After reading Mark Steyn’s outstanding piece on Obama’s “novel” (called Dreams from My Father), I started creating a mental list of all of Obama’s actions that would have been career-killing for a conservative yet are merely fascinating parts of his biography for the Left and its mainstream-media partners/enablers. Here’s what I have so far:
1. Obama had a working relationship with an admitted domestic terrorist. Imagine for a moment if a Republican presidential candidate served on charitable boards with Eric Rudolph and attended a political fundraiser at Rudolph’s home. That candidate would be drummed out of the race (and rightly so). Yet Obama’s known affiliations with Bill Ayers — whose terrorist organization, Weather Underground, has a far higher body count and record of devastation than Rudolph — have been concealed, rationalized, and justified.
2. Obama joined a radical third party. It was a scandal in 2008 when a vice-presidential nominee’s spouse may have joined a third party in Alaska, but Stanley Kurtz’s excellent reporting that the president of the United States belonged to the radically socialist New Party has hardly generated a yawn from the media.
#more#3. Obama was a profligate drug user. Does anyone remember the fever swamp speculation that a younger and wilder George W. Bush used cocaine? Or how about the breathless, above-the-fold reporting of his long-ago DUI (on the eve of the election, no less)? Well, our president isn’t just an admitted past cocaine user (assuming one can believe anything in his novel/memoir) but he also apparently enjoyed an era of Cheech and Chong–level marijuana use as a proud member of the Choom Gang.
4. Obama is a fabulist on the order of James Frey and Greg Mortenson. I won’t repeat the key elements of Mr. Steyn’s masterpiece, but I will note that in his fabrications Obama has also joined the likes of . . . his own vice president (he of the fake coal-mining ancestry).
The list could go on (and please, commenters, make your own contributions).
After a primary campaign season where the media picked over the lives of Republicans to such an extent that we spent days wondering about offensive words written on a rock, agonized over old sexual-harassment allegations, and debated the details of candidates’ divorces, it’s almost amusing to see the media actively work to maintain public ignorance of multiple aspects of Barack Obama’s biography. After all, why discuss the president’s trouble telling the truth about his life when Ann Romney has a horse in the Olympics?
When running for (or holding) the world’s most powerful political office, the details of a candidate’s life should be scrutinized. We should know and consider past actions and relationships to help us determine the candidate’s present beliefs and character. But to the Left, past drug use is a problem only if you’re a hypocrite; amongst the leftist elite past radicalism is often presumed (and recalled wistfully); even terrorism can be excused if the terrorists have the right ideology.