders).
For Khalidi, though, greener pastures called: the opportunity to become a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. There, he now directs Edward Saids legacy: Columbias notoriously Israel-bashing Middle East Institute though, much to the Universitys chagrin, he was scratched in 2005 from a program designed educate teachers on instructing their young students about the Middle East. New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein concluded Khalidis splenetic meanderings mightnt be the best model.
They didnt faze Barack Obama, though. He was front and center with Ayers and Dohrn at a farewell bash when Khalidi left Chicago for New York. It was only right. Khalidi, after all, had hosted a fundraiser for Obama in 2000, when the latter launched an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. And so it goes. A few weeks ago, Khalidi told worldnetdaily.com he supports Obamas presidential run because he is the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and because Obama has promised negotiations with Iran.
Ayres, too, provided a minor ($200) contribution to Obama, in 2001. That was the year of September 11, just a few days before the Times published its excerpt of Ayress remembrances of bombings past. Read the short interview and ask yourself: Could anyone, let alone someone as sophisticated as Barack Obama, chat with Bill Ayers for about 30 seconds and not know exactly where is coming from?
Could they really have been friends? Well, Ayers is virtually channeling Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright when he wails that American society is not a just and fair and decent place.
God, what a great country, he scoffed to the Times. It makes me want to puke.
Hey, right back at you there, Professor. At least thats how most of us are likely to feel. But not Sen. Obama. And thats why Ayers like Khalidi and Wright and Michelle Obama, and others who know the senator well while weve been told precious little sees in Barack Obama the change hes been waiting for.
No thanks.
