Happy Memorial Day! God Bless all who served and continue to keep our Nation safe!
Dana Milbank, a talented and thoughtful Obama apologist for the Washington Post who gets plenty of face-time on MSNBC and other cable poll & opinion markets (there's bugger all news on them), rose to object to any and all bloggers and Internet journalists raising questions to goad the mainstream media into doing its job with regard to Sen. Obama's links to dangerous radicals. Dana Milbank waved the 'bloody-shirt' of McCarthyism and guilt by association fallacies in the face of any of these questions posed and he stated that he would undo the fabric of the charges.
Here's what he's got:
The smoking gun? Obama's "mentor" during his teens, according to Kincaid, was "a key member of a Soviet-controlled network that was sponsored by Moscow and active in Hawaii."
These accusations fall somewhere between guilt by association and guilt by invention, but the accusers were just getting started.
In college, Obama "admits selecting Marxist professors among his friends and attending socialist conferences," Kincaid went on. In Chicago, he said, "Obama launched his political career back in 1995 at the home of communist-terrorist Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn," the two Weather Underground figures who have already made a cameo in the campaign. Kincaid then made the unilateral decision to accuse Dohrn of the 1970 killing of a policeman, a charge no prosecutor has made.
"The Weather Underground terrorists," Romerstein added, "were instrumental in getting him to office in the first place."
Those charges were relatively benign compared with the questions. One inquired about the link between "the American left and Islamofascists." Another asked about nefarious influences on Michelle Obama, the senator's wife. A third raised the possibility that Obama's "change" slogan is based on the 1961 communist "Movement for Change."
It was beginning to sound like a UFO convention. But the panelists took it seriously, firing questions back at the audience. "Was Barack Obama working for Bill Ayers?" Kincaid wondered aloud. Romerstein demanded: "How come for 20 years he sat in the pews and listened to a raving anti-American racist? How did he bring his two young children to this church to hear (the Rev. Jeremiah) Wright rave on?"
The evidence was compelling enough for participant Friedman. For him, the Rosetta Stone was Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, who Friedman alleged was the protege of a man with "a Communist Party-front record" in Chicago. "The more I look at this, I'm seeing there are a lot of red-diaper babies around here," he deduced. "By putting these pieces of the puzzle together, I'm beginning to see something much bigger."
Dana, the questions remain.
1. Obama was appointed to Chairmanship of the Annenberg Challenge by Billy Ayers. What were his duties and obligations? Why has Obama not explained, in any fashion whatever, the path to that position and how it lead to the subsequent 'drop party' for Obama's campaign at Ayers/Dohrn's home in 1995?
2. How did the Woods Fund directorship with Ayers affect your view of American relations with Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez?
3. Explain the Obama Educational Platform and highlight any and all influence Ayers has or might have in laying out this Platform. Is Ayers a kitchen cabinet member to the Obama Educational Imperative?
4. What is Rezko's relationship to Ayers? Hyde Park is a very 'close-knit' community - one would say elite. Entree to those associations are akin to a Mount Carmel Graduate and son of a 19th Ward Streets and Sanitation Driver getting into Skull & Bones at Yale.
Dana these questions need answers. Actually, I have a pretty good idea how they will be considered. Pretty much in the same manner as Chicago Magazine handled Ayers a couple of years ago.
Click my post title for Dana's "McCarthyism" charge - Charlie McCarthy? Gene McCarthy? Certainly not 'Northeye' McCarthy from Canaryville!