PrestoPundit

WHO WOULD YOU GUESS KNOWS MORE about Obama's relationships with Bill Ayers -- reporters at the NY Times who are paid to report such things, or a blogger?  At this late date, we all know we can count on it that the blogger knows more, and generally has a superior talent for searching documents, reading texts, and providing an analysis of events. 

Every time I read that the NY Times has lost another chunk of its readers or that another crop of NY Times reporters have lost their jobs, its hard not to think that no group of people better deserves it.

POLITICIANS DON'T COME ANY MORE CYNICAL than this --  in his own memoir Obama embraces racism and America hate, justifying these revolting means because of their promise to produce Obama's own radical and race-centered political ends.  Let me suggest this.  You'd have to go overseas to find a more disturbing major political personality in my adult life time.  There's a difference in kind here from the long-ago adolescent middle class radical posing of the Clintons and their gross but pathetic little crimes, corruptions and political compromises.  Obama is a true cradle to manhood radical with a racist and Marxist understanding of the world, literally schooled in the art of producing radical results (Google:  Obama & Saul Alinsky) -- and in it for the long haul and the big score.

BONUS:  A picture of Obama teaching the political physics of Saul Alinsky.

WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? A diagnosis using clips from a NY Times story on Obama's Chicago years.  Via No Quarter.  Read also John Kass's article on Obama and The Chicago Way.  Worth quoting at length:

"I know there are those like John Kass who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently, and I'll leave that to his editorial commentary," Obama said.

Not the politics, just the corruption, I said then, wishing silently that he had decried it all, that he'd stood up years ago and pointed to the list of sleazy deals, pointed an angry finger at the Duffs, the white, Outfit-connected drinking buddies of Daley who received $100 million in affirmative action contracts through City Hall ..

Obama had nothing to do with the Duff deal. But he kept mum. He has endorsed Daley, endorsed Daley's hapless stooge Todd Stroger for president of the Cook County Board. These are not the acts of a reformer, but of a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won't make no waves and won't back no losers.

Obama the reformer is backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Daley boys. He is spoken for by Daley's own spokesman, David Axelrod. He was launched into his U.S. Senate by machine power broker and state Senate President Emil Jones (D-ComEd) ..

As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him -- but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They're fixated on what it was, and they think it's clean now.

And they've spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.

It's as if Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.

I've joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments.

So why the disconnect? Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he's a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists.

For an answer as to when pundits will ever put Illinois corruption in context, I called on Tom Bevan, executive director of the popular political Web site Real Clear Politics (which directs readers to my column on occasion) and a Chicagoan.

"To a large degree, the media has accepted much of the Obama narrative thus far," Bevan told me. "He's risen so quickly, but his history hasn't been bogged down with an association of Chicago politics and I can't tell you why exactly, except perhaps that some may have bought into the established narrative and can't separate themselves from it."

"And I don't know if the country understands just how corrupt the system is in Illinois. People don't see it. They're flying over us, cruising at 30,000 feet," Bevan said.

What's so stupid about all this is that these questions have such easy answers.  It's as if Kass is stuck in a George Orwell novel -- or the Soviet Union -- and can't publicly print the answers everyone knows, but no journalist dares speak.  Pathetic.

IS BARACK OBAMA THE MOST DISHONEST MAN in America?  An investigation of Jeremiah Wright's The Trumpet makes it clear that "Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages" about Wright's race hate and anti-Americanism.  A look at Rev. Wright's The Trumpet,"leaves no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism, white people, and "assimilationist" blacks."  Read the whole thing.

SOMETHING WORTH CONSIDERING is the fact that Barack Obama paid for this Jeremiah Wright microphone -- contributing tens of thousands of dollars to bankroll Wright and his activities.  When you pay for something year after year knowing what you're paying for, guess what, you own it, like anything else you've paid for, it's yours.  And Stanley Kurtz in his article is right, there is no doubting the Obama's knew exactly what they were buying, in ever sense of the term.  And don't think the Obama money and support didn't matter.  The Obama's have been some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's richest bankrollers, and from the Obama tax returns you have to imagine that they have been among his largest contributors.  They have also been the most famous and politically powerful of Wright's flock.

A man who's bankrolled such filth shouldn't be President, and you have every right to tell you neighbors the same.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Steve Sailer:

Obama Jr. has actually drawn useful lessons from his father's failure -- he's abstemious, cautious, and, while he talks a lot, he seldom says anything that anybody who disagrees with him can understand.

MATT STEARNS at McClatchy Newspapers claims that efforts to bring to public attention Barack Obama's childhood years spent attending weekly Islamic services and instruction is part of a plot hatched by an former clandestine CIA officer.  If I was conspiracy minded I might suspect that Matt himself has hatched his own fantastic plot to hide the true facts of Obama's childhood religion from the voting public.

UPDATE:  Larry Johnson says it wasn't me.

OBAMA SHOWS OFF HIS PACKAGE for the press corp his female fans.  I haven't seen a man show off his private parts in tight pants since seeing my loser history teacher do this move in the front of the class for the "benefit" of 8th grade girls. The maturity level of this man astounds.  I was stunned to see this then and I'm stunned to see it now.

From the comments:

"When did we start getting our news reported by giddy schoolgirls?"

Via Malkin.

YOU DON'T THINK OBAMA is a radical?  Is this radical enough for you?  The central aim of every radical tract is the undermining of established universal principles and law in favor of temporary ad hoc expediencies and arbitrary feelings of "social justice".  You can find the plea for expediency and against principles in the name of "social justice" in any radical you want to name -- and likewise you can find the case against this sort of radicalism in every conservative thinker you can name, from Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell to Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and David Hume.  Obama is on the side of a long list of radicals and against Smith, Sowell, Hume, Burke and Hayek.

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN  -- the government employees union endorsed Obama.

I'M REALLY TIRED OF PEOPLE telling me how brilliant and educated Barack Obama is -- based on what I'd like to ask?  Obama's talent for reading a speech?  Obama's ability to breeze through course after course of idiotic left wing classes at elite left wing universities?  Obama's strange and exceptional talent for running rings around the truth with endless streams of BS and lies?  Or is it Obama's ability to write exactly what his left wing Harvard Law professors wanted to hear?

Obama spent a good deal of his high school years and his first two years of college high or intoxicated (source -- Obama in his memoir).  Someone who spends his time getting stoned and drunk isn't someone retaining a lot about American history, economics, biology, logic, geology, etc.  And what course did Obama take?  What was the intellectual environment he put himself in?  He says he sought out Marxist professors and hard left friends, studied neocolonialism, and took literature classes with such people as Israel hating Palestinian radical Edward Said.  In Chicago he spent every Sunday (he claims he attended church on a regular and constant basis) listening to the history lessons and cultural critique of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (whom in Obama's eyes is a deeply learned man, or so he repeatedly says).  In New York Obama spent his time reading the Village Voice and going to socialist conferences (source:  Obama's memoir) -- a diet of which inevitably leads to a loss of intelligence and IQ. 

So here's the challenge.  If Obama is such a smart and learned man, why is he so ignorant of American history?  Maybe he didn't write the words himself, but why did he read them?

UPDATE:  The best evidence of Obama's intelligence, if not the quality of his understanding of things, can be found in the 3 or 4 comment posted here.

THIS IS INTERESTING. In his new book Doug Feith criticizes Bush's neoconservative justification for the Iraq war.

"[Feith] criticizes Bush for not defending the main rationale for invasion -- protecting Americans from a genuine threat -- and instead emphasizing the subsidiary and iffy goal of establishing democracy."

It's a great misfortune of history that Bush's Presidential role models in Iraq were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson rather than TR and FDR.

OBAMA CALLS REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT his "former pastor".  Time to meet Barack Obama's current pastor.

FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE takes a trip to Chicago to investigate "Obama's World".  Here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.

UPDATE:  Now Part 3.

I'VE TOLD YOU BARACK OBAMA DOESN'T TELL THE TRUTH and now Nice Deb takes a first step in documenting it case after case after case. I've got reams more to add to that list, and will as time permits.

A JOURNALISM PROFESSOR rips the Main Stream Media for journalistic malpractice in its failure to do investigative reporting on Barack Obama.  Actually, give the journalistic malpractice of the 2004 race, this isn't so much a news story as a developing long-term trend.  Every case of investigative journalism cited by the good professor is at least two or more decades in the past.

UPDATE:  John Hawkins:

There are a lot of great lines in [in the professors article on Obama], but no answer to the very obvious question; "What took so long?"

Well, we could just as easily ask, "What took the press so long to cover the allegations by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth back in 2004?"

After all, the Swifties formed before Kerry captured the nomination and his anti-war protesting wasn't exactly a secret. Moreover, the Swift Boat Vets were veterans, many of them had served with Kerry, they were credible -- more so than Kerry himself -- and they actually blew huge holes in some of Kerry's stories.

Yet, despite the fact that they were getting enormous coverage on talk radio and in the blogosphere, the mainstream media almost completely ignored them until Kerry responded to them publicly and then they simply aped the Democratic line, "Their allegations have been disproven," without ever giving their arguments a serious looksie.

Another clue that may help answer Don Campbell's question was the huge outcry on the Left after the ABC debate, where Obama bombed when he had to actually had to answer some tough questions about Jeremiah Wright, his refusal to wear a flag pin, and his connections to terrorist William Ayers.

So, why didn't the media hit Obama on Wright earlier? Why didn't they cover the Swift Boat Vets for Truth earlier? Why was their such a protest over Barack Obama being asked tough questions in a debate?

It's the same answer to every question; the mainstream media is mostly comprised of liberals, they do what they can to try to help their candidate win, and they generally think it helps to give Democrats a pass on tough issues.

BARACK OBAMA -- the candidate of corporate fat cats and university pin heads.  What do these folks have in common?  A leftist university education, a dependence on direct cash, cheap loans, grants and other benefits from the government -- and a contempt for middle class Americans.  Worth quoting:

Obama's remarks [about working class Pennsylvanians] reflect the emerging demographic transformation of the Democratic party from a bottom-up "party of the people" into a holding pen for all sorts of economic and educational elites. One way to [demonstrate] this is to look at who has been making presidential campaign contributions during the 2008 election cycle ..

Through May 1, the Democratic presidential field has suctioned up a cool $5.7 million from the more than 4,000 donors who list their occupation as "CEO." The Republicans' take was only $2.3 million. Chief financial officers, general counsels, directors, and chief information officers also break the Democrats' way by more than two-to-one margins ..

Wall Street firms .. also tilt decisively toward the Democrats. Employees in storied Wall Street institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley have all favored the Democratic field by a large margin. Even both sides of the recent Bear Stearns/JP Morgan Chase deal choose Democratic candidates over Republicans by two-to-one margins ..

universities offer Democrats a hotbed of support. Professors favor Democrats over Republicans by a nine-to-one margin ($3.7 million to $430,000). Their students, though presumably struggling with sky-high tuition bills, nevertheless sacrificed enough late-night pizza and chips to send $4.1 million to their professors' favorite candidates and another $1.4 million to the GOP ..

The white-shirt/red-tie brigade of Republican presidential aspirants holds a nearly three-to-one edge among janitors, custodians, cleaners, sanitation workers, factory workers, truckers, bus drivers, barbers, security guards, and secretaries. While Democrats command the financial loyalty of architects, Republicans successfully woo contributions from the skilled craftsmen who turn their blueprints into reality -- specifically, contractors, hardhats, plumbers, stonemasons, electricians, carpenters mechanics, and roofers. This trend extends to the saloons, where the Democrats carry the bartenders and the Republicans the waitresses. The GOP field even secures more financial support from teamsters, steelworkers, bricklayers, and autoworkers.

WHAT DO SENIORS HAVE AGAINST Barack Obama?   They're voting Clinton over Obama by huge margins.  Perhaps it's his wife.  When folks over 60 were growing up a kid actually got a history education, and in a long life time of experience built on that foundation, they've seen enough of the world to know how offensive Obama's bitter half is saying things like this:

Barack Obama, the missus explains, is Everyman who has ever been put down by The Man. And "understand this" .. Mrs. Obama is here to make sure you feel their pain. Which is really your pain. Because the hardships of a privileged Ivy League couple are "exactly" the same as the travails of miners or service workers or small-business owners: "So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race," she grumbles, "but the irony is, the sad irony is, that's exactly what is happening to most Americans in this country."

Don't tell Michelle about the Great Depression or the Carter Malaise. "Folks are struggling like never before," she seethes.

We know Barack Obama shares a similar world view -- because we've read his memoir and we know his working associates and we know his church and we know his college studies and we know his wife and they are all of a ungrateful, bitter, condescending and anti-American piece.  (The word "anger" shows up in Obama's own memoir nearly 100 times, despite a lifetime of privileges and wealth unheard of in most of the world, and even in much of America -- privided to him by loving and sacrificing grandparents whom he's repeatedly trashed in print and on the campaign trail.)  So don't tell me that Obama understands what is great about America or that he loves this country the way average Americans do.  He doesn't and he's let us know it in every way he can -- and calculated campaign speeches written by others can't change that fact.

And note well -- Barack Obama seems to be as ignorant of American history as his wife.

ELECTION MAP OF INDIANA  -- a close look shows Obama wins handily in white counties with a major University.

It's remarkable to see  a coalition of far left college graduates, blacks, and young voters running even with or trouncing a traditional coalition of blue collar Democrats, farmers, senior citizens, and white women.

THE INDIANA EXIT POLLS.  Some numbers that jump out at me.

-- White Democrats voted 65% to 35% in favor of Clinton over Obama.

Comment:  Without the black vote Obama would have been blown out in Indiana.

-- Obama defeated Clinton 57% to 43% among college graduates with post-graduate experience.

Comment:  Outside of the black population, Americans with multiple years of left wing college studies under their belt are Barack Obama's strongest voting block.

-- "Very liberal" voters voted 73% - 27% Obama.

Comment:  Lefties know their man, and easily see past Obama's non-ideological rhetoric.

-- "Conservative" voters voted 65%-35% Clinton; moderate" voters voted 55%-45% Clinton.

Comment:  The fact that Obama is a member of the far left with a radical background hostile to American power and traditional American values is beginning to turn up on the radar screen of even politically uninformed moderate Democrats.

-- People who decided on election day or in the last three days voted 59%- 41% for Clinton.  Early deciders split 50-50.

Comment:  The facts surrounding Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright have begun to cut the legs out from under the Obama bandwagon.

-- White voters 60 and up chose Clinton over Obama 71% to 29% percent.

Comment:  These voters would have been at least in their 20s when Obama's close associate William Ayers was bombing police stations in New York.  They would have been at least in there teens when Martin Luther King dreamed a very different civic dream from the dreams of Black Liberation Theology that church members like Barack Obama were required to confess at Trinity in Chicago.

-- Clinton took 60% of the Protestant and Catholic vote.  Obama took 58% of the "none" vote and 60% of the 7% of voters who are something other than Christian, Mormon, Muslim, Jewish or non-religious (the Buddhist, Sikh and Wiccan vote?).

Comment:  Christians tend not to be big Obama fans.  Without atheists and non-Christians, Obama would have been a huge loser in Indiana.

-- 37% of voters thought both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are honest and trustworthy.

Comment:  Maybe it's time to start calling the Democrat party the stupid party.

-- 29% of voters in the Democrat primary say they would vote for John McCain or they would not vote it Barack Obama is the Democrat nominee for President.

Comment:  Democrat primary voters are more intelligent perhaps than I give them credit for.  The only tough call here is between John McCain and not voting.  Good thing all three options were listed.

Well, enough for now.

UPDATE:  Marc Ambinder sees a Democrat crack up:

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels ..

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they'd be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee  ..

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they'd choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they'd definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

WHEN YOU'VE BEEN FIRE-BOMBED  it tends to concentrate the mind.  It also provides the sort of incentive our leftist press corp lacks when it comes to digging out the specifics of Barack Obama's 20+ year close working relationship with terrorist bomber Bill Ayers.  And if you don't think Obama is a brass-balled b*llsh*tt*er, consider again Obama's Ted Kennedy size lie that Ayer is an "English" professor and a mere neighbor.  Obama's campaign has also put out the lie that Ayers' adult age children go to school with Obama's elementary school aged children -- a lie widely circulated in the left-o-sphere and the MSM.

THE STATE OF THE ART -- Michelle Obama comes up with a politicallly correct victimology for millionaires and front running Democrat party nominees.  Could there be a conspiracy to hold Michelle Obama down and block her husbands ambition?  Watch the video to get a sense for the full scope of the conspiracy, or listen to the Hugh Hewitt's audio outtakes from the speech.

Identifying a national conspiracy against a black man and his black wife -- with the thick suggestion that it's a white conspiracy -- that's what we need to unite the country.  Bring us together Barack and Michelle!

UPDATE:  Here's the text of Michelle Obama's speech.

BARACK OBAMA tells us he had a Muslim upbringing, but he covers up much more than he acknowledges.

THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN is making a PDF copy of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father available free on the web -- you can download it by clicking here. 

ALSO -- Steve Sailer has posted the portion of Obama's book dealing with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on his web site, with a small bit of helpful annotation, for those who don't care to read the whole book.

THE OBAMA BS works like sorcery with left wing journalists, who see a magic pony in every steaming Obama speech.   But when you move from Democrats with bylines to actual voters, you find people in the post-Wright world are no longer mis-directed by the Obama's slight of hand, and see Obama for what he is, another politician piling the rhetoric higher and wider as his needs change from here to there.  So says Mark Steyn.  Worth quoting:

[Obama's] Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap - indeed, full-sized canyon - that's opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That's the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama's adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator's speechifying "magic" came from Jeremiah Wright himself. "He's a politician," said the reverend. "He says what he has to say as a politician. ... He does what politicians do."

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaida and the government inventing AIDS to kill black people. In his belated "disowning" of Wright, Obama said, "What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that - that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the - the commonality in all people."

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it's suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn't find his groove and couldn't prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: "If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough. That's - that's a show of disrespect to me."

OBAMA LIES ABOUT his apology to Rev. Wright -- Tom Maguire has the money quote.  (Lies, prevaricates, bullshits, stonewalls, spins, you know what I mean.)

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER calls horse manure on Barack Obama.

THIS IS WHAT GLOBAL WARMING looks like in Oregon:



Yes, that's ice covering a huge lake in Oregon.  The photo was taken last Friday.  Here's the news story.

WHAT UPSET OBAMA? It clearly wasn't what Rev. Wright said about America, or about racially different brains, or about AIDS, or about Farrakhan, or about the white people, etc., etc.  Wright has said those things time and time again.  And Obama has heard or read these things time and time again for more than a year (for certain) and very likely in most every case for going on 20 years.  No, it wasn't what Rev. Wright said about America and race which offended Obama, it was what Rev. Wright said about Obama that finally caused Obama to object to the views of his one time political and spiritual mentor ("political" and "spiritual" mentor are Obama's own words used to describe his relationship with Rev. Wright).

So when Obama decided to break from Rev. Wright he did so not because of the loathsome ideas Wright has about America, white people, racial biology, etc., but because of Rev. Wright's personal attack on himself.  As a study in character and judgment this is not uplifting, this is not "bigger than himself", this is all about himself.  And it reveals a very small man who failed to rise to the circumstances presented by events.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse has more on the same topic.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Wright's speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House.

Rev. Wright's world view come directly out of left wing academia.  If you've read Barack Obama's memoir, you know that much of his own world view comes out of a very similar leftist academic milieu, packed with Marxist professors, "neocolonial" studies, feminist studies, etc., and far left "intellectual" friends, mentors, and colleagues.  If Obama has actually given up a belief in some of this stuff, he needs to tell us exactly what he's finally rejected and what he still accepts -- and why.

The one thing we do know is that in his political career he's rarely if ever voted against the policies which fall out of the world view of the far left and its powerful interest groups, even when he's publicly acknowledge that there are profound arguments against what he's done.  One powerful example:  what Obama says about public education and the teacher unions vs. how Obama has voted on public education and the teachers unions.  He talks as if he well knows that leftist education policies and leftist education special interests have been destructive to our kids, but he votes on education issues and the teachers unions as if he doesn't know -- or doesn't care. 

Intellectually as a young man Obama was once a comfortable member of the intellectually grounded hard left.  Today he sometimes talks as if he has tempered his views, but Obama continues to vote as if he has not.  Should we judge him by his words -- or by his actions?  And if by his words, which words?  His calculated political words of today or his detailed disclosures revealing his very thoughts written only a decade ago?

MICHELLE MALKIN ON on Barack Obama's horse-manure express.  It seems my b*llsh*t meme has gone viral:

A google search of "obama wright bullshit" brings over 298,000 hits.

A google search of "obama wright BS" brings over 146,000 hits.

A google search of "obama wright bull crap" brings over 25,400 hits.

A google search of "obama wright horse manure" brings over 22,700 hits.

A google search of "obama wright bull manure" brings over 12,600 hits.

A google search of "obama wright cow manure" brings over 2,300 hits.

Everyone knows b*llsh*t when they hear it, but can you say exactly what it is and how it differs from an ordinary lie?  Someone who's given a good stab at doing so is philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his thoughtful essay "Bullshit", which I recommend to your attention.

UPDATE:  Parsing Obama's b*llsh*t -- an amazing piece of analytical work from Ann Althouse.