Getting to know BHO

Now we start to see the real Barack Hussein Obama. His work with Bill Ayers to radicalize Chicago schools was spelled out in detail this week in a Wall Street Journal piece by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Most of you will remember Ayers and his now wife, Bernardine Dohrn, as among founders/leaders of the radical and violent Weatherman, aka Weather Underground Organization, which bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon about 30 years ahead of Al Qaeda. Ayers and Dohrn have now been adorned with “respectability” as faculty members at, respectively, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Apparently prosecutorial misconduct enabled them to avoid having to serve prison time. However, they were terrorists as that term is used today, and they remain radical: not very long ago Ayers said publicly that he regretted not doing more as a Weatherman.

Obama’s first political campaign began with a party in the home of Ayers and Dohrn.

More elaboration by Kurtz on Obama’s radical background, titled “Senator Stealth,” was the cover story of the September 1 issue of National Review. A September 7 blog at The Spectator (London) by Melanie Phillips, titled “Revolution You Can Believe In,” discusses more of the same; click here.

I hope we all have reason in a few weeks to be thankful for long presidential campaigns. That observation will produce many a questioningly furrowed eyebrow, so I ask, How long has it taken for Americans to know anything about Obama beyond his fine speeches?

Truth and fairness have been disserved by an overwhelming majority of the mainstream media. So the real Obama has been scandalously slow to emerge from beneath a heavy overburden of manure and pretense.

Mark Twain famously observed, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” I’m not quite ready to argue that overthrow of our government is the objective of any Obama backers, as it was of Sgt. Raymond Shaw’s mother in "The Manchurian Candidate," but it all gets more gravely worrisome by the day.

Several respected friends have been Obama supporters from the get-go. So impressed was one of those that he told me, “In the end, I could not care less about the messenger – Obama, Clinton, McCain. Rather, it is the message that matters.” I have challenged a few of them to give me a single name of anyone in Obama’s background whom one could consider respectable at any level of political leadership. Anyone, that is, before Obama emerged as the Darling of Message for his party and the fawning mainstream media. None of these friends has delivered, nor have I found any such name in rather extensive reading and research. Not one. Zilch.

Obama is so bereft of any public record (aside from his far left but otherwise brief and unremarkable legislative record), about all we have to assess him are his associates. Those include scumbags like Tony Rezco and the usual assortment of corrupt Chicago politicians; radical extremists like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn; and, last but not least, his America-hating wife Michelle. Not a name among ‘em most would want mentioned in the same paragraph with our own.

Chicago political corruption, by the way, provides a particularly embarrassing contrast between Obama and the opposition. GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin rose to high office in Alaska by taking on political leaders in her own party whom voters considered corrupt. Obama made his mark in Illinois politics by using lawyers to remove opponents from the ballot and, when he had opportunities to help clean out corrupt officeholders, he either didn’t have the huevos or, more likely, he and they were all one happy family.

A man with Obama’s cronies, not to mention his new idolaters on the left fringe, is a serious threat to the Republic.

Barack's great deception

In 1995, Barack Obama published an autobiography that has sold like hotcakes and helped make him and his wife quite wealthy people. Titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama's book got rave reviews, just like the national address he delivered in defense of his 20 years following the spiritual leadership of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I wrote at FamilySecurityMatters.com about the Wright speech when it was delivered back in March. Now a writer with the pseudonym Michael Gledhill has written a devastating comparison of the Barack Hussein Obama appearing in Dreams and the one now appearing regularly on your TV screen and about to be officially the Democratic Party's candidate for president. It is titled "Who Is Barack Obama?" and can be found in the September 1 print issue of National Review and at this link.

Numerous analysts of Obama's writing and speechifying have noted the same strength and weakness: well-formed rhetoric pleasing to the eye or ear but lacking substance. Dreams is full of substance -- but little or none that a patriot would recognize as suitable background for a U.S. senator, let alone for someone aspiring to lead our country as its president.

Just like his wife Michelle, the Barack Obama of Dreams was a bitterly race-conscious person with a high dislike for the United States. Or in the concluding words of Michael Gledhill, "Dreams from My Father reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight – a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization."

I am reminded of the supreme irony of the demeaning remarks Obama recently leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas. In contrast to Thomas's, Obama's youth (as well, by the way, as that of his America-hating pastor Wright) was Easy Street. As an intellectual and patriot, neither Obama nor Wright could carry Thomas's briefcase.

Green Left seduces the Rockefellers

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, John D. Rockefeller’s corporate progeny, shrugged off greenie attacks by the Rockefeller heirs and fired back. Here's the latest from Canada. There are two things Coloradans should keep in mind about this developing story: 1) Unlike CEO James Mulva of our soon-to-be-neighbor in Broomfield, ConocoPhillips, Tillerson and Exxon Mobil haven’t knuckled under to the global warming hysteria (fraud and hoax are other words that come to mind) that’s all the rage these days.

2) Through the work of “climate czarina” Heidi VanGenderen and others, Gov. Ritter has Colorado in the grip of the same Rockefeller crowd who are nipping at Tillerson’s posterior at Exxon Mobil.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund supports an outfit called the Center for Climate Strategies , CCS, which I understand to be, among other things, a self-styled manager/facilitator (puppeteer?) seductively providing resources at no charge mainly to states to “[enable] deliberative democracy” in policy development addressing climate change. However, it appears the only climate change of interest to CCS is anthropogenic global warming (if any), and CCS’s skillful control of agendas leads in only one direction: drastically reduced carbon emissions. Some deliberative democracy (the term used in its mission statement).

In Colorado’s case, a climate action plan was reportedly developed with CCS guidance by another nonprofit, something called the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, RMCO. State climate (read, global warming) action plans engineered by CCS are usually the product of a “Climate Change Advisory Council” (do a Web search on that term, and you’ll see what I mean) appointed directly or indirectly by the governor; the RMCO work might be seen as more “independent,” but I believe that’s a distinction with little difference. A report in the Rocky 11/6/07 seems to confirm what I have learned from other sources, that the Ritter/VanGenderen climate action plan is the RMCO product with some minor variations.

Ominously, RMCO is hand-in-hand with the Natural Resources Defense Council. A major report on warming in the west featured on RMCO’s Website is shown to be the product of both organizations. A recent George Will column noted, “Today's ‘green left’ is the old ‘red left’ revised.” It would be hard to find an organization closer to the heart of the green left for the past 35 years than the NRDC.

Investor’s Business Daily had it right in this 5/29 editorial about Exxon Mobil in contrast to British Petroleum -- and one could add ConocoPhillips, Xcel and dozens of others that have drunk Al Gore’s koolaid. IBD’s comment about the endless ads “touting capitulation to the global warming religion” reminds me of Xcel’s ad about the Coors Field solar array and its Gee Whiz! 14,000 KWH per year. By comparison, the Palo Verde nuclear plant west of Phoenix generates 14,000 KWH in about 13 seconds.

Might one be unduly cynical to suggest that political correctness is the only thing standing between Xcel and nuclear-electric power advocacy?

Fund my grant or die

Garbage in, garbage out, was my reaction on reading the environmental love song by one Richard Anthes in the Denver Post, Mar. 29. Inadvertently to be sure, Anthes confirmed for readers exactly what the global warming scare is all about: research money for his and other related organizations. He is president of something called the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. The garbage in is his introductory statement, claiming it is “clear” that the “major cause” of planet warming “at an unprecedented rate” is human beings. The garbage out is his case for more and faster computers for more exotic models.

Many in the lucrative climate research community have long been censoring, or bullying into silence, scientists who differ from their well-funded (and possibly ruinous) orthodoxy. Critics are finally coming forward. Nearly every day, what Anthes claims as clear becomes less clear – some argue false, even fraudulent.

Anthes proceeds from his controversial opening to a clarion call for more research funds. From the federal government, of course.

The obligatory call to urgency isn’t missing, either. “If climate change is ... the preeminent threat facing our planet ... then it seems imperative that we invest ...”

That’s a huge “If.” Those whose backs remain sore from shoveling snow recently must be excused for skepticism vis-à-vis what Anthes is shoveling.