Free Republic

June 05, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Rezko: GuiltyFor an untouchable change agent, Obama certainly has a lot of questionable associates. By Stephen Spruiell Talk about bad timing. Barack Obama’s friend and fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko was found guilty today of mail fraud, wire fraud, soliciting bribes, and money laundering in connection to a federal investigation into political corruption in the state of Illinois. Rezko now faces sentencing on 16 of 24 counts, some of which carry punishments of up to 20 years in prison. The verdict comes as Obama is securing the Democratic nomination and trying to put behind him...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H11x6bMu4Y

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried to deflect a question about his relationship with terrorist Bill Ayers by saying that he “engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old” and that he was now a professor and a neighbor. The real issue is whether Obama shares Ayers’ communist views. Obama admitted to exchanging ideas with Ayers on an irregular basis but did not say what those ideas were. But we know that Ayers, rather than just being a 1960s “radical,” was a member of a Marxist-Leninist communist group. The Weather Under-ground, or Weathermen, wasn’t just...

For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now. As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it. ABC reporter Jake Tapper calls him "a one-man gaffe machine." Take the Auschwitz flub, where Mr. Obama erroneously claimed last weekend in New Mexico that his uncle helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp. Reporters noted Mr. Obama's revised claim, that...

IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentences “the distinctive note” of the inaugural. They have also been a distinctive note in Senator Obama’s campaign, and were made even more prominent last week when President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Parliament, disparaged a willingness to...

Is anyone else bothered by the superhuman rise of Barack Obama? Granted all his virtues, his intelligence, his fast footwork, and the grand rhetoric of his stump speech. Does anyone feel bothered by the fact that he has a conspicuously invisible track record, and that his Illinois years are marred by doctrinaire leftism and intimate connections with the Chicago Machine? Here's a telling fact: Michelle Obama is the daughter of a Daley Machine precinct captain. She grew up watching Chicago politics up close; now she is its biggest homegrown star. Maybe it's not that hard to understand Obama marrying Michelle...

Most pundits are telling Senator Hillary Clinton that it's all over but the shouting.  The math is against her.  However, the math is also currently against Senator Obama -- neither candidate can earn the needed majority in the remaining primaries.  The decision will be made by the Democrats' superdelegates, who are not obligated to decide whom they support until the convention. And they are empowered to change their allegiance at any time, based on their "read" of what's best for the party. This means that until the first ballot in Denver in August, Hillary still has a chance. Conventional wisdom...

Four score and seven years ago… No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860. And, of course, the Senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’s Apology, etc: It’s history. He said, apropos the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him...

Appeal Refocused Amid Tight Race After Clinton Win ANDERSON, Ind. -- Barack Obama recast his call for change by speaking more directly to voters' economic concerns as polls show him in a dead heat with Hillary Clinton in Indiana. The shift comes amid signs that Sen. Obama's lofty appeals for hope and change may not be resonating with financially insecure voters, and may even be driving them away. Campaigning in central Indiana, which has been hit hard by plant closings this decade and where unemployment is two percentage points above the national average, the presidential candidate spoke about how he...

Return to the Article April 28, 2008The Moment of Truth for the Left has ArrivedBy James Lewis If you haven't listened to Jeremiah Wright's hate sermons at Hugh Hewitt's website, you must do so.  Every American with open eyes and ears has to listen to the voice of racial hatred, coming not from the Klan but from a clergyman of the Christian Left. Reading his words isn't enough, because you won't hear the unmistakable meaning of his vocal intonations. If you are a person of good will you will feel upset. But it's of the utmost importance to understand this...

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – "What's the Matter With Kansas?" – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Mr. Obama's offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: "Bittergate." In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama's tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch...

Jeremiah Wright speaking live now. Fascinating. You can also get it live streaming from CNN

Traveling the country the past few months, I have encountered habitual Republican voters so entranced by Barack Obama’s potential to lead the nation that they plan to vote for him in November. Once Hillary Clinton’s defected supporters return to loyalty, Obama Republicans could produce a Democratic presidential landslide. But Obama’s current missteps jeopardize their support and imperil his election. These apostate Republicans never were deluded into considering him anything other than a doctrinaire liberal who wants a more intrusive government with higher taxation and tougher regulation. But they have leaned toward him as an exceptional candidate in the mold of...

This is an absolutely blatant attempt to rewrite history by Barack Obama, documented at ABC News Political Punch. First, I honestly don’t care much whether a person wears a flag pin, and you can certainly be a patriot without wearing a badge proclaiming it. The issue for me: Obama’s reasons for taking off that pin. Barack Obama on his refusal to wear a flag pin, now: Obama’s two radically different versions of his reasons for not wearing the pin are there for you to read. Here’s our post about it at the time. You decide who’s telling the truth.

apallasch@suntimes.com In a sit-down interview with the Sun-Times, White House hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he has been following with great concern the gun violence that has plagued the city in recent weeks. "The news has just been heart-breaking," Obama said after a speech to union members at McCormick Place. "I've asked my staff to contact the Chicago Police Department, and I'm going to put in a call to the mayor just to find out just what is accounting for this huge uptick." Obama said elected officials can help by restoring federal funding to put more police on the street...

Michelle, ma belle: These are words that go together well. She looks fabulous, like a presidential spouse out of some dream movie — glossy hair, triple strand of pearls, vaguely retro suits that subtly remind you she’d be the most glamorous first lady since Jackie Kennedy. Michelle, “fear,” “cynicism”: These are words that go together more problematically. Mrs. Obama is most famous for declaring, about her husband’s candidacy, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.” Just a throwaway line reflecting no more than the narcissism and self-absorption required to mount a presidential...

Hillary Clinton won a decisive ten-round decision over Barack Obama in Pennsylvania's Democratic primary, but she didn't score a knockout. The struggle continues. Clinton still has virtually no chance of overtaking Obama's delegate lead or his edge in the popular vote. And the superdelegates will be loath to ignore this advantage. Meanwhile, Obama's weaknesses as a general election candidate grow more apparent with each successive primary.Clinton's best chance of winning the nomination was to win Pennsylvania so decisively that she would have set off a media firestorm about Obama's electability--one that would lead superdelegates to wonder whether she would not...

GUEST COLUMNIST Some liberal commentators have downplayed the effect of Barack Obama's recent fundraising speech in San Francisco. But that's wishful thinking. Along with the revelations about Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, his remarks in San Francisco will haunt him not only in the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, but also in the general election against John McCain, assuming he gets the Democratic nomination. To win in November, a Democratic presidential candidate has to carry most of the industrial heartland states that stretch from Pennsylvania to Missouri. That becomes even more imperative if a Democrat can't carry...

The primary thus far has been a deservedly hellish experience for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and things are only going to get worse. But what should the nation expect from a “congenital liar” and a Centrist imposter who represent a Democratic Party so much dominated by Liberals that its Congressional Moderates and Conservatives could hold their meetings in a cloakroom that doubles as the Blue Dog Democrat Clubhouse.

April 20, 2008 Redefining 'Swiftboating' and Rewriting History By Henry P. Wickham, Jr. If the words "swift" and "boat" must be combined and turned into a verb, then let us insist on its proper use. The word as a verb originates from the campaign undertaken in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans in response to the John Kerry presidential candidacy. The word means, or should mean, the exposure of a fraudulent autobiography of one seeking political office or public influence. It is the correction of a personal and professional record that has been selectively and dishonestly compiled, as the Swift...