With the guilty plea of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who pled to two felonies and resigned last Thursday, Barack Obama adds to his growing list of denounced friends — and friends who should have been: black supremacist Reverend Wright, domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, convicted felon Frank Rezko, Communist Party USA (CPUSA) PAC Chair Joelle Fishman, Obama campaign advisor, Princeton University professor and Marxist sympathizer Cornel West …
They have all had their uses, whether they are marrying him and baptizing his children and giving him South Chicago street cred, or coming up with money to allow him to buy a house that was “above his pay grade”, or inviting him to use their living room to launch his political career, or lubricating Obama’s ride toward a Michigan victory. But they have their conspicuous liabilities, too, revealed for all to see when the spotlight of a national election bears down on them.
When push comes to shove, as in under the bus, Obama dithers until he knows he can’t dither any longer. It’s tough. No one can have so many friends with such radical views without sharing those views—and the record, in his own words, shows he does. Hence detaching from them is tough. But sacrifices must be made for the long-term objectives they all share: power and income redistribution, a la’ Saul Alinsky, the original community organizer.
Kilpatrick has been on the orange-alert list for some time, but Obama did not move to cut connections until Wednesday night, hours after he copped a plea. The delay will further erode Obama’s declining credibility with mainstream voters. Keith Naughton writes in Newsweek:
…16 months ago, as Obama was launching his campaign for president with a scalding speech to the Detroit Economic Club upbraiding Detroit‘s automakers for not building more fuel-efficient cars. But while that speech gave Obama green street-cred, his praise of Kilpatrick as a ‘great mayor’ who will do ‘astounding things for many years to come’ backfired. As Kilpatrick now heads to jail for four months, for obstruction of justice, two attack ads have already appeared on the Web replaying Obama’s Kwame moment. One, produced by the conservative Freedom’s Defense Fund and soon going into heavy rotation on Detroit TV stations, shows Kilpatrick’s mug shot, as the 10 felonies he faced scroll down the screen while Obama says, ‘I’m grateful to call him a friend.’ The ad ends ominously with the line: ‘You should know who Obama’s friends are.’
Obama asked Kilpatrick, by that point wearing an electronic tether, not to show up at the Democratic National Convention. Well, yeah. That makes sense. But it was not until Wednesday night, a few hours after the prosecutor announced Kilpatrick was pleading guilty that Obama issued a “step aside” statement. In Detroit’s suburbs, where even before the conviction, Kilpatrick had only a 2 percent approval rating, that friendship won’t play well. More from Naughton:
Detroit is 81 percent black and the poorest city in America, according to new census data, while the surrounding suburbs are 81 percent white and include some of the most affluent enclaves in the country. Ever since the riots of 1967, Detroiters have divided themselves along racial lines, and politicians on both sides of the city’s cultural fault line—the 8 Mile Road made famous by Eminem—have stoked racial fears to get elected. “This Kwame Kilpatrick mess has splattered over onto the Obama campaign at the worst possible time,” says veteran Detroit political consultant Sam Riddle. “Kilpatrick’s brand of leadership has fed into the worst stereotypes that white voters have about black leaders.”
While the Obama campaign has 30 field offices in Michigan, a third again as many as John Kerry had in 2004, the outcome is anything but certain. … Meanwhile, let’s hope those field offices don’t have Che Guevara flags waving in them.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
The Obama links get more and more curious. Some of them are just shady friends, like Kilpatrick has proved to be.
Others lead somewhere, like his Syrian friend, convicted Chicago bagman Tony Rezko, who helped O buy his house (according to the London Times) shortly after Rezko received a 3.5 million loan from >Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi (Saddam’s Oil for Food bagman and cousin) or … Jeremiah Wright & Louis Farrakhan > Libyan terrorist Moammar Qaddafi, … or his cousin, good old Raila Odinga > Sheikh Abdullah Abdi, chairman of NAMLEF, otherwise known as National Muslim Leaders Forum. Go figure.
What about Rashid Khalidi, co-founder of the Arab American Network, who hosted a fundraiser for Obama? Obama and Wm. Ayers, serving together on the board of the Woods Fund, gave Khalidi’s group a total of $75,000 between 2001 and 2002. Khalidi is a harsh critic of the United States and a harsh critic of Israel — and, no surprise, a friend of the PLO.
Then there is Mazen Asbahi, who served all of a week as Muslim Outreach Director for Obama’s campaign. Asbahi resigned in early August, when his ties to Jamal Said, imam of radical Chicago mosque, hit the news. Asbahi is connected to the ISNA, and that is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — the Egyptian terrorists who created Hamas. Is there a pattern here?
Obama now has another friend to throw under the proverbial bus: Khalid al Mansour, former mentor to the Black Panthers, and now alleged organizer of funding for Obama’s expenses at Harvard Law — with help from the Saudis.
As reported in Investor’s Business Daily, one of the most respected papers on the planet. Is there a pattern is maybe not the question: Is there no end? is what we should be asking.
So who is mentoring Obama all these years? Obviously he does not think for himself, as per the colossal stumble at the townhall discussion when he was looking around desperately for someone to help him out. And now he is trotting around the country with a teleprompter in front of him wherever he goes. This is brilliant? No, but it is weird.
What is the problem with these people in washington. Don”t they knowanything or don’t care that we have a terriost, anti jew, not born in america, has been promoted and paid for by terriost, or know and don’t care.
It is not the american way to be stepped on , freedom taken and handed over to these foreiners. Some day the people will raise up and say no more. We want our country back.
This man Obama the muslim is taken it a litttle by little.
No one man has this many friends of opposition that he has for no reason.
He is up to something you can count on it.I heard they had people watching the internet. Thats good. I hope they know how I feel about this. This is my opinion and none of the sites.