Is/was Barack Obama a member of Democratic Socialists of America? It sure looks like it.

No worries–they were probably just guys in his neighborhood.

Between these folks and Ayers and Dorhn (who are no doubt members as well, unless it wasn’t radical enough for them), it sounds like a pretty bad neighborhood.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg wonders if Senator Obama ever read his home-town newspaper.

And then of course there was Ayers’ own autobiography, the profile in the NY Times in which Ayers casually said he’d wished he’d made more bombs etc.

I don’t know Chicago well. But my sense of the place is that they take politics pretty seriously there. Young, very smart and hyper ambitious politicians like Obama tend to read the local paper (never mind the New York Times, which ran a couple dozen stories mentioning Ayers and his terrorist ties between 1990 and 2004). The political class in Chicago knows who everybody is, where they came from, what they believe. They tend to learn about people who give them jobs, money and political opportunities. And, people like Ayers don’t exactly keep their views or radical past a closely guarded secret, particularly when they remain unreprentant.

In short, I think it’s a lie — and a pretty stupid one — to say that Obama didn’t know about any of this. The obvious answer is he just didn’t care.

Yes, just like Reverend Wright’s rantings. It was no problem. Until, that is,it became politically inconvenient to him. He is lying about his relationship with Ayers, which means that he was also almost certainly lying about not knowing what was being preached in his church of twenty years. Why should we believe anything he says?

[Update late morning]

It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood, with advice columns from Barack’s and Michelle’s neighbors:

Dear Mary Ellen: Your question is borne of bourgeois ignorance and manufactured consent. A violent revolution is coming, and the workers will throw off the chains of their oppression and rise up in a bloody revolt against AmeriKKKa’s legacy of racism, genocide, and hegemonic corporatist empire. In the coming revolution, the state and its propagandist education apparatus will wither away, thus ushering in a new age of proletarian enlightenment. All education will be free, and all children, including yours, will be rescued from their bourgeois shackles and freed to join the vanguard for permanent revolution.

Bernadine has legal advice as well. Also, grooming tips from Rod.

[Afternoon update]

The memory hole doesn’t work so well any more, what with web archives. Politically Drunk has found some pages that had been previously scrubbed that confirm Senator Obama’s membership in the New Party:

From the October 1996 Update of the DSA ‘New Party’:
“New Party members are busy knocking on doors, hammering down lawn signs, and phoning voters to support NP candidates this fall. Here are some of our key races…

Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).”

Beyond the archived web page from the Socialist New Party is the recognition by the “Progressive Populist” magazine in November 1996 that Obama was indeed an acknowledged member of the Socialist Party.

“New Party members and supported candidates won 16 of 23 races, including an at-large race for the Little Rock, Ark., City Council, a seat on the county board for Little Rock and the school board for Prince George’s County, Md. Chicago is sending the first New Party member to Congress, as Danny Davis, who ran as a Democrat, won an overwhelming 85% victory. New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate seat from Chicago.”

Is there any record of Senator Obama demanding a correction to the publications?

Next, I expect him to say “that’s not the Democratic Socialist Party that I knew…”

Is/was Barack Obama a member of Democratic Socialists of America? It sure looks like it.

No worries–they were probably just guys in his neighborhood.

Between these folks and Ayers and Dorhn (who are no doubt members as well, unless it wasn’t radical enough for them), it sounds like a pretty bad neighborhood.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg wonders if Senator Obama ever read his home-town newspaper.

And then of course there was Ayers’ own autobiography, the profile in the NY Times in which Ayers casually said he’d wished he’d made more bombs etc.

I don’t know Chicago well. But my sense of the place is that they take politics pretty seriously there. Young, very smart and hyper ambitious politicians like Obama tend to read the local paper (never mind the New York Times, which ran a couple dozen stories mentioning Ayers and his terrorist ties between 1990 and 2004). The political class in Chicago knows who everybody is, where they came from, what they believe. They tend to learn about people who give them jobs, money and political opportunities. And, people like Ayers don’t exactly keep their views or radical past a closely guarded secret, particularly when they remain unreprentant.

In short, I think it’s a lie — and a pretty stupid one — to say that Obama didn’t know about any of this. The obvious answer is he just didn’t care.

Yes, just like Reverend Wright’s rantings. It was no problem. Until, that is,it became politically inconvenient to him. He is lying about his relationship with Ayers, which means that he was also almost certainly lying about not knowing what was being preached in his church of twenty years. Why should we believe anything he says?

[Update late morning]

It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood, with advice columns from Barack’s and Michelle’s neighbors:

Dear Mary Ellen: Your question is borne of bourgeois ignorance and manufactured consent. A violent revolution is coming, and the workers will throw off the chains of their oppression and rise up in a bloody revolt against AmeriKKKa’s legacy of racism, genocide, and hegemonic corporatist empire. In the coming revolution, the state and its propagandist education apparatus will wither away, thus ushering in a new age of proletarian enlightenment. All education will be free, and all children, including yours, will be rescued from their bourgeois shackles and freed to join the vanguard for permanent revolution.

Bernadine has legal advice as well. Also, grooming tips from Rod.

[Afternoon update]

The memory hole doesn’t work so well any more, what with web archives. Politically Drunk has found some pages that had been previously scrubbed that confirm Senator Obama’s membership in the New Party:

From the October 1996 Update of the DSA ‘New Party’:
“New Party members are busy knocking on doors, hammering down lawn signs, and phoning voters to support NP candidates this fall. Here are some of our key races…

Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).”

Beyond the archived web page from the Socialist New Party is the recognition by the “Progressive Populist” magazine in November 1996 that Obama was indeed an acknowledged member of the Socialist Party.

“New Party members and supported candidates won 16 of 23 races, including an at-large race for the Little Rock, Ark., City Council, a seat on the county board for Little Rock and the school board for Prince George’s County, Md. Chicago is sending the first New Party member to Congress, as Danny Davis, who ran as a Democrat, won an overwhelming 85% victory. New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate seat from Chicago.”

Is there any record of Senator Obama demanding a correction to the publications?

Next, I expect him to say “that’s not the Democratic Socialist Party that I knew…”

CNN (of all places) essentially calls Barack Obama a liar:

Griffin also tells a somewhat nonplussed Cooper that Obama has lied about his “coming out party” at the home of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in 1995. Obama has said that Alice Palmer arranged the fundraiser and the venue, but Griffin spoke to two people who attended the event, who claim Obama lied. Palmer had nothing to do with that event outside of being invited to it. Obama and Ayers planned the event themselves.

The story never made much sense. Why would Ayers and Dohrn allow their house to be used for an event in which they had no role? I wonder how long he’s been falsely fingering Palmer for it? I’m betting that he never told this fairy tale until recently, when it suddenly (and inexplicably, to him) became a potential campaign issue.

And of course, the next question is, if he’s lying about this, what else is he lying to us about? After all, as Senator McCain pointed out yesterday, for a guy who has written two books about himself, his life hasn’t been anything close to an open book.

From Mark Steyn:

The point is not that President-designate Obama is a “close friend” of the unrepentant Ayers, or that he was only eight when his patron was building bombs to kill the women of New Jersey. As Joe Biden would no doubt point out on his entertaining “This Day In History” segment, McCain was only six when Czogolsz killed President McKinley. But I doubt he’d let the guy host a fundraiser for him.

But, in the world in which Obama moves, it would seem absurd and provincial to object to partying with an “unrepentant terrorist.” The senator advanced and prospered in a milieu in which men like Ayers are not just accepted but admired for their “passionate participation”, and function as power-brokers and path-smoothers. This is a great country, and most of us (as Peter Kirsanow notes below) make it without having to kiss up to America-haters like Ayers and Wright. But not Obama.

Who is this man on course to be 44th president? Apparently, it’s not just impolite but racist to ask.

Speaking of which, Sarah Palin apparently handled the racism nonsense from CNN pretty well yesterday.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg has some more thoughts on the terrorists“passionate anti-war and civil rights movement” and the contradictions of the fascist left.

Mickey Kaus points out the foolishness of the press, in imagining that there was ever any possibliity that the media would be supporting McCain.

It’s one thing to have pro-Democratic, pro-Obama media favoritism: That’s just the way it is. Political reporters have opinions. Better blatant than latent.

It’s another to have that very favoritism used as evidence that McCain is blowing it, losing his reputation for “integrity” and his “gold plated brand.”

Yes, they only like McCain when he’s running against Republicans. The NYT endorsed him in the primary. Does anyone imagine they’ll endorse him in the general?

He also has a warning:

It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain’s shift to negativism has “driven the final nail into his coffin,” as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no–given the speed with which the country now processes information, there’s plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama’s not that far ahead.

Nope.

I suspect that there are a lot more of these folks than there are Republicans against McCain. And they’ve connected the ACORN dots between Obama, the Dems in Congress and the housing meltdown.

Bob Owens notes that it’s not just Bill Ayers. And he also points out the absurdity of thinking that one could be a member of the Weatherman at all, let alone a founder, and not have murderous intent:

BarackObama.com, the campaign’s official website, offers up a “fact check” that Obama was just eight years old when the Weathermen were active in 1969. The Obama campaign has tried to use the founding date of the Weathermen as a touchstone, claiming that the acts of the group were something that happened “40 years ago” when Obama was a child. Far closer to the truth is the December 6, 1990, sentencing date of Weathermen Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, when the last of the Weathermen were sentenced for their role in a string of bombings in the mid-1980s, including bombs that detonated at the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City’s South African Consulate, and the United States Capitol Building.

Barack Obama’s ties to the Weathermen aren’t ties that were 40 years removed from a child’s experiences, but the conscious decision of a young radical to establish a relationship to an infamous terrorist because of shared ideology and interests.

Barack Obama never set any bombs. But he’s never had problems with associating with those who did.

This talking point that Obama was “only eight years old” is stupid, as is anyone who buys it.

[Afternoon update]

Abe Greenwald has more:

Okay, let’s go with that judgment thing, shall we. Barack Obama served on the board of an educational organization headed by a terrorist bomber. He launched his political career in said bomber’s home. He then went on to serve two years alongside said bomber on the board of a “charitable” organization. Not quite done, Obama gave the bomber the gift of an enthusiastic blurb for the bomber’s book jacket. Even if Obama’s preposterous new claim about not knowing who Bill Ayers was was true in 1995, was it true in 1997 when Obama, then state senator, endorsed Ayers’s book? Had he not yet found out the identity of his buddy by 2000, when he took the position serving with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund? Did no one slip him a note over the next two years reading, “Don’t indicate that you’re reading this note, but the guy next to you is a terrorist”? Frankly, if Obama didn’t find out that Bill Ayers is a terrorist until it came up during the primary, then there’s more to worry about than the candidate’s political leanings.

No kidding.

[Early evening update]

Here’s a flash from the past. A 2001 piece by David Horowitz about the terrorist couple:

This is the banal excuse of common criminals – the devil made me do it. “I don’t think you can understand a single thing we did,” explains the pampered Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers “without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War.”

I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.”

That would have been 1991. This was a man who would later be put in charge of millions of dollars, with Barack Obama, to propagandize and radicalize Chicago schoolchildren. Either Obama had no problem with his past, or he was unaware of it. I don’t believe the latter. But either way, I don’t want him to be running the country. For all we know, he’ll appoint Ayers to be head of the Department of Education.

[Evening update]

“Bill Ayers has never hidden the fact that he was part of the Weather Underground, part of this radical group. In some ways it has made him somewhat famous in the South Side, Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood where he lives.”

I guess we’re supposed to believe that he somehow only hid it from Barack Obama.

Steve Diamond (no Republican he, I’m guessing) has been doing an excellent job in pulling together the story of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers and other sixties neo-Stalinist radicals, and the shared agendas, particularly in the area of education. Just keep reading and scrolling.