PrintOctober 13, 2008
Obama's Three Strikes
In dealing with the unexpected, the unusual, or the threatening in life, it's good to keep in mind Goldfinger's dictum. As explained to James Bond just prior to dumping him into the shark tank (or was it chopping him in half with a laser? I forget.), Goldfinger's dictum goes like this: "Once is bad luck, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."
Goldfinger was alluding to the mystic power of three. Three is a meaningful and potent number, for both good and evil. The good is embodied, as we all know, in the Trinity. Less attractive are such things as three-strikes-you're-out and the "three men on a match" of the WWI trenches. In this case, three is all that is required to establish a pattern of malignant activity. Three and no more. Add another one, let it go to four, and it might well be too late.
Which brings us to Barack Obama. With the news that he belonged to the far-left New Party during the 90s, public revelations of his involvement with fringe left-wing politics have hit three, the other two being William Ayers and ACORN.
(What about Jeremiah Wright and the shadowy figure of Rashid Khalidi, you ask? The problem with these is that neither is fully political. Both are deeply intertwined with religion and race. Obama has shown a distinct talent for manipulating both. But the big three only involve goofball left-wing politics, depriving anyone of the opportunity to wail about religious or racist attacks.)
Bad luck is named William Ayers. Ayers is by now a figure of celebrity. But it will prove useful to glance at his history to make clear exactly why he's a figure of interest in the first place.
Ayers, along his wife Bernardine Dohrn, was a founder and leader of the Weathermen, a New Left terrorist group of the late 60s. The Weathermen were an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the flagship organization of the New Left. Tiring of SDS emphasis on protest, the Weathermen turned to direct action in the form of bombings and attacks on public figures, police, and politicians.
Over 300 bombings occurred in the late 60s and early 70s. It's difficult to say with certainty how many were carried out by the Weathermen. At least one police officer in San Francisco was killed by a bomb set by the organization, and there were probably other deaths as well. There's no debate concerning the fact that Ayers and his group were out to kill hundreds by bombing a dance at Fort Dix in March 1970. Instead, the bomb went off while still being put together, killing most of the would-be bombers and blowing a good-sized hole in W. 11th St. (It was still there when I arrived in New York a few years later.)
Ayers and Dohrn went underground, continuing the bombing campaign for several years with strikes against the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other targets. By mid-decade, the Weather Underground (as they now called themselves) had fallen apart. In 1980 Ayers and Dohrn came in from the cold, each receiving no more than wrist-slaps for their terrorist activities. "Guilty as hell," Ayers is quoted as saying. "And free as bird."
His record as an "educational expert" need not detain us. The question of his relationship with Barack Obama has been bubbling under since early in the year, when it became known that Ayers had hosted Obama's political coming-out party. All the same, Obama insisted that Ayers was "just a guy from the neighborhood" until records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) were released due to the efforts of NRO's Stanley Kurtz, revealing that the two had worked very closely together on the CAC, an educational foundation run by Ayers, for several years.
So Obama lied about his relationship with Ayers. And there it might have stood had Sarah Palin not hammered the subject unceasingly since being released from the Fortress of Solitude by John McCain's campaign staff. In recent days the media too has begun taking a closer look.
Coincidence comes in the form of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), another offshoot of the New Left, a direct descendant of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which attempted to end poverty in the late 60s by demonstrating in welfare offices.
Although involved in the campaign against Wal-Mart and other standard liberal efforts, ACORN's actual goal is nothing less than full-bore socialism for the US of A. All the same, it has convinced much of the legacy media and many politicians that it is a harmless reform group. The original failed bailout package sponsored by Nancy Pelosi featured a provision to provide ACORN with several billion dollars of federal (read: taxpayer) funds. Fortunately, it was stripped from the bill before it was passed.
In recent years ACORN has been deeply involved in voter registration drives, which have provided a little more insight into the organization's methods. In each of the recent presidential elections, ACORN was accused of filing masses of false registrations, with many of its branches paying heavy fines. This year is no different. Early this week, the authorities raided ACORN's Nevada office in a voter fraud investigation, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Obama, it appears, once acted as counsel for the organization. His campaign counters that he was just one of a large team of attorneys. Considering his story regarding Ayers, we can be excused for wanting to look more closely at the relationship, but there we're stymied. Obama's records with ACORN are one of the many that he refuses to release.
And now we reach number three: the New Party. Thomas Lifson provides as clear an explanation as we'll find:
The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within.
...and that, it seems, could fairly be called "enemy action".
A terrorist bomber, what may be the largest vote-fraud operation in history, and a political party calling for a socialist revolution in the United States. Obama has certainly been a busy little bee -- though not too busy, it seems, to cover his tracks in all three cases. As well he might -- anybody with such a history has a few questions to answer. And Obama knows this full well, considering the effort he's put into ducking those exact questions since his campaign began.
But those questions must be asked and answered before November 4th. Which, needless to say, is a job for Superwoman. Sarah Palin's relentless hammering brought the Ayers story back to the surface. She must now tie the three strands together: Ayers, ACORN, the New Party, and pound at it until it can no longer be ignored. (Of course, this will be an extremely upsetting experience for Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, but that can't be helped.)
If the three can be bundled, and the resulting package adequately presented to the American people, Barack Obama is through. American voters have made it clear time and again that they have no use for the political extremes of either left or right. Obama plainly suffers, at best, from a weakness for crackpot left-wing politics, and at worst from a yearning to create a revolutionary situation in American society. The first reveals an immature personality, one easily led and given to romantic concepts of how the world works. The second is evidence of serious maliciousness.
We require neither in the oval office.
J.r. Dunn is associate editor of American Thinker.
