Posted on 10/07/2008 2:20:38 PM PDT by vrwc54
The years he won’t discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about.
Barack Obama does not want to talk about Columbia. Not even to his good friends at the New York Times, who’ve so reliably helped him bleach away his past — a past neck-deep in the hard Left radicalism he has gussied up but never abandoned.
Why? I suspect it is because Columbia would shred his thin post-partisan camouflage.
You might think the Times would be more curious. After all, the Democrats’ presidential nominee has already lied to the Gray Lady about the origins of his relationship with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Back in May, in a cheery profile of Obama’s early Chicago days, the Times claimed (emphasis is mine):
Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park’s fringes, among university faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home, aides said.
Now look, anyone who gave five seconds of thought to that passage smelled a rat. Ayers and Dohrn are passionate radical activists who lived as fugitives for a decade. There’s no way they held a political coming-out party for someone who was unknown to them. Obviously, they already knew him well enough by then to feel very comfortable. They might have been sympathetic to a relative stranger, but sponsoring such a gathering in one’s living room is a strong endorsement.
And now, even the Times now knows it’s been had.
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
I read somewhere that Obama used to attend Young Socialists meetings while at Columbia.
I haven’t read either book. The reason being that back then I could have cared less, and wonder why anybody else would. I only care now because the man is running for President of the Nation I live in and care about deeply, but I’m still not interested in reading the books allegedly by him about himself.
It’s as though once he became a State Senator he thought the World was beside itself to know all about him, so he allegedly sat down to write all we needed to know about him inclusive of a few juicy tidbits to show him as a regular guy in the 21st Century America.
Often I wonder who bought the massive volume of his books that kicked their ratings up to the “Best Seller” category that perpetuated some interest in his autobiography, but then that is simply a suspicion. Wondering cynically where the warehouse is containing all those copies of the books that were purchased specifically to cause that rating.
Personally I’m more interested in what’s NOT in his books.
Root: I don't know! I didn't know him. I don't think anybody knew him. But I know that the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange.
I just can’t believe The United States will be electing this Marxist!!
In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I believe that in a minute. Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you.
So, why or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley?
Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed’s key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-in-law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar.
Dohrn was not admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the “Revolutionary Armed Task Force”) “comrades,” including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after serving 22 years of a plea bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. The father of Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert, was sentenced to 75-to-life, with no chance of parole, after a trial in which he refused to participate. Chesa is the co-author of a recent apologia for the regime of Venezuelan “left” strong man, Hugo Chavez.
Trienens recently explained his unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practice law and had graduated from law school (before going on her bombing spree) 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago Tribune saying, “[W]e sometimes hire friends.”
I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior to attending law school when Obama’s DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988. Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn’s CV indicates that she left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to starting a position at Northwestern (again, hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been at the firm at the same time, although if Obama and Dohrn met before Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have discussed the firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there.
My best guess, though, is that it would have been Tom Ayers who introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get the attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in very handy later in Obama’s career as Kaufman suggests.
(Recently I heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton Minow, who tells me her sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell contends on the basis of this anecdote that her family met and supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to provide me any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.)
In any case the summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a lawyer and working as a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama’s first supervisor or mentor there. Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law review in the spring of 1990. After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter registration campaign... http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html
There are two fallacies there that add up to a cheap shot.
"Change" isn't necessarily "fundamental change," and saying you want changes in something doesn't mean that it disgusts you.
But if Obama had been close to Ayers at Columbia wouldn't more people have remembered him as "that radical guy"?
Someone who went to Columbia in the 1930s might have been recruited by the Communist Party or the Soviet Union and kept his convictions hidden, but it's quite a stretch to argue that Obama became Ayers's "mole" in the 1980s.
The fact that Obama will not release any part of his college record is thought to reflect the fact that he did not go to Columbia University, but Columbia College, which was an affiliated program but virtually an external degree program, aimed at people who already had some college but didn’t have the grades or preparatory courses to get into Columbia University. Obama’s grades at his first college, Occidental, were apparently not very good.
This would explain why nobody knew him, because he lived off-campus and was actually in a different program, although one affiliated with Columbia University.
If this is true, one wonders also how he got into Harvard from the Columbia College program. Supposedly, the same Khalid wrote a letter for him and managed to help him get into Harvard.
The founder of the WeatherUnderground let Barry Obama into THEIR WORLD. Bill Ayers selected Barry as the Chairman of a leftist foundation that Ayers founded.
BARRY IS DIRTY AS HELL!
It would not surprise me if someone had to earn their way in.
But will anybody listen or are half the voters in this country bound a determined to turn the USA over to a Communist?
Remember, most people under the age of 30 don't remember much about Communism. They were in grade school when the Soviet Union collapsed and since then they have been mostly indoctrinated in American public education.
Through a lot of research I found the name of a William Araiza (on a TX Columbia Alumni list) who in one writing mentioned he attended a poli-sci seminar with Obama and in another writing claimed it was a class. Haven’t figured out which William Araiza it is from Googling though.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=9E8CD8A7-E90B-4311-8AA9-AEFD014A14B2
Thanks for posting this. Excellent article.
Mayabe the SOB never got a diploma from anywhere or even passed the frickin Illinois
bar exam.
The more ineresting question is, "Who the Hell bought them and WHY?"
I recall Fort Worthless Jim Wright...and the sales of his books...there were those super-readers that bought 100s of cases.
If someone paid his tuition at columbia and harvard, wouldn’t that count as income and wouldn’t he have to declare it on his returns? Just wondering.
Where have I heard that before?
It's marxist boilerplate.
None of you can deny that Obama started his political career at a small c communist's house with a history of terrorism.
Ayers is proud of that.
Ayers and Dohrn are typical trust fund radicals who never had to pay a price.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that he didn't attend classes (perhaps only went for exams), and that he was not registered as Obama but was registered under some other name. What, if anything, does this change in terms of avenues of inquiry?
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