“Just a guy in my neighborhood”
…erful university and its allied neighborhood association have worked to manipulate boundaries and borders to assure “stability” and separation. Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives lives a block from our home and, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of “safe neighborhood watch”: the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has its eye on things twenty-four-hours a day. I pass Farrakhan’s mansion, offer a cheery wave to the Fruit, get a formal nod in response, and turn north two blocks across 47th Street, into the lap of urban blight.Breaking: William Ayers Mentioned Obama in his “A Kind and Just Parent” Book
Well, ok - Ayers mention of him in that book does sound like simple, if cheezy, name dropping. Yet…
...
Obama’s political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber—even a repentant one—he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he “didn’t do enough.”
Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright’s angry racism or Ayers’s unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?
No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.
First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with—let alone serve on two boards with—an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?
Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with obvious success.
...
Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama’s core beliefs. ... Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale.
...for which remark Krauthammer will be decried as raaacist in 3… 2… 1…
