Jack Kelly Sunday

Good Morning, my friends. And that includes you, too, Jack.

This week in the Post-Gazette, our good friend Jack Kelly does his own character assassination of Barack Obama.  It's a particularly difficult argument to counter as it's almost all based on subjective reactions by conservative or otherwise debunked sources.  But let's plow through anyway.

Jack begins:

Barack Obama is the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected to the presidency, historian Michael Beschloss told radio talk show host Don Imus in November of 2008.

"So what is his IQ?" Mr. Imus asked. Mr. Beschloss didn't know. He was just assuming.

So assuming you know something when you don't is bad, right Jack?

Let's keep going. Jack continues:

There is little evidence to support it. Mr. Obama went to Harvard, but so did George W. Bush, who some liberals consider dumber than dirt. The president won't release his transcripts, so we can't judge by his grades. Mr. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, but when he was selected, popularity mattered more than scholarship.

Jack, how do you know that? That last part, I mean. That when Obama was selected president of the Harvard Law Review it was a popularity contest.

Turns out, Jack, that your assumption here was wrong.  Who says so?

Bradford Berenson, Obama classmate at Harvard Law and White House Council for George W. Bush:

You don't become president of the Harvard Law Review, no matter how political, or how liberal the place is, by virtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Review entirely on his merits.

Did you even bother to check, Jack? Did anyone at the P-G bother?

I am guessing not.

Let's move on.  Here's the big assumption on Jack's part:

Columnist Joe Klein said Mr. Obama's first autobiography "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." But Mr. Obama got help writing "Dreams from My Father" from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers," celebrity journalist Christopher Andersen claimed in his 2009 biography of Barack and Michelle.

"The book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writing," Mr. Andersen wrote.

Biographer David Maraniss published this month his interview with Genevieve Cook, who dated Mr. Obama in New York, but bears little resemblance to the "New York girlfriend" described in "Dreams." That's because she is a composite, Mr. Obama said.

Yet Mr. Obama's description closely resembles radical Diana Oughton, who was Mr. Ayers girlfriend and who blew herself to smithereens in 1970 while building a bomb intended to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, according to the blogger "Bookworm."

Ah, we're back to the "Weather Underground Terrorist Ayers wrote Dreams of My Father" story.  Doesn't anyone at the P-G keep track of Jack's conspiracy theories?

We saw this in 2009.  It was wrong then and it's wrong now.

No matter, let's start at Bookworm and work our way backwards.  Bookworm isn't actually presenting much new material, it's little more than a link to this article at The American Thinker.

Written, in 2010, by the now-debunked Jack Cashill.  But let's take a closer look at the Ayer-girlfriend connection.  This is what Cashill says:

More intriguing still, Obama seems to borrow the one girlfriend in the oddly sexless Dreams from Ayers' experience. "There was a woman in New York that I loved," he tells his half-sister years after the fact. "She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes."

The woman of Obama's memory evokes images of Diana Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two women shared similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they seemed to have grown up on the very same estate.

"The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his grandfather." According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton "brought Bill Ayers and other radicals" to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. The main house on the Oughton estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton's father's grandfather.

The carriage house, in which Oughton lived as a child, now serves as a public library. It may have already seemed like one when Ayers visited, an impression that finds its way into Obama's memory of a library "filled with old books and pictures of the famous people [the grandfather] had known-presidents, diplomats, industrialists."

"It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us," Obama writes of his visit to his girlfriend's country home, "and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore." As can be seen from aerial photos even today, the Oughton estate also has a small lake and is surrounded by woods.

Look very carefully at what Cashill's saying. He's saying that the girlfriend in the Obama book isn't actually a girlfriend of Obama's.  She's actually Diana Oughton - an old girlfriend of Bill Ayers.

This is the research Jack Kelly is using.  In fact, Jack's actually misquoting his source.  Cashill doubts her existence.  Jack just uses Cashill's "research" to "prove" that Ayers ghost wrote Dreams.

But we know that the girfriend is actually real (if only a composite).  From David Maranis at Vanity Fair we learn about Genevieve:

Much later, after the publication of his book Dreams from My Father, and after Barack Obama became famous, a curiosity arose about the mystery woman of his New York years. “There was a woman in New York that I loved,” he wrote. “She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. On the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine. You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That’s how it was.”

Obama did not name this old girlfriend even with a pseudonym—she was just “a woman” or “my friend.” That she remained publicly unidentified throughout his rise to national prominence became part of the intrigue of his New York period’s “dark years” narrative. His physical description was imprecise but close. Genevieve is five-seven, lithe and graceful, with auburn-tinged brown hair and flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes. Her voice was confident and soothing. Like many characters in the memoir, he introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race.

She was the woman with the family and the old house on the lake.  She actually existed.

Cashill is wrong.  And if Cashill is wrong, then Jack is wrong.

Again.

Doesn't anyone care about this stuff at the P-G?

Tracking Teh Crazie at World Net Daily

It's always a good idea to keep track of what teh right wing crazies are thinking.

This time, our good friends at birther central are doing their darnedest to connect, yet again, President Obama to Bill Ayers.

They fail, of course, but in doing so it's a good lesson in what counts as dot-connecting for teh crazies over at WND.

Let's begin. This morning I saw this headline at WND:

It leads to this story - it's a retread, I guess, of some of the "research" they did in 2009.  The Obama/Ayers dots are "connected" in the first two paragraphs:

Although the Washington Post this past week featured an extensive profile of Mitt Romney’s high school days, which alleged the presidential hopeful engaged in bullying, the news media has yet to probe important aspects of Obama’s early education that may evidence later radical ties.

In 2009, WND exposed Obama’s attendance in a church Sunday school that espouses far-left politics and served as a sanctuary for draft dodgers from the Students for a Democratic Society during the time Bill Ayers was a leader in that organization.

And number of paragraphs down the piece we read:

After living from age 7 with his mother and step-father in Indonesia, where he was enrolled as a Muslim under the name “Barry Soetoro” in public schools, Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 11 in 1971 to reside with his grandmother. His mother moved back to Hawaii in 1972 and stayed there until 1977, when she relocated again to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

In his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama recounts on page 17 moving to Hawaii and being enrolled in the Unitarian church.

Note the Muslim connection in a story about Obama's Unitarianism - how do they do that with a straight face?

But back to Ayers - they've established that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971 on.  And that he went to Sunday school at a Unitarian Church.  And that that Unitarian Church "espouses far-left politics" and attended sunday school at a church connected to the SDS when Ayers was a leader there.

Ah...that's where things break down.  We've all known Ayers to be a leader of the Weather Underground - but what's the connection to the SDS?  From a PBS documentary:

The Weather Underground emerged when [Bernadine] Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government.

And when did this break occur?  When did Ayers and Dohrn et al leave split with the SDS?

Um, a couple of years before Obama set foot in that Sunday school:

By 1969 the organization had split into several factions, the most notorious of which was the “Weathermen,” or “Weather Underground,” which employed terrorist tactics in its activities.

This is what passes for dot-connecting among teh crazies on the right.

Get used to it - we got 6 months until the election.

Tracking Teh Crazie - WND On That Breitbart-Obama Video

Read teh crazie here:

Video footage of President Obama during his college years at Harvard University was intentionally suppressed by news media and academia during the 2008 presidential campaign in order to hide Obama’s connections with radical leftists, according to the editors of Breitbart.com, the website of late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart.

Tapes of Obama at Harvard in 1991 have now been posted online and aired on the Fox News Channel, and they show then–student Obama speaking warmly on behalf of a leftist professor, Derrick Bell.

“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama says during his speech before hugging him.

The embrace between the pair had been edited out of a video that was released earlier in the day by Buzzfeed. (Video of the embrace can be seen here.)

“This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate,” said Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro.

Referring to Professor Bell, Shapiro explained, “This is a close associate of [controversial Obama Rev.] Jeremiah Wright, a man who was quoted by Jeremiah Wright regularly. This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we’ve reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it.”

Selling black Americans to aliens to relieve the national debt?? What the heck is that all about?  Once you see the details and how WND/Breitbart is manipulating them, you'll see how empty this story is.

Jack Kelly Sunday

This week's Jack Kelly column is on TARP, a recent report on it by it's overseer Neil Barofsky, and what that report says about TARP-fraud.

Recently whenever a conservative mentions "TARP", it's done with derision as with this blurb from Pat Toomey's campaign website:

In a press release on Saturday, Rep. Joe Sestak accused U.S. Senate candidate Pat Toomey of supporting President Bush’s fiscally irresponsible policies, but it was Joe Sestak (RC #681) and Arlen Specter (RC #213) who supported President Bush’s largest spending package—the $700 billion TARP boondoggle—not Pat Toomey. [emphasis added.]

How odd, in light of that, to see Jack Kelly, conservative columnist at the P-G write:

TARP consists of 13 programs, for which $474.8 billion has been obligated. TARP recipients have paid back much of it, and $178.4 billion in TARP funds remain outstanding.

On Oct. 26, the second anniversary of TARP, Mr. Barofsky issued a report on the program to Congress. It concludes that, while TARP prevented financial and economic collapse, it has made possible the payment of record bonuses to Wall Street bankers, failed to increase lending to small businesses and fallen short in reducing unemployment or preserving home ownership. [emphasis added.]

I wish I could have read something like this a month or so ago. Then we could asked Pat Toomey about the "boondoggle" that "prevented financial and economic collapse."

Now look closer at the report's criticism. It's about the Wall Street bonuses and banks' failures to increase small business lending. Note that Jack doesn't refudiate any of those charges.

Nor are the charges of TARP fraud new. Witness this from April of 2009:

The man charged with monitoring the $700 billion financial rescue has launched more than a dozen investigations into possible misuse of the money, according to a report sent to Congress today.

In findings that are not likely to soothe agitated taxpayers who are wondering what return they are getting from the bailouts, Neil Barofsky -- Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP -- said billions of taxpayer dollars are vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse.

Barofsky -- who detailed the bailout fund perils in a 250-page tome [pdf] -- said that the criminal probes are looking into possible public corruption, stock, tax, and corporate fraud, insider trading and mortgage fraud. There would be no details on the targets, according to the report, "until public action is taken."

Inadequate oversight and insufficient information about what companies are doing with the money leaves the program open to fraud, including "conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants and vulnerabilities to money laundering," Barofsky told lawmakers.

Difficult to pin that one on the Obama administration as April of 2009 was only about a month or so after the Inauguration.

But Jack's ending is the real funny:

Telling us what's happening and why is the job journalists are supposed to do. If journalists were doing their jobs, we should know at least as much about TARP as we do about Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's teenage dabbling in witchcraft. That we don't is contemporary journalism's enduring shame.

He's complaining about bad journalism? This is the Jack Kelly who's column on Van Jones was yanked because it was so riddled with factual errors. This isthe Jack Kelly who claimed, with no evidence mind you, that ex-Weather Underground radical William Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book "Dreams of My Father."

Watching Jack Kelly complain about bad journalism is a hoot.

Jack Kelly Sunday

Well it's about time. Almost exactly a month after his favored party and his favored candidate for President lost, and lost badly, in what he called an electoral "landslide," and six weeks after both her disastrous debate with Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden and her equally disastrous interview with Katie Couric, Jack Kelly finally speaks out about Sarah Palin.

Guess what? In this week's column, he endorses her for President in 2012.

No, I'm not kidding.

In the course of the column, he blames her bad luck and her bad press on the media. He begins:

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this had never been done before.

According to the Washington Post, this is the ad:



But if you look at it, it's not completely about Governor Palin, is it? Strikes me it's more about McCain's bad judgment in choosing Palin than it is about Palin herself.

But again, look at Jack's text. WHAT had never been done before, Jack? A campaign ad critical of Sarah Palin or a campaign ad critical of a Vice-Presidential candidate? Or a campaign ad critical of a Republican candidate for Vice-President? It's not clear. And as it's from an experienced columnist at a major American Newspaper, shouldn't it be?

In either case, what difference does that make?

Next up, he blames the big bad media for her bad press:

Within days of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's selection by John McCain to be his running mate, there was speculation in the news media that maternal neglect was the cause of baby Trig's Down Syndrome; that Trig was really daughter Bristol's baby; that Sarah was a fundamentalist who believes dinosaurs and humans coexisted; that she once belonged to a secessionist party; that as mayor of Wasilla, she tried to have popular books banned from the town library.

None of this was true, but this was how the news media introduced Ms. Palin to people in the lower 48. No vice presidential candidate has ever been subjected to such a torrent of abuse.

It's difficult to argue against such statements. WHO IN THE MEDIA said that "maternal neglect was the cause of baby Trig's Down Syndrome"? Jack doesn't say. WHO IN THE MEDIA said that Trig was actually Bristol's baby? Again, Jack doesn't say. I know more than a few bloggers said it, but is Jack now lumping us all in with the Main Stream Media?

Jack's more than capable of quoting someone verbatim. He even does it in this very column. But by leaving it vague, he's left it to the readers to fill in the blanks with some imaginary "reporting" of such. ("I didn't read anything like this, but Jack Kelly says so, so it must be true. I must've just missed it.")

News to Jack: Sarah Palin is a fundamentalist. The church she attends was described in Newsweek this way:

Except for the national spotlight, Wasilla Bible Church resembles thousands of conservative evangelical churches across the country. Its statement of faith says its members believe that the Bible is the "inspired, inerrant word of God."

It's that last part: that the Bible is the "inerrant word of God" that makes her a fundamentalist. It was her husband who belonged to that seccessionist party - she just addressed its convention this year. Jack didn't tell you that, did he?

And Jack's spinning things just a tad in discussing the book banning. Jack writes:

...that as mayor of Wasilla, she tried to have popular books banned from the town library.

Not exactly true. While no books were ever banned, Palin did inquire (three times, as it turned out) whether the local librarian would be OK with "censuring books if asked to do so." When the librarian said "no" that librarian was duly fired for disloyalty. After what must've been a fierce public outcry the librarian was reinstated the next day.

Something else Jack didn't tell you.

And I gotta say that I found this paragraph unintentionally funny:

A star athlete and beauty contest winner who hunts moose and worked as a commercial fisherman, Sarah Palin has a remarkable personal and political story. But it's a story the news media largely ignored in favor of spreading malicious gossip.

I mean , given Jack's own history of spreading the gossip, it's high hilarity for Jack to suddenly see the light of journalistic fairness. For instance, did you know that William Ayers could easily have written Barack Obama's book "Dreams From My Father"? (Ayers's later autobiography and Obama's book share some nautical metaphors, so IT MUST BE TRUE.) Or that William Ayers and Barack Obama may have met at Columbia a full decade before either has admitted? (Obama was at Columbia in the early 80s and Ayers was at Columbia in the early 80s so IT MUST BE TRUE.) Both those bits of information came from the well-worn typewriter of Jack Kelly.

Neither has a shred of evidence to support it (beyond the rantings of the far right fringe). Can someone say to my friend Jack that he's also "spreading malicious gossip"

Please?

Jack Kelly Sunday

One last chance.

Jack has one last chance to smear Senator Obama before the election and in this week's column he does his darnedest to cover at least most of the bases. To his credit he doesn't dirty himself (or the P-G) with the laughable "Ayers wrote Obama's book" meme or the embarassing "Obama's birth certificate is a fraud" meme.

No. He just goes for the jugular with this:

Less is known about Barack Obama than about any major party candidate for president in modern history. His public resume is thin -- eight years in the Illinois Senate, four in the U.S. Senate, with two of them spent running for president.

And no candidate for president has had more problematic associations. Barack Obama's first major financial backer was Antoin "Tony" Rezko, currently awaiting sentencing on corruption charges. For nearly 20 years Mr. Obama attended services where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached hatred of the United States, and of white people. The radical group ACORN has been committing voter registration fraud on a massive scale. Mr. Obama taught classes for ACORN organizers, and represented the group in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois. The most significant managerial responsibility Barack Obama has ever had was as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a project conceived of by unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers.

These associations have been less explored by the mainstream news media than has Joe the Plumber's divorce and a tax lien against him.

All presented as statements of fact. And that's all they have left: Rezko, Wright, ACORN, and Ayers.

Guilt by association, the GOP way.

For the record, the corruption charges facing Rezko had nothing to do with Obama. Wright is long gone from the campaign and of him Obama has already said:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Further, Obama was joined by the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE in that lawsuit against the State of Illinois forcing that state to comply with already existing federal laws intended to enhance access to the polls. They won.

And the "training" Jack trumpets? Two hours:

Lewis Goldberg, a spokesman for Acorn, said Mr. Obama conducted two leadership training sessions of roughly an hour each for Acorn’s Chicago affiliate over a three-year period in the late 1990s. He was not paid for that work, Mr. Goldberg said.

Two whole hours over three whole years! Ohmigod-ohmigod-ohmigod!

And that Chicago Annenberg Challenge? Left out of Jack's prose is the fact that the money for the Challenge was put up by the radical Walter Annenberg - founder of such radical publications as TV Guide and Seventeen magazine. Oh, and he was Richard Nixon's Ambassador to the UK. It was the radical Annenberg who introduced Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher.

Ayers and TWO OTHERS; Anne Hallett and Warren Chapman came up with a draft of a grant proposal. That draft was then revised the draft into a formal proposal. The story is here.

Of course if you just read Jack the plan was COMPLETELY conceived of by Ayers. The reality, as always with Jack Kelly's columns, is much different.

One last chance to smear, Jack. How do you think you did?