“We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He’s afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him,” says Larry C. Johnson at Huffington Post, next to pic of Ayers and flag from Chi Mag, as below.

The context is that Hillary has to convince superdelegates that Obama’s unrepentant-terrorist friend and supporter Ayers will be a millstone around his neck in the general election.

I am a pessimist. Even though Hillary is the one who wins the big states that will count in the fall, the “supers” appear to be moving toward Obama. Even though Hillary has more popular votes and polls much better among the Reagan democrats, the supers appear to be moving toward Obama.

Hillary’s only hope is that the super delegates will come to their senses and realize that Barack Obama’s relationships with the corrupt Tony Rezko, the racist-wife stealing Jeremiah Wright, and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers will provide the Republicans with ammunition they have never had at hand to use against the Democrats’ candidate. This is particularly true of that flag stomper, Bill Ayers.

“[I]t will be the relationship with Bill Ayers that will empower the Republicans to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama.”

Fact is, Obama lied about their relationship.  (And a campaign died?)  Why?

What is he hiding? As I have pointed out before, 1995 was a critical year in the Obama/Ayers relationship. It was in 1995 that Barack was tabbed by Ayers to be the Chairman of the Annenberg Challenge (a failed $50 million project). That same year, Barack sat at a kitchen table with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Bill’s wife, and plotted the ouster of Alice Palmer, who [sic] Obama took down in order to secure his place in the Illinois state senate.

What the supers must do:

If the Super Delegates do not insist on a full and complete disclosure from Barack Obama about his ties to Bill Ayers, the Republicans will force the issue in the fall. It is one thing to have a name that sounds like the terrorist who attacked us on 9-11. But it is an entirely different matter to be close friends with an unrepentant terrorist who bombed U.S. Government buildings.

With friends like Johnson, the Dems could win.

Can you imagine a self-respecting newspaper going with this item, which I know I am going to pass over in silence:

Delmer Reed has told friends he believed it was no coincidence that his former wife, Ramah, divorced him and married [Rev.] Mr [Jeremiah] Wright shortly after the Chicago pastor gave him advice on their troubled marriage in the early 1980s.

Roosevelt Thomas, a lawyer who handled the Reeds’ divorce in 1983, confirmed to the New York Post that Mr Reed long believed Rev Wright moved in on his wife after counselling them.

Even Bill O’Reilly is drawing the line:

Bill O’Reilly told Kinky Freidman and Juan Williams that he’s tired of the Wright story. This sudden Wright fatigue didn’t stop him from mentioning the New York Post story about Wright stealing the wife of a church member. He even held up the front page so viewers could catch the headline and photo.

For documentation purposes, it started here, wouldn’t you know?  With this:

May 4, 2008 — The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama‘s loose cannon of a spiritual adviser, stole the wife of a parishioner – after the man sought Wright’s help in saving his troubled marriage, the former husband told friends.

Delmer Reed, 59, confided to pals that he believed the minister moved in on his wife while Wright was counseling the couple at his Chicago church in the early 1980s, The Post has learned.

“That’s exactly how he said it,” Reed’s divorce lawyer, Roosevelt Thomas, told The Post.

Chicago youth worker Harold Davis backs Reed up.

“Jeremiah knew all the weaknesses of the couple, and he started focusing on the wife, her vulnerabilities, and started doing things she wanted Delmer to do – spending time with her, taking her to the movies, that sort of thing,” said Davis, who heads the Chicago branch of football great Jim Brown’s Amer-I-can youth program.

“Everybody knew Jeremiah took the man’s wife,” said Davis. “It was common knowledge.”

The Wrights deny he ever counselled the woman.  

But a member who chastised Wright for his behavior was denounced from the pulpit:

Activist Derrick Mosley, a self-styled minister who has clashed with Wright, said there’s an “unwritten rule” that pastors don’t counsel married couples separately – as Wright did with Ramah Reed, he said.

In 2003, Mosley said, “I called him on the carpet about the indecorous manner in which he’d obtained his wife.”

In response, said Mosley, “he ranted and raved from the pulpit. He got up and announced, ‘If Derrick Mosley is in the building, I want you all to arrest him.’ “

Wow.  Was Obama there for that sermon?

If it happened.  Let us not trust Mosley too far:

CHICAGO — The Rev. Derrick Mosley, known throughout the Chicago area as a self-proclaimed community advocate, was arrested and charged with wire fraud and extortion Monday in an alleged plot to blackmail the wife of a professional athlete.

NBC5 Image

Mosley is accused of trying to obtain $20,000 from a business manager representing the athlete’s wife, claiming he had a videotape depicting her in a sexual encounter with a musician and another woman, NBC5’s Darren Kramer reported. Sources confirmed the musician on the alleged sex tape was R & B star R. Kelly.

According to NBC5’s sources, the tape pre-dates the woman’s marriage to the unidentified athlete. R. Kelly’s manager said Mosley tried to extort money from him in a separate incident. The R & B artist’s manager filed for a restraining order against Mosley in 2003, NBC5’s Marion Brooks reported.

A tangled web, I’d say

Reporters swoon at Obama:

John Harris, editor of Politico.com, has said he was forced to put certain reporters sent to cover Mr. Obama through a rehab program after they returned to the office. Back in January, NBC News anchor Brian Williams noted that Lee Cowan, the reporter NBC had sent to cover Mr. Obama, had told him that “it is hard to stay objective covering this guy.”

Somehow, however:

Some media reevaluations of Mr. Obama are now taking place, fueled in part by revelations such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that are hard to ignore. But the simple truth is that Mr. Obama has had a free media ride for so long that he effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination before any of his political weaknesses were generally known.

John Fund delivering this, for the excellent Wall St. Journal Political Diary.

A little (not much) bold thinking to demonstrate that Obama has been delivering nonsense to gullible Dimmycrats:

In the form of a few penetrating questions:

1, On what unifying principle will he bring us together, as he has been saying from the start, besides general weariness at political squabbling?

2. How long will avoidance of squabbling last when interests are concerned, and they always are?  He means to achieve what’s wanted by some but not by others and in the process bring us together?  Bull.

3. Meanwhile, leaving that question unanswered, what are his inclinations?  What side will he argue spontaneously, as it were, of the hot questions, as in pacifism (rampant among Dimmycrats, to be sure) over security?  Gun rights vs. gun banning (hot potato that Dems leave alone)?  Freedom (of speech and market, to name two) vs. government control?

— He’s a blank slate in many respects, seeking to repair with his brash self-confidence his woeful lack of experience.  But those pesky inclinations are already surfacing —

more more more

John Fund quoting a Dem superdelegate skeptical about a joint Obama-Clinton ticket and the baleful Clinton Effect:

“If Hillary were the vice president you would have Bill rattling around the West Wing and Obama would need a food taster for four years. No way.”

And not checking for excessive calories either.

Marcial Froelke Coburn begins her August, 2001, Chicago Mag story this way:

At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock ‘n’ roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.

Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he’s already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.

Ugh to the tap on arm.  Yuck.

Double yuck, however, to the pic of Ayers standing on the flag, which is what’s going to be run in lots of places and in fact was just run on Hannity’s show on Fox.

He’s a friend of O.?  Held one of his first fund-raisers in Hyde Park?  Someone he met at Aldi’s?  Questions, we got questions.

Obama’s exaggerations, doubletalk, and systematic deception are “unappealing,” but also “unexceptional” for the politico on the campaign trail, says City Journal’s Fred Siegel in The Australian, but he fingers O. as a special case, with reference to his Chicago base:

What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.

Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

Look to the Chicago Connection and his “conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics,” says Siegel, citing its “political and cultural tribalism,” where

racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics.

Siegel cites John Kass’s “Chicago way” and says:

At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.

Why did Chi pols anoint him?  To make themselves look good.

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

He’s Jones’s boy — word used not as in Deep South but as at City Hall.   Tony Allen-Mills in The Times of London:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The father-son motif arises:

Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Or, per Todd Spivak in the Houston Press, Jones became “Obama’s kingmaker”:

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

As a state senator, “he made a specialty of voting present,” says Siegel.  But in the U.S. senate, he was “such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.”

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics.  . . . .   [W]hites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

More more more is at this site.