“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” –Obama friend William Ayers
The problem of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told The New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it’s dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it…
[I]t was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory”…
Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.
While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.
Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government’s fingerprints all over it.
Now we see what happens when political “wisdom” supplants good loan underwriting. When private financial institutions are virtually forced to make loans to people with a bad credit and job history .. this is what you get. Enjoy it.
Barack Obama knows it. The election he had in the bag is slipping away…
Democrats know something, and desperation is setting in. They have a novice campaigner who wanders off message. With every advantage in the primaries, Obama couldn’t win the big states — New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania — against Hillary Clinton, even when he got to define the rules for running against him. She could never risk alienating the base she’ll need in 2012; John McCain and Sarah Palin have no such constraints — hence the panic.
For a “change” candidate, Obama appears to be a man locked in time, unable to move past criticism, unable to move from the grip of the Democratic left, unable to adapt to the changed reality that the campaign is not the referendum on the war in Iraq or on the administration of George W. Bush that he’d envisioned…
Obama will lose because with less than two months remaining voters won’t be able to get comfortable with him. He can’t stay on message and he can’t avoid sending signals that interfere with the message when he does.
McCain, on the other hand, has been superb going back at least to Obama’s European tour. Mainstream America is comfortable with him and, with Palin’s selection, conservatives who had their doubts are onboard. The GOP is energized and suddenly an unwinnable election is reversed.
“The public’s right to know” is often invoked by the mainstream media, when what they are really talking about is the media’s right to smear those that they disagree with politically.
It is doubtful whether the public is half as obsessed with Sarah Palin’s daughter as CNN obviously is. Even before this particular story was hyped, CNN was among those in the media who had become something of a laughingstock for how they had gone overboard in favor of Barack Obama.
Increasingly, over the years, CNN has become less of a news reporting organization and more of a propaganda machine for liberal-left politics. Unfortunately, CNN is not alone.
It was not the newsworthiness of young Bristol Palin’s pregnancy that put it on the front page of the New York Times or interminably on the bottom of the screen at CNN. It was an opportunity for them to try to damage the political career of someone they disagreed with politically.
But how much damage is this story likely to do? Only time will tell but it seems doubtful whether a lot of votes will be changed by it. The public does not always echo the media’s obsessions.
Conservatives were apparently expected to be shocked but the media’s perceptions of conservatives often bear no resemblance to reality. Rush Limbaugh, for example, remained supportive of Governor Palin– and disgusted with the liberal scandal-mongers.
There is even a positive aspect to this. How many of us could have the history of our lives, and the lives of our whole families– going back for decades– picked over with a fine-tooth comb by investigative reporters, backed by the resources of a television network or a major newspaper, and have them come up with nothing worse than this?
There are people who are near and dear to me who have made some very bad mistakes in their lives. Would that disqualify me as a candidate for political office?
It certainly would not if I were running as a liberal Democrat. The media would say, “get over it” and “move on.”
