What is the significance? It is that Barack was a communist and is a socialist (at least) who believes capitalism doesn't work and government must mandate redistribution of wealth directly from the wealthier to the less wealthy (and especially the racially oppressed less wealthy). You can see this in an unbroken line from Barack's red diapers to Barack's tutelage under Ayers (Ayers: "Capitalism? I hate it.") to Barack's 2001 radio interview ("[It's a shame] the Constitution doesn't say what the government must do for the people") to Barack's "spread the wealth" comments to Joe the Plumber.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barack rose from Columbia University to the U.S. Senate because of Bill Ayers' early sponsorship and tutelage + because of Bill Ayers' connections to powerful Chicago political operatives.
Ayers sponsored Barack because the two shared sufficient amount of radical political belief. Barack's mother was a communist, his father was a communist, his step-father was a communist, his teen-aged father-figure and mentor Frank L. Davis was a communist, and Barack intentionally sought out radical friends at both Occidental College and Columbia.
Bill Ayers saw in Barack a fellow radical who possessed clean cut good looks, talent, and the added benefit of biracial background (DO NOT doubt that Barack's biracial background was and is a huge benefit to him).
These are the radical traits and personal pluses which prompted talent scout Bill Ayers to coddle Barack through the radical political minor leagues, all the time preparing Barack for The Show.
"Don't think. It can only hurt the team." -Crash Davis.
Just internalize the doctrine. It feels right.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bill Ayers' father is wealthy and well-connected in Chicago.
I suspect Bill Ayers met Barack when Barack was at Columbia University and the two lived two blocks apart in Manhattan.(1)
Barack was financially sponsored into Columbia University by a Saudi financier. Barack lived in Manhattan with two Pakistani students. Though he lived meagerly in Manhattan, Barack visited Pakistan with his roommates during a summer break. Where did he get the money for such a trip? Saudi financier again? Note: How did Barack originally attract the attention of this Saudi money? It would be fun and enlightening to know. Sweet speculation.
At Columbia, Barack took a class from radical Arab intellectual Edward Said. Said and Barack were photographed sharing a meal together. Said and Bill Ayers were friends. Said blurbed Bill Ayers' book "Fugitive Days".
Also, consider:
Barack's big protest issue at Occidental College was U.S. corporations divesting of South African holdings and business.
While Barack was at Columbia, The Weathermen organized a protest of South African apartheid at LaGuardia Airport: The Springboks Protest, in which someone stepped from the crowd and flung acid into the eyes of a security guard, permanently blinding him. Ayers and Dohrn were national leaders of The Weathermen. Ayers and Dohrn lived in Manhattan, two blocks from student Barack Obama. Zombietime:
I'm not saying that Barack Obama himself was at this protest; he may have been, he may not have been. But it is likely that Obama -- who in his own words hung around with Marxists and socialists and was involved in the anti-Apartheid protest movement in New York in 1981 -- would have been aware of an anti-Apartheid protest by Marxists and socialists which happened in the same city he was in.
[...]
On the left: Barack Obama in New York ca. 1982. On the right: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in New York in 1982. Had their lives just overlapped?
They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
They lived near each other.
The went to school near each other.
They had the same political interests.
Their circles of friends and associates intersected.Chicago neighborhood,
more pure coincidence?
By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected.
Or was it not a coincidence at all?
In the real world, what are the odds?
If Barack was not under the sponsorship of Chicago-connected Bill Ayers, isn't it quite a coincidence that Barack decided, out of the blue and while living in Manhattan, to go to Chicago to become a community organizer?
Let's be serious: the odds are good that Bill Ayers convinced Barack to go to Chicago under his sponsorship, then Ayers used his connections to set Barack up as a community organizer who became trained in Saul Alinsky style tactics.
The odds are good that Ayers shepherded Barack into Harvard Law School. Barack was recommended to Harvard by a powerful Manhattan politician and sometime mayoral candidate who had been a lawyer for Malcolm X. Exactly WHERE does little Barack Obama make a connection like that?
Where does little Barack make any of his connections (Saudi financier?), and why? Why do these persons want to help young Barack Obama? The answer is an elephant in the room:
Young Barack was radical; Communist; Pro-Palestinian. He agreed with their politics. He had political ambition. He had the looks and talent and bi-racial juice to become a significant political player. These radical sponsors equated to talent scouts who were impressed with what they saw or heard about Barack. The Saudi financier was paying the equivalent of a signing bonus to a high school baseball player.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barack did a legal internship at Sidley-Austin in Chicago. Sidley-Austin had done legal work for Ayers' father when the father was the powerful CEO of Con Edison. Sidley-Austin already employed the near unemployable Bernadine Dohrn, because "sometimes we do favors for our friends."
The official Barack story is he never knew Bernadine Dorhn when he interned at Sidley-Austin. They were mere ships passing in the hallways. The official story is Barack never met Bill Ayers until Barack landed on the Board of Directors of Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1995.
The official Barack story of massive recurring coincidences could be true. But, in the real world: come on! Barack's official story is very likely to be fiction. It's fiction which anyone can suspect if they look squarely at the record.
Barack has displayed consciousness of guilt about Ayers, i.e. "Just a guy in my neighborhood", followed by later lying about Ayers again "A Professor of English, our kids went to school together(Ayers' children are grown), we served on a board together(they served together in two massive enterprises: CAC and Woods Fund)." Notice Barack's careful and misleading language. Technically, Ayers was not on the CAC Board, and therefore Barack and Ayers did serve on "a" board together at The Woods Fund. Barack is all clever, no substance, no truth. If Barack has nothing to hide about William Ayers: why is he fighting tooth and nail to hide as much as he possibly can? Habit?
In the real world, Barack was likely sponsored by Bill Ayers from age 20 (1981) until the day he was sworn into the U.S. Senate and did not need Ayers anymore. Barack has admitted exchanging email with Ayers into 2005.
In the real world, something significant happened while Barack was at Occidental College and "seeking out true radical friends."(2) This significant thing resulted in Barack's being financially sponsored, by a Saudi, to enroll at Columbia and to live in Manhattan with Pakistani students. I'd like to know what that significant thing was.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Suppose you knew the official Barack biography, and suppose you read Jack Cashill's argument that Bill Ayers wrote parts of "Dreams of My Father". You would say: Cashill makes a quite good argument. But, really, the odds it actually happened are slim.
But suppose you suspected Bill Ayers had shepherded young Barack from Columbia to Chicago organizing to Harvard to Sidley-Austin and then back to Chicago, suppose you then read Cashill's actually quite good argument that the veteran author Ayers wrote parts of "Dreams of My Father" (after Barack was unable to finish the project and Barack's publisher dropped him). Then you would say: Of course! It makes perfect sense. Ayers' kitchen table was already open to local authors who were struggling with books. How did early 1990s Barack ever get a publishing deal anyway?
Of interest, this week, is that Rashid Khalidi was friends with Bill Ayers and in fact credited Ayers with being the force which pushed Khalidi through to the completion of Khalidi's own book. Barack and Khalidi shared meals together. Khalidi "helped me [Barack] see instances of my own prejudice." Barack, on the tape the LAT refuses to make public, toasted and tributed Khalidi at Khalidi's going away party from Chicago. Khalidi had served as Yasser Arafat's advisor during negotiations from 1991 to 1993, and served at various times as a PLO interpreter, liason, and fund-raiser.
If you knew only Barack's official biography, you might believe Bill Ayers had nothing to do with Barack being selected as Chair of the Board of the CAC. If you suspected Ayers had shepherded Barack since 1981, and had authored large swaths of "Dreams of My Father" in 1994-1995, you would say "Of course! The puzzle pieces fit perfectly!" (as do the cold hard facts-link)
How did newbie Illinois State Senate Candidate Obama end up being a member of and being sponsored by the Chicago branch of the socialist New Party in 1997? This also has the aroma of Bill Ayers' guidance and sponsorship.-link
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What is the significance? It is that Barack was a communist and is a socialist (at least) who believes capitalism doesn't work and government must mandate redistribution of wealth directly from the wealthier to the less wealthy (and especially the racially oppressed less wealthy). You can see this in an unbroken line from Barack's red diapers to Barack's tutelage under Ayers (Ayers: "Capitalism? I hate it.") to Barack's 2001 radio interview ("[It's a shame] the Constitution doesn't say what the government must do for the people") to Barack's "spread the wealth" comments to Joe the Plumber.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note:
(1) Zombietime:
What's so odd about Obama's near-silence concerning his time in New York is that he said he transferred from Occidental to Columbia for the specific purpose of getting more involved in political consciousness and activism at a larger and more engaged school. This New York Times article, for example, says Obama transferred to Columbia to "test my commitments" to social justice causes "like apartheid and poverty in the third world." And yet we are asked to believe that once Obama arrived in New York, the epicenter of activism, he suddenly stopped being politically active. No. It's much more likely that he continued his activism, but now refuses to discuss what he did there. Why the strange glossing over of what should be the culmination of the activism which got its start at Occidental? Could it be not that he abandoned politics altogether, but rather that he became so radicalized that it would be an embarrassment now that he's trying to present himself as mainstream?(2) from "Dreams of My Father", about Occidental College:
Bonus Coincidence: As Andrew McCarthy pointed out in this article at the National Review Online, entitled "Why Won't Obama Talk About Columbia?":- Obama took a class at Columbia from Edward Said, the influential Palestinian activist and intellectual.
- Obama was later photographed sitting and chatting with Said at an Arab-American dinner, showing they must have continued their relationship.
- Said wrote the blurb for William Ayers' Weather Underground memoir Fugitive Days.
- Ayers attended Columbia Teachers College in the 1980s and almost certainly at that time knew Said, who was then a professor at Columbia.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This and that:
Ayers and Obama shared office on the third floor of a small office building from 1995-1998.
Obama blurb/recommended an Ayers book in 1997.
Ayers dedicated his 1974 book "Prairie Fire" to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan.
Ace:
McCain: Tortured by Communists
Obama: Tutored by Communists
Posts
