Tuesday, October 14, 2008

KURTZ CONNECTS THE DOTS

Have you wondered why Obama and his friends have gone to some extreme lengths to try to keep records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge out of the hands of curious journalists (and there aren't many these days) like Stanley Kurtz?
It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign....

An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but who is still “palling around” with the same folks. Discretely waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife, and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy. The book will be published by Third World Press, a press set up by Carruthers and other members of the ASCAC. Representatives of that press were prominently present for Wright’s eulogy at Asa Hilliard’s memorial service. Less than a decade ago, therefore, when it came to education issues, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were pretty much on the same page....

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing....

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.


I will wait with bated breath for McCain to bring this up. I will turn blue with anoxia and pass out before anyone in the MSM does.

John McCain has reportedly said that there is no reason to fear Barack Obama. And there isn't. He's just another opportunistic, lying politician, but he is a particularly dangerous one. What I fear most are the ideas he is deliberately trying to hide from the American public; ideas he is strongly committed to and supported his entire life. The messiah man doesn't have much of a public record, but almost everything that is out there points to a radical extremist ideology that has at its core an anti-American, anti-capitalistic 'spread the wealth around' mentality.

This is not a man who creates wealth; or who even appreciates the creation of wealth or its creators...he prefers to steal wealth from others, in order to make himself appear saintly (a sort of Robin Hood, but without the macho) and compassionate. His record documents that he has channeled millions of dollars to organizations whose only purpose has been to promote his brand of anti-Americanism, which just happens to be Bill Ayer's and Jeremiah Wright's brand. He has been remarkably consistent at it, in fact; and now he markets the package as "hope and change" when it is nothing more than the same old tired marxist BS that has been around and failed miserably in the real world for the last century or more.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of that it used to be ok to connect Obama with Wright--back when the leftist's goals were to make people think he was a man who "clung to his religion" (if not his guns and bitterness):
I am baffled why it is racist to inquire about the racist Rev. Wright when Obama himself not so long ago boasted of the value of his friendship with Wright, and sympathetic journalists saw the radical Wright as a sort of proof of Obama's leftwing fides. And while we are battered by economic news, and Wright becomes a "distraction", that defensive argument is largely used out of embarrassment, since at one time most in the Obama circle once saw Wright, in the mode of the Ayers friendship and the ACORN patronage, as a definite plus. Only when he became a liability as the race widened was Wright dropped. And by the time Obama had become a messianic figure, any remembrance of Wright at all, in Orwellian fashion, transmogrified into our present smear of "racist." That was then, this is now. So, for example, we forget that in February 2007, the progressive journalist Ben Wallace-Wells wrote a balanced, but sympathetic article for Rolling Stone about the soon-to-be presidential candidate Barack Obama entitled "Destiny's Child." After examining Obama's associates, world view, and background, Wallace-Wells concluded, I think, in admiration:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church — the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing — for such a measured politician — is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that's packed in there. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Obama's life story is a splicing of two different roles, and two different ways of thinking about America's. One is that of the consummate insider, someone who has been raised believing that he will help to lead America, who believes in this country's capacity for acts of outstanding virtue. The other is that of a black man who feels very deeply that this country's exercise of its great inherited wealth and power has been grossly unjust. This tension runs through his life; Obama is at once an insider and an outsider, a bomb thrower and the class president. "I'm somebody who believes in this country and its institutions," he tells me. "But I often think they're broken."

So was it racist of Wallace-Wells to bring up Rev. Wright? And if not, why is it now, especially when Obama himself not long ago used to evoke Wright (and others) on his own accord? So, again for example, in a March 27, 2004 inteview with Chicago-Sun Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani (the “God girl”), Obama offered the now rather startling admissions:

GG: Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.
….
GG: Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?

OBAMA:Well, my pastor [Wright] is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for. I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.

GG:Those two will keep you on your toes.

OBAMA: And they're good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what’s happening to each of us in ways that are useful. I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.


Of course, once it became clear that they couldn't help him beyond a certain point, he supposedly dropped them from his circle of acquaintance. But, since they were all such good friends, I'm sure that they--and Ayer's--understand the pragmatism at the heart of this action: you know how it is, Bill/Reverend/et al...for a while I have to pretend that I don't know you--but just wait till after the election....

And, while Obama may try to distance himself from specific persons, he has never bothered to distance himself from the despicable ideas--or the ideology-- that those persons represent-- and that Obama himself has promoted his entire life.

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