Aaron Klein - The Manchurian President: Barack Obamas Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.

President Obama characterizing his relationship to unrepentant Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers.

OF ALL PRESIDENT Obamas radical associates from the past, few received more attention or were as shocking as his connection to Pentagon bomber-conspirator and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. However, despite the eventual news media spotlight placed on the Obama-Ayers relationship, most Americans are still unaware of just how extensive are the presidents ties to the man who proudly proclaimed, Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.

The Obama camps success, in the heat of the 2008 presidential primary, in concealing and mischaracterizing this relationship as a casual coincidence in which the Obama and Ayers families happen to know each other because they are neighbors in Chicago, was astonishingly successful in fending off normally inquisitive reporters and political operatives, including the seasoned attack forces of the Clinton camp.

Even those who followed the few news reports that bothered to probe the depths and significance of Obamas ties to Ayers may still be in the dark as to the extent of that relationship. Indeed, we here present new information that links Obama to Ayers much earlier than previously thought and that astoundingly connects the presidents little-scrutinized boyhood years to Ayers radical ideology.

By April, 2008, it was clear that candidate Obama was a serious contender to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. During this period, the Clinton campwho are normally world-class experts at the politics of personal destruction (i.e., ad hominem attacks on their political foes)were struggling to find ways to damage her opponents standing in the primaries and polls.

Less than a month before the primary, on April 16, 2008, to be precise, was to be the first time candidate Obama would be asked a direct question in a public forum about his relationship with Ayers. The setting was an ABC News presidential debate with fellow candidate Senator Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia, prior to the Pennsylvania primary.

Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Obama:

A gentleman named William Ayers. He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. Hes never apologized for that.

And, in fact, on 9/11, he was quoted in the New York Times saying, I dont regret setting bombs. I feel we didnt do enough. An early organizing meeting for your State Senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly.

Can you explain that relationship for the voters and explain to Democrats why it wont be a problem?

Obamas now classic reply was:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, whos a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. Hes not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesnt make much sense.

Stephanopoulos reference to Obama having been friendly with Ayers comes from a February 26, 2008, article on the news and public affairs website Politico. Journalist and blogger Ben Smith reported there about a similar query regarding the Obama-Ayers relationship to Obamas chief political strategist, David Axelrod. But by that time the campaign had apparently already synchronized its message about Obama and Ayers, and Axelrod launched the campaigns guy in his neighborhood bandwagon.

Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school, he said. Theyre certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together.

(Obama resided for many years in the same Chicago Hyde Park neighborhood; what is not even remotely true is that the Ayers-Dohrn children and the Obama children could have attended the same school. In fact, at the time of the Philadelphia debate, the three Ayers-Dohrn children were all in their mid-to-late 20s, while Obamas daughters, Sasha, six, and Malia, nine, attended elementary school.)

The present authors are quite familiar with Obamas relationship with Ayers, as it was Aaron Klein who broke the first story on the subject. On February 24, 2008, Kleins article on WorldNetDaily, Obama worked with terrorist, was the first news article to expose that Obama had been a paid director of Chicago nonprofit Woods Fund, where he worked alongside Ayers.

The Bill Ayers story would eventually become a prominent election issue. And it would soon emerge, as we shall see, that Obama and Ayers worked closely together on a hundred-million-dollar education foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. It also turns out that Obama had a more extensive relationship with Ayers than has previously been disclosed, and that the future president worked with Ayers as early as 1988.

Obamas earliest exposure to Ayers ideology, astonishingly enough, traces back to Obamas childhood and the Hawaiian church at which the future U.S. president attended Sunday school as a boy. While a firestorm ignited during the campaign over Obamas 20-year membership, as an adult, in the church of radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright, almost nothing has been reported about his Sunday school attendance at First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, a radical activist church that may have influenced the future presidents early outlook.

First Unitarian of Honolulu, a member of the Unitarian-Universalist denomination, served as a sanctuary for draft dodgers during the 1960s and 1970s and was strongly linked to the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, during the time Weatherman radical Bill Ayers was a leader in that organization. Ayers Weatherman domestic terrorist group was an offshoot of the SDS.

The SDS had been established in late 1959 as an extremist student activist organization that went on to spearhead the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement. A Discover the Networks profile notes that SDS aspired to overthrow U.S. democratic institutions, remake the American government in a Marxist image, and help our enemies be victorious on the battlefield in Vietnam. Many key SDS members were red-diaper babies, children of parents who were Communist Party members or Communist activists in the 1930s.

After President Lyndon Johnson abolished student draft deferments in 1966, more than 300 new SDS chapters were formed nationwide with the goal of disrupting ROTC classes, staging draft card burnings, and harassing campus recruiters for the CIA and for firms that conducted research tied in some way to national defense. The SDS also notoriously staged college demonstrations in protest of the Vietnam War and occupied buildings at universities such as Columbia.

But it was at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that the SDS would make its play for national power, as SDS protestors fomented a riot with the intention of sinking the nomination of pro-war liberal candidate Hubert Humphrey. Despite the ensuing mayhem, replete with extensive television coverage of Chicago cops violently suppressing SDS-instigated protests, Humphrey won the conventions nomination, though not without inflicting significant damage on the Democratic Party.

The Chicago riots also led to major infighting within SDS about the future direction of the group, causing it to fragment into factions led by various radical personalities, many of whom, as we document in this book, are intimately associated with President Obama and his administration.

One of the SDS splinter groups, the Weatherman, led in part by Ayers, sought the downfall of the U.S. government while proclaiming the launch of resistance and a race war on behalf of the Third World and against America.