Obama backers at the HuffPo have already started the hysteria that the vast right wing conspiracy has returned, this time to destroy Barack Obama.
A high-ranking labor supporter of Hillary Clinton is distributing to union leaders and to Democratic strategists a document detailing the radical activities of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, two former members of the '70s group the Weather Underground, who decades later, in Chicago, crossed paths with Barack Obama.
The document - a three-page emailed essay by Rick Sloan, communications director for the International Association of Machinists as Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) -- takes both literary and political license to outline what Sloan believes would be the thrust of a hypothetical Republican campaign against Obama focusing on his tangential connection to Ayers and Dohrn.
The goal of the essay appears to be to discredit Obama as the prospective Democratic presidential nominee.
The most damaging new material cited by Sloan appears in a link to an FBI Freedom of Information web site -- where a viewer can examine hundreds of pages of a study of the Weather Underground and its leaders, written in 1976 by the Chicago FBI office, just at the group was disintegrating at the end of the Vietnam War.
Sloan contends that the purpose of his document is to outline what he conjectures will be the tactics of Republican operative Karl Rove, an informal adviser to John McCain's campaign, if Obama is the nominee. The title of Sloan's paper is: "What Is Rove Up To?"
Sloan argues that Rove will use Ayers and Dohrn for 'red-baiting' attacks on Obama. Rove's "target is Barack Obama's signature slogan 'Change We Can Believe In.' Rove wants to redefine it as revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could
stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Senator Joseph McCarthy."
Sloan bases his conjecture on two Rove appearances on Fox's Hannity & Colmes, April 8 and April 14. During one appearance, Rove referred to Ayers and Dohrn thus: "Are there ways to find out the relationship between Ayers and Obama that are visual, that give it power and force?" During the other appearance, more obliquely, Rove described as "almost Marxian" Obama's controversial remarks about "bitter" small town Pennsylvanians.
Oh, for God's sake. I guess we can't expect Democrats to have actually vetted their own candidates for possible character flaws before the election cycle begins (that's why the superdelegates are picking the candidate instead). No, it must be that nobody would care about a president who hangs out with bigots and terrorists.
No, it's just those Republican meanies making a big deal out of nothing. Riiight.
Well, I hate to break it to man-crushin' Jeromy Brown, but there's an awful lot of "nothings" adding up to something in the case of Obama.
There's his associations with bigots and terrorists. Try as he might, most people aren't going to believe Obama went to a bigot's church because of the Bible study. If, as Jeromy tries to argue, there's no proof that Obama thinks any of the kooky things Jeremiah Wright spews, then we are left to ponder his sanity because no one would stay in a church where the pastor went on vicious rants periodically (I'm being kind here) if he were a thinking person. To call a bigot one's "spiritual mentor" and then say you disagreed with the teachings of that mentor is, well, ridiculous.
Now we find out that Obama hung out with William Ayers the unrepentant terrorist.
Just in case anyone has forgotten, Ayers was part of a radical leftist anti-war group called the Weathermen, who believed in killing American citizens to end our involvement in Vietnam. Ayers has stated he is unrepentant for his role and that he "didn't do enough." I guess killing your own citizens isn't enough for some people.
Now, Obama has tried to argue that he was only a kid during Vietnam. That's fair enough. I was, too. But I didn't grow up to hang out with people who would have liked nothing better than to kill my father the soldier. Perhaps it is unfair that I hold people of my generation and age (mid-40s) to a similar standard, but there it is. Even in my more liberal days, I would have found hanging out with unrepentant terrorists to be a problem.
The problem the Democrats face isn't that Republicans are going to vet their presidential candidate. The problem is that they didn't do it themselves. Perhaps they were simply starry-eyed by Obama's perfect liberal voting record. Or maybe they loved a guy who could say he wanted to transcend race even as he insulted potential voters as bigots and rednecks. Or maybe they swooned when Obama criticized McCain's association with lobbyists (saying we should scrutinize who he hangs out with), but didn't bother looking at who Obama hangs out with.
Regardless of why Democrats swung behind an unknown, very liberal candidate, they are stuck with him. Don't blame Republicans for pointing out how stupid a choice it was.
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