"Critics of Sen. Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his "past associations." That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counterattack against "guilt by association."
We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.
Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom serious money changed hands.
Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Mr. Obama's election campaigns, and Mr. Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers' money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance - but an alliance is not just an "association" from being at the same place at the same time.
Mr. Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that...
The story of Mr. Obama's political career is not pretty. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot - after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates' petitions, on whatever technicality he could devise.
Despite his words today about "change" and "cleaning up the mess in Washington," Mr. Obama was not on the side of reformers trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Mr. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.
Sen. Barack Obama is running on an image directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini.
Why much of the public and the media have been so mesmerized by the words and the image of Mr. Obama, and so little interested in learning about the factual reality, was perhaps best explained by an official of the Democratic Party: "People don't come to Obama for what he's done; they come because of what they hope he can be..."
0bama has the same “hate America” Marxist ideology that Ayers and Wright have. Period.