The Company He Keeps(B. Hussein Obama)

National Review Online ^ | April 11, 2008 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[kellynla]

Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe it’s because they’re so comfortable around him.

He presents as the transcendent agent of “change.” Sounds platitudinous, but it’s really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media’s Chosen One, he hasn’t had to.

But he’s 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, Obama’s change would radically alter this country. He eschews detail because most Americans don’t believe we’re 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 she’s 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 she’s never grown out of it.

After four years at one of America’s 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 country’s top law firms, and to a plethora of prestigious institutional positions, has not much altered her perspective. Through the windows of her mansion on Chicago’s south side, American society still appears as a caste system.

The United States, says she, is “just downright mean.” Never, prior to her husband’s presidential run, had she had a reason to feel proud of it, she told a campaign throng. But by last November, with Barack’s 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 Years earlier, the Obamas had gravitated to the baleful Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an unapologetic racist and hard Left firebrand. They were comfortable with him — and he with them.

By the senator’s own account, Wright is the inspiration for his memoir, The Audacity of Hope — the title is cribbed from a Wright sermon (“The Audacity to Hope”). For Michelle, who had written that a racial “separationist” would have a better understanding of American blacks than “an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight,” Wright’s Trinity Church mission statement had to resonate, right from its opening declaration:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. Rev. Wright inspired his congregation — of which the Obamas were 20-year members — with “black liberation theology.” The doctrine is itself the inspiration of James Hal Cone, a professor of “Systematic Theology” at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Cone is also the author of several books, which a tendentious Wright urged Sean Hannity to read during a recent interview.

It’s a useful suggestion. For example, there is Cone’s 1969 opus, Black Theology and Black Power, in which he helpfully explains:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community.... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love. Black liberation theology, as Wright has elaborated, is closely aligned with the “liberation theology” of Nicaragua during the seventies and eighties: i.e., the doctrine that catalyzed Marxist revolutionaries. It spurred an unabashedly Leftist movement that emphasized, you guessed it, the crying need for “change” — as George Russell aptly described it in a 2001 Time magazine analysis, “social change in the process of spiritual improvement.”

It is this same drive for upheaval, for supplanting a political order which purportedly treats blacks as “less than human,” that impelled Wright’s plea for God to “damn America.” In the oppression narrative, the murder of 3000 Americans on 9/11 isn’t terrorism but social justice. America, after all, had it coming. For Wright, it was “chickens coming home to roost.” Indeed, Wright sometimes prefers to call our country “the U.S. of KKK A” — a grotesque sentiment which, we shall see, is shared by others with whom the Obamas choose to associate themselves.

For their part, the Obamas couldn’t get enough of Wright. Barack and Michelle had him marry them. They chose him to baptize their children, who were routinely exposed to Wright’s race-baiting bombast.

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 didn’t 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 pastor’s noxious rants threatened to derail his White House bid, Sen. Obama kept Wright officially on board as part of his campaign’s “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.

The mainstream media, in their zeal to elect a Democrat, are assiduously airbrushing Ayers: “an aging lefty with a foolish past,” as the Chicago Sun-Times has so delicately put it. In fact, it is the press that is rife with foolish, aging lefties. Ayers, by contrast, is an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past — one who beat the system he so reviles when, after his years of fugitivity, terrorism charges were dropped due to government surveillance violations. He’s “guilty as sin,” by his own concession, but “free as a bird.”

Ayers didn’t just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it. As his memoir gleefully recalled, “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

Whether Pentagon bombing day was more or less ideal than other days, when he, Dohrn and their Weathermen comrades bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and sundry banks, police stations and courthouses, Ayers does not say. But on each occasion, there was surely optimism that the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.

There were lots of bombs. There is no remorse. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the New York Times in 2001, sorry only that he and the others “didn’t do enough.” Like what? We can’t be sure, though National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg recounts Ayers’s sentiments back in the day: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”

Ayers and Dohrn have done the actual dirty work of terror, while Jeremiah Wright draws the line at waving pom-poms. But the prism through which they assay the dirty work is precisely the same: America has it coming.

For them, that makes all the difference. It’s not terror, just chickens coming home to roost. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” Ayers rationalizes with nauseating arrogance, “while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Right. As her companion Discover the Networks profile illustrates, Dohrn now goes even further: insisting their bombings weren’t terrorist acts at all: “We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody.”

Maybe she’s forgotten the “bastards getting what was coming to them” part. Or maybe she’s just lying. She was, we can be confident, something less than a model of compassion back then — like at the Weathermen “War Council” meeting in 1969, when she famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

Charming. The “War Council,” it should be noted, concluded by first condemning the United States for — what else? — its pervasive racism, then formally declaring war against what the Weathermen called “AmeriKKKa.” Rev. Wright would have understood.

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 didn’t 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 here’s how the University’s 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 isn’t 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, who’d 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 they’d caused the victims of their wanton murders and mayhem — the fault for those, surely, was our downright mean society.

The Ayers and Obama, meantime, kept up. There was yet another panel in 2002, Obama and Ayers waxing on “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis.” Dohrn, too, was asked to weigh in, on a panel addressing the question, “Why Do Ideas Matter?” I’m sure it was, er, wild.

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 judge’s order that she testify in a grand jury investigation into the Weathermen’s 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 Said’s legacy: Columbia’s notoriously Israel-bashing Middle East Institute — though, much to the University’s 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 Khalidi’s splenetic meanderings mightn’t be the best model.

They didn’t 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 Obama’s 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 Ayres’s 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 that’s how most of us are likely to feel. But not Sen. Obama. And that’s why Ayers — like Khalidi and Wright and Michelle Obama, and others who know the senator well while we’ve been told precious little — sees in Barack Obama the change he’s been waiting for.

No thanks.

[kellynla]

Obama wins the Primary and loses the General election.

[Leisler]

(Comment from another webs site.)

“”obama’s ‘working class upbringing?”

Hello.
BOTH his parents had PhDs. His father was a government official in Kenya. His mother was an anthropologist who worked for the Ford foundation. Her second husband was an Indonesian oil company executive.

Not exactly the factory workers you’re portraying.

Obama was raised and educated by his white grandparents in Hawaii where he attended an expensive elite private school, after that he attended Ivy League schools.

His grandmoher (a typical white person) was a Vice-president of a major bank in Hawaii.

Where does the “working class” part come in. Obama is a product of the academic elite and would not know the actual working class if his life depended on it as his comments reveal.”

[ChocChipCookie]

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 country’s top law firms, and to a plethora of prestigious institutional positions, has not much altered her perspective. Through the windows of her mansion on Chicago’s south side, American society still appears as a caste system.

This is what completely confounds me. Michelle and Obama have attained a position in America that very few will ever reach, whatever their skin color. For all her achievements, she CHOOSES to not see past the color of her skin. I'm sorry for her because millions of us have left that kind of thinking in the dust.

[dainbramaged]

Imagine the cabinet appointments this clown would make.

[vietvet67]

How some of the general public can consider a man for president who is friends with a self-confessed terrorist is way beyond me..

[penowa]

"Obama wins the Primary and loses the General election."

I think you're wrong. I think Hillary will win the nomination, take Obama for VP, unite the Democrats and win in November.

[kellynla]

” I think Hillary will win the nomination”

Steak dinner at Donovan’s in San Diego says you’re wrong.
And I like my steak medium rare. LOL

[kellynla]

Excellent points, “Leisler!”

[A_Former_Democrat]

I think you overstate the “achievements” of the NObombas.

I bet if you were to look in their admission and employment files you would see alot of “achievement” that had less to do with merit and much more to do with “color of her/his skin.”

These two have been spoonfed for so long they thing they’re invincible and above everyone else.

[ModelBreaker]

BOTH his parents had PhDs. His father was a government official in Kenya. His mother was an anthropologist who worked for the Ford foundation. Her second husband was an Indonesian oil company executive.

Barak and John Edwards, shivering in the doorstep in the winter because Dad was laid off at the factory.

[kellynla]

“This is what completely confounds me?”

Doesn't “confound” me in the least.

Lets look at the facts.
American colleges & universities have been staffed by Leftist professors for decades who have been indoctrinating our children with anti-American, anti-military and anti-Judeo-Christian propaganda for decades. And Hussein & Michelle Obama are just products of that indoctrination.

"Liberalism is just Communism sold by the drink."
P.J.O'Rourke

[WHBates]

Imagine the cabinet appointments this clown would make.

Or worse, imagine the court appointments? It's a frighting prospect.

[Grampa Dave]

"With each new utterance on the topic of Reverend Wright, Barack Obama seems to confirm his own moral obliviousness. Worse yet, he seems to have disdain for those who are troubled by his own unwillingness, even now, to break with Wright."

On his new campaign plane, Obama said he has spoken with Wright in recent days and disputed any suggestion that he or his campaign have asked him to stay out of the limelight.

"I have talked to him," he said. "I haven't asked him to do anything."

Walter Williams: "For the nation and for black people, the first black president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama is not. Barack Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. By now, many Americans have heard the racist and anti-American tirades of Obama's minister and spiritual counselor. There's no way that Obama could have been a 20-year member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church and not been aware of his statements."

Thomas Sowell: "It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious. Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it."

Hussein Obama’s racist pseudo minister has turned the Dems' run for President into party's train wreck!

Devastatingly, Shelby Steele writes: “Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own (white) mother."

Just What Did Obama Know About Wright's Past Sermons? (Plenty)

“Barack Obama either agreed with what was preached from the Trinity pulpit, or he tuned it out and stayed around pretending to for political reasons. To say he stayed for 20 years but doesn't agree with Wright's preaching is incredible denial. It'd be like a man buying White Sox season tickets for 20 years, attending the games, and saying he's not a fan.”

Obama’s supporters want us to ignore this story… just push it under the rug. While they’ll align Republicans with any obscure pastor who does or says something controversial, they’re trying to convince us that Obama’s 20-year long close relationship with Wright, including his effective endorsement of him, his church and rhetoric with a $22,500 donation in 2006 is irrelevant.

“When Obama decided against wearing an American flag pin, we may all have been a bit too quick to accept his rationale, too quick to find that issue unimportant. Now, that American flag pin has gotten a lot bigger for a lot of us, especially in light of what may have been and may still be Obama’s deeper, and, perhaps, secret, less than patriotic beliefs about America.”

“Wright says that blacks can’t be expected to sing God Bless America because of racism. Obama doesn’t salute the flag during the National Anthem. That sure strikes me as an amazing coincidence since Obama swears he never heard Wright say anything against America.”

Here is the link to the Star Spangled Banner video with obama standing there without his hand over his heart...

Notice her ear ring!

The picture, which appeared on a U.S. Web site, showed the Illinois senator donning a Muslim elder's headdress and robes during a 2006 trip to Wajir in northeastern Kenya. Ahmed Sheikh Bahalow, a retired teacher and elder from ethnically (read Muslim) Somali Wajir, said his community was offended by the insinuation Obama had done anything wrong on his visit. "The Somali community and in particular those living in Kenya have never been that interested in America politics," Bahalow told Reuters in the central town of Isiolo. "But we are following it keenly now because we have been provoked." Wajir residents planned to demonstrate in the town after Friday prayers to show their support for Obama, he said. Those aren't Episcopalians praying on Friday.

[penowa]

Sorry, but I don't ever plan to set foot in CA again in this lifetime.

I'm basing my guess on Obama's latest gaffe pushing Hillary into a BIG win in PA. The local media is running with it, not just the cables. Will probably have the same effect in Ind., Ky. etc.

[kellynla]

“How some of the general public can consider a man for president who is friends with a self-confessed terrorist is way beyond me.”

No levelheaded American will go into the voting booth on 11/4 and vote for an anti-American racist. Now remember I said, “levelheaded American” which automatically excludes all those dependent on government subsidies, Leftists & illegal aliens. LOL

[Mr Rogers]

It could well be considered a working class upbringing.

She didn’t finish her thesis until Obama was in his teens. He lived in poverty in Indonesia, and I think he lived with his Mom in an apartment in Honolulu when she came to Hawaii for a few years in his teens. His grandparents lived in an apartment when they took care of him.

Obama was not raised in money like Gore, Kerry or GWB were.

However, while I despise McCain, if Obama gets the nod I may be forced to vote for Juan.

Obama has a ton of personal issues from his rejection by his father and (yes) by his Mom. He had issues with his race, and resolved them by linking up with Wright and choosing to believe America is a land of black oppression.

Meanwhile, he has no clue about working for a living. GWB was raised in money, but he understands a working man in a way Obama never will. I mean, think about - you get out of school and become a ‘community organizer’? Your wife gets paid big bucks for ‘community relations’? Have you ever met anyone who knew jobs like that existed, or would ever consider applying for one?

Obama needs counseling - YEARS of counseling to work out his personal problems. That shouldn’t take place in the White House. He also needs to understand that the resentment he and his wife share against America are shared by very few others.

I loath John McCain, but Obama is frightening. He actually makes McCain look stable!

[kellynla]

“Sorry, but I don’t ever plan to set foot in CA again in this lifetime”

I don’t know how we’ll ever survive. LOL

But don’t let that prevent you from making a wager.
There is such a thing as the telephone and Donovan’s accepts all major credit cards.

If by some freak of nature you win the wager, you pick the restaurant of your choice and I’ll be glad to pick up the check.

[river rat]

My, my, my........

The Obamas appear to have a long history of close contact with terrorists, racists, black segregationists and just plain old enemies of the Republic....

In a sane world - this %$&^%$&% wouldn’t even be considered for a civil service job as garbage truck driver.

[kellynla]

Is that the actual 3/20/2008 cover of TIME magazine??

Tell me it is! LMAO