Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood

Peter Gadiel

Sen. Barack Obama, who started his political career in the living room of his friend, Marxist bomber and murderer Bill Ayers, claims that Ayers is just a “guy in my neighborhood,” not someone he really knows.

Well, Obama’s way of phrasing this lie, this attempt to put distance between himself and his murderous political ally brings to mind another, very different, neighborhood, the one inhabited by Mr. Rogers. “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which is to say, his circle of friends, includes Lady Elaine, King Friday, Mr. McFeely, and other interesting characters.  Some of them come to visit Mr. Rogers in his living room but Mr. Rogers has the decency not to claim, “Hey, I don’t know these people. They just live in my neighborhood.” But of course, Mr. Rogers’ neighbors never bombed buildings or murdered anyone in the process, either in real life or in the Land of Make Believe, so Mr. Rogers never had any reason to lie about them. After all, if Lady Elaine had planted bombs and murdered people, American mothers might think twice about letting the kiddies tune in on that particular neighborhood.

Amazingly, there are many voters who, though otherwise decent people, are thinking of installing as President of the United States the sort of person they’d never let their kids watch on television.

Like Mr. Rogers’ circle of friends, Mr.Obama’s also has some interesting characters, but they are the sort that normal, decent people don’t want to have anything to do with. They are such vicious haters, crazies and criminals that they should make any sane person question the character, judgment and beliefs of this guy running for president who has so closely associated with them over the span of decades.

We have a pretty good idea of who’s in Mr. Obama’s circle of friends. Besides the murdering, self-described Marxist, William Ayers (who doesn’t regret planting bombs and killing people, just wishes he’d done more), there’s his equally murderous wife, the lovely Bernadine Dohrn (her philosophy on the value of other people’s lives is summed up in her comment on the Manson gang’s murders: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!” Appropriately she’s a confessed admirer of Fidel Castro, another guy to whom human life has little value).

Another longtime Obama associate is Louis Farrakhan. (“White people are potential humans…they haven’t evolved yet.” Members of Hamas are “freedom fighters.”) Mr. Farrakhan, hater of whites, Jews in particular, has recently proclaimed Mr. O to be the “Messiah.” This merely confirms what Obama himself claimed not long ago in Berlin (the perfect place for it) when he declared to a cheering crowd of Deutches Volk: “We are the people we’ve been waiting for.” (If this is so, where have we been all of our lives?) In Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, mail is delivered by Mr. McFeely. In Obama’s, The Message is delivered by Minister Farrakhan.

Of course in Obama’s circle, there’s too much hate for only one minister to be able to deliver that message so his neighborhood also includes Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. Wright was Obama’s minister for two decades, and performed the wedding for Barack and his wife., but public exposure of those hate-filled sermons caused Obama to claim he never figured out what kind of guy this was in all those years, and besides “I hardly knew him.”

No Chicago Democrat’s neighborhood is complete without its version of Al Capone, and Obama financier Tony Rezko fills that role. He was among the first handful of campaign donors whose contributions launched Mr. Obama’s political career in 1995. Later, as a member of Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee he raised $14 million for him. While Rezko was under federal investigation for attempted extortion, money laundering and other such neighborly deeds, Mr. Obama was happy to buy some land from him way below market value. Then he returned the favor by steering millions in taxpayer funds to neighbor Rezko’s low income housing project, which within a few years of opening had to be boarded up.

Of Mr. Rezko, Mr. Obama says: I hardly knew him.

Then there’s the potential First Lady, Michelle Obama. Here’s a woman who, as she admits, was never proud of the United States until her husband was nominated by the Democrat Party for president. Evidently, Lady Michelle’s sole criterion for judging the worth of a nation of 300 million with a history as an independent nation of over two centuries is whether her husband is a major party candidate for president. It’s possible there’s a problem with this woman’s ego.

In addition to overvaluing her family’s worth, she is utterly ignorant of history. She has said that she couldn’t possibly be proud of the United States because among the founders were men who held slaves. Memo to Lady Michelle: if you were even a little educated about the history of your own race, you’d find that black Africans had a long history of enslaving each other long, long before the arrival of white people. Does this make you ashamed of your people’s history also?

Mr. Obama is too important a man to have a neighborhood that is geographically limited. His neighborhood includes Kenya, where some are saying Mr. Obama may have been born. There he campaigned for another friend, presidential candidate, Raila Odinga. Mr. Odinga, a “socialist,” was educated in Communist East Germany, named his son Fidel Castro Odinga, and his father was leader of the Kenyan Communist Party. Obama appeared at numerous rallies with Odinga, rallying support from the troops. After losing the presidential election, Odinga, Obama’s guy for president stirred up mass rioting. Among the many violent incidents resulting from this Obama pal’s inflammatory rhetoric: his Muslim allies burned women and children alive who were hiding in a church.

When the subject of Kenya is brought up, Mr. Obama comes real close to saying: “Kenya? Never heard of the place. I like Hawaii.”

Mr. Obama’s neighbors also include the members of ACORN, to which he has steered taxpayer funds and which in return has been conducting “voter registration drives” on his behalf of such awesome corruption that it is now the subject of criminal investigation in 13 states. Here’s another bunch of neighbors, engaged in a criminal enterprise on his behalf, who Mr. Obama has decided he’d better disavow.

The criminals at ACORN aren’t the only lawbreakers that Mr. Obama is happy to include in his neighborhood. Don’t forget illegal aliens. Mr. O. is one of the Senate’s biggest promoters of providing benefits to illegals. Last year, when then-New York Gov. Spitzer decided to give illegals and the unknown terrorists and violent felons among them to get drivers licenses, the people of that State rebelled. Hardly any politicians were willing to support a move that would provide the same tools to the future terrorists that had been so essential to Mohammed Atta et al. committing mass murder on 9/11.

Mr. Obama was one of the few to endorse licensing illegal aliens and terrorists. Not really a surprise. Since Mr. Obama includes in his neighborhood native born terrorists like Ayers and Dohrn, crooks like Rezko and ACORN, why not put out the welcome mat for the next Mohammed Atta?

So, here’s the thing about Mr. Obama’s neighborhood: a person is known by the company he keeps, and Mr. Obama has been keeping unfortunate company. He made the choice to live in a neighborhood, a circle of friends, shared by haters, killers, terrorists, communists, liars, and crooks. When the nature of his pals is revealed, he claims he “didn’t know.”

Mr. Rogers always ends his show asking “Please, won’t you be my neighbor?” When Mr. Obama asks that question, a sane person, a person who truly cares about the welfare of the people of the United States, can only answer: “No thanks.”

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Peter Gadiel is the President of 9/11 Families For a Secure America.