Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Who's Radical?

Is Barack Obama a radical? All we can say for certain is that 1) he partnered with a slew of them to get himself into positions of power in Chicago and, 2) he gave them tons of money when he had the chance. It's possible that this doesn't reflect his heart, but rather, a cool calculation about how to crack the corrupt Chicago power structure - but, in the end, the difference may be academic. Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review -
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.
Look at the linkage that exists in that one paragraph. Barack gets to be head of Bill Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and is given the power to distribute as much as $150 million to improve education, when he just is a couple of years out of law school and has no background in education. Some of the money goes to Reverend Wright. Some of it goes to people who make Wright appear mainstream and mild.
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.
That's the reality. Liberals are scambling to hide that reality behind - what else - accusations of racism. In today's Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson pretends that the reaction of a couple of angry McCain supporters makes McCain the equivalent of George Wallace because Wallace had angry crowds, an assertion that was widely shouted down when made a few days ago by civil rights Congressman John Lewis. Jackson is too smart not to be conscious of the perfidy he's engaged in.
HAVING FAILED to convince voters that they represent a break from the tragic Bush presidency, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin are careening into George Wallace territory to destroy the nation's first African-American nominee, Democrat Barack Obama.
Frank Rich says in the New York Times:

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

While Rich takes the predictable liberal stance that saying Barack's middle name is a racist attempt to make him the "other," in its endorsement of Obama today the Boston Globe, owned by Rich's bosses at the New York Times, celebrates Barack's otherness, calling him by his full name.

Voters can make no more powerful statement about America's commitment to inclusion and opportunity than to put forward this man - Barack Hussein Obama, son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas - as the nation's representative to the world.

So if otherness is good, Hussein is good, but if otherness concerns you, Hussein is evil. Not content to simply endorse for President the man who is so uniquely unqualified for the position whose political partners have been hateful, violent and racist, the Globe, in a separate disendorsement, calls McCain unfit!

Campaigns are crucibles, and this one has revealed McCain to be erratic, out of touch with ordinary Americans, and, with Palin as his shotgun messenger, too quick with the sneer, smear, and division. He has been a profound disappointment, and he is unfit to lead the nation into its perilous future.

While it seems pretty clear that Barack is a radical, we have no way of knowing if he'll have any allegiance to the philosophy of those who got him to where he is. One thing Barack has been consistent about is that Barack comes first, ideals second.

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