Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.

Euripides' dictum has prompted many to look at the company Senator Barack Hussein Obama is wont to keep:

Frank Marshall Davis

K-State dropout, poet, labor organizer, Communist Party member, journalist for a newspaper published by a Communist front labor union, 'Frank' is described by Senator Obama in his autobiography as a mentoring figure for whom he had great affection: "It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created."

'. . .his faith. . .' in what? certainly not God, in the dialectic of history? in revolution? in the proletariate? Senator Obama coyly sanitizes his Marxist associates.

Willima Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn

Others have highlighted Senator Barack Obama's connections with Weather Underground leader William Ayers in slickly produced TV spots:




Here are a few more samples of what passes for thought in Obama's circle of friends and acquaintances:

Here is a clip of Ayers reminding us why the last Democratic nominee deserved to be 'Swiftboated'. Of course, Ayers thinks Kerry's scurilous behavior after his return from Vietnam was a fine thing:




Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn supported and defended academic charletan Ward Churchill:



But Senator Obama's questionable associations are not limited to a childhood mentor and the 'neighbors' in whose house his political career was launched, and with whom he served on governing boards of left-wing non-profit organizations that wasted millions of dollars in grant money in failed attempts to improve education in Chicago.

Antonin "Tony" Rezko

Another 'neighbor', fast-food restauranteur, real-estate developer, political fund-raiser for Chicago machine politicians, recently convicted of six counts of wire fraud, six counts of mail fraud, two counts of corrupt solicitation, and two counts of money laundering, Rezko was among the very first contributors to Obama's state and U.S. senatorial campaigns. In 2005, on the same day when Obama and his wife bought their Hyde Park home for $1.65 million ($300,000 million below the asking price), Rezko's wife bought an adjoining vacant lot for the full asking price. The Rezkos subsequently sold part of that land to the Obamas at a bargain price.





Dorothy Tillman

Long-time Chicago Alderman, leading adocate of the payment of slavery reparations to African-Americans, Tillman was an early backer of Obama's political career, a fact he used to excuse his continue endorsement of her reelection at a time when the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the cost-overrun ridden construction of which she championed, and whose management board was staffed by her family and close associates, was under investigation for corruption.

No video of Ms. Tillman, but a tour of the ward whose interests she purported to represent spouting radical ideas was posted to YouTube with the caption, "A quiet New Year's Day morning trip down Calumet, Prairie, Indiana and 47th Streets in Bronzeville. All of this is in Chicago's 3rd Ward, as is most of the rest of Bronzeville. The 3rd Ward, which was ruled for 24 agonizing years by Alderman Dorothy Tillman, has 5,000 vacant lots, half the number in the entire city. And who endorsed her for re-election in 2007 (she lost, fortunately)? Hyde Park resident Senator Barack Obama! Has he ever driven through Bronzeville? If so, he might have had second thoughts about his support. All politics is local, Barack. Remember that. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. She and her 49 City Council colleagues have gotten $1.2 million APIECE every year since 1994 to improve streets, sidewalks and lights. Even if you don't live in Chicago, it's your tax money, too.":



Alexi Giannoulias

Obama endorsed Giannoulias' successful campaign for state treasurer in 2006, despite reports that Giannoulias' family-owned Broadway Bank, where Obama's campaign accounts were held, had made loans to known organized crime figures. Records show Giannoulias and his family gave more than $10,000 to Obama's senatorial campaign.

Jeremiah Wright

Now thrown under the proverbial bus, Senator Obama and his family's spritual life for twenty years consisted of singing hymns and listening to the sermons of this America-hating fire-brand who dressed Marxism and black nationalism up in vestments and passed them off as Christianity:



Khalid Al Mansour

Here is a little speech from a fellow who solicited letters of recommendation for Barack Obama so he could get into Harvard:




Is it any wonder Obama's staff have to periodically cleanse the open-posting sections of his campaign website of anti-Semitic claptrap?

Mazen Asbahi

Another one under the bus: somehow Senator Obama managed to pick a member of the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group dedicated to establishing a world-wide Caliphate under Sharia law, as his campaigns's Muslim liason.
Asbahi resigned this month when his radical ties were revealed.

Whether he picks them, or just attracts them, can America afford to have a man with these kind of associates in the Oval Office?

As Euripides wrote: "Every man is like the company he is wont to keep."

Thursday, August 14, 2008

A Quiz on World Affairs

With the end of the Cold War, a Communist country, which had been organized along federal lines into constituent republics, dissolves into those republics, with each becoming a sovereign nation. In one of those republics, there is a province in which (partly due to population shifts during and just before the Communist era) the majority of the population is ethnically distinct from the now-independent republic. In that province there is a strong separatist movement engaged in an armed insurrection that has taken effective control of much of the province. As a result, the province has not participated in the parliamentary elections that elected the national government of the republic.

The premier of the republic orders military action to retake control of the province, which is, under international law, a part of the now-sovereign republic. In the press of a great military power (which, incidentally, has unfriendly relations with the democratically elected government of the republic due to its close ties to another great military power), there are breathless (false) reports of genocide being carried out as part of the attempt to reassert sovereignty over the province. The great power, without U.N. sanction and without taking care to avoid targetting civilian targets, launches a military campaign which strikes target throughout the republic, and is which it describes as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. The other great power, which was friendly to the government of the republic, protests and sends logistical support to the futile resistance by the republic’s government.

1. The great power launching the military strike on behalf of the separatists is

A. The United States
B. Russia
C. not enough information is provided

2. The republic fighting the separatists is

A. Georgia
B. Serbia
C. not enough information is provided

3. The separatists are

A. mostly Christian Ossetians
B. mostly Muslim Albanians
C. not enough information is provided

4. The year when this takes place is

A. 1999
B. 2008
C. not enough information is provided



The correct answer in each case is, of course, C.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Vechnaya Pamyat!

The passing of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitzen is surely a time of reflection both for Orthodox Christians who share his love of the Russian culture that was shaped from its birth by Holy Orthodoxy only to be marred by the Bolsheviks' imposition of inhuman ideas born in the rationalistic West, and for all who learned of the true scope of that inhumanity through his writings.

I would urge all readers of this blog to find and read the last interview Alexander Isayevich granted to the Western media
in Der Spiegel, and to take to heart his criticisms of the West, and the saying of his I once quoted at a candlelight vigil for the victims of the KAL 007 shootdown: "The dividing line between good and evil does not run between social systems, but right down the middle of the human heart."

O God of spirits and all flesh, who has trample down Death and made powerless the Devil, and given life to the world, do Thou, the same Lord give rest to the soul of Thy departed servant, Alexander, in a place of brightness, a place of verdure, a place of repose, whence all sickness, sorrow and sighing have fled away. Pardon every sin which he hath committed, whether by word, or deed, or thought, for Thou art good and lovest mankind: for there is no man that liveth and sinneth not, for Thou only art without sin, and Thy righeousness is unto eternity, and Thy Law is truth.

Vechnaya Pamyat! Vechnaya Pamyat! Vechnaya Pamyat!

Memory Eternal! Memory Eternal! Memory Eternal!