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[http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/salim_mansur/2008/10/18/7126606-sun.html
B.O.'s pals stink
Obama's influences include radicals, a terrorist and felon
By SALIM MANSUR
Last Updated: 18th October 2008, 3:42am
Nineteen months or seemingly an eternity ago, in March 2007, the Washington Post published a long background piece by Peter Slevin on senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, and the relationship that connected both to Saul Alinsky (1909-72) of Chicago.
The life experience Obama brings as his credentials for the White House is of a community organizer in Chicago. Slevin reported Alinsky's disciples hired Obama to "organize black residents on the south side, while learning and applying Alinsky's philosophy of street-level democracy."
In 1985 Obama moved to Chicago and there discovered Alinsky through his disciples and writings. It is the Alinsky connection that compellingly reveals Obama's career.
Among those with whom Obama worked in Chicago's corrupt politics were the radical preachers Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger, the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and the convicted felon Antoin Rezko.
Alinsky was a radical socialist. He invented community organizing as a political camouflage for subverting America's democracy and capitalist economy.
In Rules For Radicals, Alinsky described the means and ends of his politics as did Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. Alinsky wrote, "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."
This is the Trojan horse principle of destroying the enemy - capitalism and democracy - from the inside. And democracy, as the French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel observed from lived experience, is vulnerable to subversion because of "its eagerness to believe in its own guilt" and "devising arguments to prove the justice of its adversary's case and to lengthen the already overwhelming list of its own inadequacies."
The associations Obama denies, and the mainstream media dissembles on his behalf, have the shared experiences of practitioners of Alinsky's politics.
Associations matter, for it is the network of relationships cultivated in an individual's career that discloses the private and public world of that person.
It is not simply the voting record of Obama that makes him the most left-leaning Democrat since the Democratic party, beginning in 1968, gradually erased the line separating it from the fringe radical left in American politics. It is his voting record based on a political view of the world grounded in the teachings of Alinsky that places Obama at odds with Middle America.
The role of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in the economic crisis by pushing sub-prime lending to high-risk borrowers in the housing market will get fully exposed, as will its malpractice in fraudulent voter registration drives to undermine the integrity of elections. While Obama's links with ACORN are irrefutable, American voters have yet to learn the full extent of this relationship.
TRUST
Any elected office in a democracy, and most importantly the highest, is ultimately a matter of trust.
Thomas Sowell, resident scholar at the Hoover Institute in Stanford University and an Afro-American of great distinction remarked recently, "Barack Obama's being the first serious black candidate for president of the United States is what most people consider remarkable, but how he got there is at least equally surprising. The story of Obama's political career is not a pretty story."
Middle America has a mighty big decision to make in less than three weeks.
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