Obuddies
“To avoid being mistaken for a sell-out, I chose my
friends carefully.” - Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father
As you well know, the election is nearly here. If you’re like most
people, you probably know a fair amount by now about Joe Plumber’s
background (he goes by his middle name! The horror!), and you may
even have heard a bit about Palin’s wardrobe, but you could likely
tell me little to nothing about the background of Barack Obama,
Presidential Hopeful. Well, that need no longer be the case! Before
you, I lay an exhaustively researched probe of the various people
who have been influenced him in his thinking and helped get him
where he is today. At the risk of giving away the ending, it’s not
a pretty picture. For reasons of space, I have had to omit a great
deal. There are a number of ties I haven’t even touched on in here.
I have been careful to leave no claim unsourced, and have followed
the data back to the most primary sources possible, so long as that
didn’t involve actually leaving the house.
Let us suppose that you, like myself, are currently in the
process of church shopping. Suppose further that in the course of
time, you encounter a preacher who seems to have a real grudge
against the US, or as he likes to call it “The US of KKK A.”
Responding to the 9/11 attacks, he declares that America
essentially brought it on itself, and instead of “God bless
America,” we should say “God
damn America. He makes some pretty outlandish
accusations such as “The government lied about inventing the
HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” and that
the government sells drugs to black people. He approvingly
distributes press releases from Hamas as part of his Sunday
Bulletin.
What would your reaction be? If you’re Obama, you would
apparently find such a man “deeply
inspirational.” Perhaps you’d even be inspired by such rhetoric
to talk about the “Audacity of Hope.” You’d bring your whole family
to his church, have him marry you to your wife, and put your
children under his tutelage. You’d keep this up for 20 years,
without a peep of complaint.
You all know how the story ends. Once the spotlight got shown on
Wright, he became terribly inconvenient for Obama, who was forced
to pretend he was somehow unaware of the kinds of things Wright
liked to say. And then, after Obama’s stunning speech about how he
could not disown Wright, the Reverend commited a grave sin: he
declared that Obama was just acting like a politician. And so Obama
dropped him, saying, “What angered me was his suggestion that
my previous denunciations of his remarks were somehow political
posturing.” In other words, it is acceptable to blame the US for
inventing AIDS, say 9/11 was our just desserts, and so on. But it
is unacceptable to speak ill of Barack Obama.
On September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden used airplanes to bomb
several targets, including the Pentagon. In fact, he was rather
late to the party. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen had bombed the
Pentagon 29 years earlier, a follow-up to their attacks on the
Capital building, and the NY City Police Headquarters. To quote
Ayers, “the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to
them.” (Read this article
for the perspective of one such “bastard,” who was nine years old
at the time.)
Ayers’ biggest bombing, however, was targeted at Fort Dix, NJ.
Ayers and his group constructed nail bombs to be set off in the
middle of a dance being held for army soldiers. Multiple other mail
bombs would be strategically located and timed to take out would-be
rescuers as they hurried in.
Had everything gone according to plan, the death toll could
have been hundreds of soldiers, their girlfriends, and wives.
Instead, a bomb detonated accidentally while being constructed,
killing a few Weathermen, and putting Ayers on the run.
Thanks to a combination of prosecutorial misconduct, the statute
of limitations, and being from a rich influential family, Ayers
managed to evade conviction. Eventually, the Powers That Be did
what I’m sure any one of us would do with an unrepentant terrorist:
put him in charge of children’s education. Ayers founded the
Chicago Annenburg Challenge, ostensibly an “educational reform”
group, but really a group dedicated to spreading
his radical leftist views. Ayers saw something he liked in
Obama, and so in 1995, Obama was chosen to head the board in the
CAC’s first year. By refusing to fund schools directly, and instead
forcing them to partner with external groups, the CAC was able to
fund numerous groups of leftist community organizers, including
ACORN, currently at the center of a
multi-state voter registration fraud scandal (more on that
later). Groups doing work with unimportant subjects like math or
science were turned down.
Obama stepped down from the board in 1999 to run for Congress.
The CAC ran for another 3 years, running out the rest of its $140
million (1/3 of which was taxpayer money). In the end, the CAC’s
own
analysis found that it had led to no improvement. If you’ve
ever wondered why, when talking about education, Obama never
mentions all his experience chairing an education board, this is
probably why.
This was not their only collaboration. Obama also served on the
Woods Fund
from 1998 to 2001, where he served alongside Ayers once again
(Ayers was part of the board of directors of this particular
group). It was a profitable partnership for Ayers; Obama sent
over $1 million
Ayers’ way while he was running the CAC, and got him another
million during his time on the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation.
The two continued to work together, appearing together at
various
speaking engagements,
honoring
Rashid Khalidi, and sharing the same floor of a
smallish office building for several years. But all of this
this really just icing on the cake.
You see, Ayers must have really liked Obama. So much so
that he held a special get-together in his living
room for Obama, and it was at this gathering that Obama
launched his political career. That’s right: a current
candidate for president actually has a genuine terrorist as a one
of his major political benefactors. It’s so absurd you’d almost
think it has to false; the only way it could be more absurd is if
he were a genuine communist
terrorist. Feel free to check the sources if you have doubts; this
particular event has been corroborated by two attendees.
This section has grown ever-so-long, so let me just address one
last issue. “Sure,” you may be thinking, “Ayers did bad things back
in the day, but Obama was only 8 then. Surely Ayers has since been
rehabilitated.” Alas, it is not so. You can find out as much from
the man himself in a
NY Times article published on, of all days, 9/11/2001. In his
words, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
This was not a man who made a secret of his approval of violence
and general hatred of the US (he even wrote a book about it, and we
know that Obama was a fan of Ayers’
books). So in the end, we not only have a known terrorist who
saw his hopes in Obama, but we have Obama himself finding this man
mainstream enough to work with and trade political favors with.
I would be remiss if I did not balance this out at least a
little, so here’s the official Obama response:
people who talk about this should be criminally prosecuted.
Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN)
With the elevation of a Chicago politician to the national
scene, it should come as no surprise that Chicago-style voting has
followed suit. At the center of all of this has been ACORN, which
has been implicated for voter fraud in about
13 states, a stunning 2/3 of the states in which they ran voter
drives. In a bold new attempt to get out the vote, ACORN has even
gone so far as to register
Mickey Mouse (no word yet on whether he was a Republican or
Democrat). And my former home of Indianapolis can now boast
105% voter registration.
Of course, while the recent example are more egregious and
wide-spread, this is certainly not the first time Acorn has pulled
such stunts. Last year, Washington state saw ACORN
forced to settle in the “worst case of
voter-registration fraud in state history.” 2006 saw convictions
of ACORN workers in Wisconsin and Colorado, indictments in
Missouri, and investigations in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.
They hardly stayed away from shady
practices in 2004, either.
As any political idealist knows, when you find a group involved
in large-scale voter fraud, the important thing is to make sure
that they’re on your side. And so it comes as no surprise that this
is another organization whose ties to Obama go way back. You can
get the details straight from an ACORN leader named Toni Foulkes:
“Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the
name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then
went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in
1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the
Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered
voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training
sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result,
many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever
ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active
volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his
failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S.
Senate, we were old friends.”
For bonus points, compare and contrast that with Obama’s own
changing explanations of his relationship to the group. (For
what it’s worth, Foulkes’ time line isn’t perfect; the lawsuit in
question occurred in 1995, and Obama’s failed bid was in 2000).
Of course, all that was a long time ago, so let’s turn to more
recent times. This year, the Obama campaign gave more than $800,000
to an ACORN offshoot. They also
misreported that payment, although whether that is an insidious
omission or a clerical error probably depends on your political
alignment. This is a hefty chunk of change; way exceeding the
$190,000 he sent their way while on the Woods Fund. You can
safely assume that, if elected, he will continue to work to funnel
your money towards such upstanding organizations. On the bright
side, we can at least be sure he takes allegations of voter fraud
seriously, as he has taken the bold step of requesting an investigation
into those who make allegations of voter fraud.
Shockingly, countrywide voter fraud is actually not the most
damning thing about ACORN. You’re quite aware of the current
financial crisis, and how it is rooted in the practice of giving
out risky loans. What you may not be aware is that ACORN has been
very active in pressuring financial institutions to give out such
loans. You can read the details
here, but I’ll sum it up briefly. To be allowed to expand or
merge, a bank has to show that it has complied with the requirement
to make loans to riskier customers. This process can be held up if
a group like ACORN files a complaint against you. This was a sword
that they wielded to great effect, not only in encouraging bad
loans, but in garnering millions of dollars worth of “donations”
from financial institutions. ACORN and associated groups then
pushed Fannie Mae to buy those risky loans, giving banks a
strong financial incentive to give out bad loans without
worrying about whether the debt could be repaid. Eventually, we got
the current melt-down.
These efforts occurred with Obama’s funding and knowledge. We
can hope they do not represent the kinds of economic policies Obama
would pursue if he were elected, but his track record suggests
otherwise.
Speaking of which, I had a friend comment that even if Obama was
a bit inexperienced, you couldn’t deny that he has very smart
advisors. This is true enough, in the same sense that Fannie Mae
had intelligent advisors. In exactly the same sense, even,
since in some case they’re the same people.
Jim Johnson was the chairman and chief executive officer of
Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. Six years after he left it was
discovered that he had engaged in
fraudulent accounting practices to hide about $200 million
worth of expenses, allowing him to pocket an extra $2 million
bonus. And so, a few years later, Obama chose Johnson to “lead the
process” of choosing his vice-president. It was a short-lived
alliance; Johnson had to step down when another
scandal surfaced regarding some $2 million worth of sweetheart
loans he’d taken. It should also be noted that he served as a money
bundler for Obama, netting him
$200,000-$500,00.
For those interested, there is also the somewhat-disputed
Franklin Raines connection Raines was Fannie Mae’s CEO from 1998 to
2004. Like Johnson before him, he engaged in shady accounting
practices to protect his bonus. The Washington Post
reported (more than once) that he had taken calls from Obama’s
campaign seeking advice on economic matters. The connection was
undisputed until McCain made an ad about it, which Obama’s spokeman
was quick to label a “flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign
that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth.” The matter
remains
unresolved.
One thing we know for sure: Fannie Mae loves Obama. In fact,
he is their second favorite lawmaker. The only one to receive
more money from them over the past ten years has been Chris Dodd,
who is in charge of the committee that is supposed to oversee
Fannie Mae.
That’s enough for now. While I’d love to post a follow-up to
explore other Obuddies such as the New Party, Tony Rezko, Rashid
Kalidi, etc, it’s probably just not going to happen in time for the
election.
So, who is the real Obama? Is he a radical leftist like many of
his mentors? Is he just an opportunistic Chicago politician,
willing to hitch his wagon to any cause that will advance his
career? I suspect the answer is somewhere in between, but even
some who have known him for years aren’t sure. I think we can
at least safely say that he is not the transformational messianic
new politician that his campaign has painted him as.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Leave a Reply