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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 28, 2008 / 21 Adar II 5768

Obama's past, right at him

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The dilemma of the Democrats is not whether the bloom is coming off the rose, but whether events will wilt it. The past that will not die commands a lot of wilting power.


Demands that Hillary die at once have gone unheeded. The size of crowds is often misleading, but hers are growing larger and more spirited. Some Democrats who only a few days ago were lining up to kick the corpse are taking due note.


"I think the race should continue," says Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico who was enthusiastically grooving on the Clinton death rattle. "She has every right to stay in the race," he says now. "She's run a very good campaign." Bill Clinton, the lively ghost in the background, reminds everyone that Hillary trails in the popular vote by less than a percentage point and by only 130 delegates, a margin that could be easily erased by the superdelegates when they get to the August convention and Barack Obama, bruised and bloody, is limping into Denver on a lame horse.


The bruises won't be so much of Hillary's making as by the resurrection of haints, skeletons and other wraiths of the night. The Philadelphia speech was meant to put his past to bed. But it didn't. That's why he takes every suggestion that he isn't as electable as Hillary — or even electable at all — as racism. But "electability" is what every political campaign is all about, measuring black, white, male, female, conservative and liberal alike against an unforgiving standard. Mr. Dooley's famous maxim that "politics ain't beanbag" gives some of our modern Democrats the vapors, and Harry Truman's rebuke that "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" only showed him to be brutish and insensitive.


But Sen. Obama's preacher trouble will not go away, and there may be more where that came from. The racist rants of another Chicago preacher with whom the senator has political ties, tenuous so far as we know now, is bubbling on YouTube.com, where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to invoke the damnation of God on America. This second preacher is the Rev. James Meeks, an Illinois state senator and key player in the Rev. Jesse Jackson's political organization, which strongly backs Mr. Obama. Mr. Meeks inveighs against white mayors as "slave masters" and scorns blacks who disagree with him as "house [servants]." The more we learn about who Sen. Obama hangs out with in Chicago, the less authentic his mantra of "brotherhood" and "unity" sounds. We could get the wrong idea about him.


"As the high-water mark for Barack Obama recedes," says Charles Lipson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, "his campaign must now confront several dangerous stumps that were once hidden below the surface [of the water]." Writing on RealClear Politics.com, he identifies one "stump" from the radical-left past that Mr. Obama has diligently hidden. He served on the board of the Woods Fund, a small radical foundation, with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn late of the Weather Underground, the radical cell that killed cops and tried to plant a bomb in the U.S. Capitol. They're married to each other now and after a decade on the run turned themselves in and served prison time. They're unrepentant. In an interview with the New York Times, Prof. Ayers boasted that he had no regrets about setting bombs to kill innocents: "I feel we didn't do enough."


When the senator and the unrepentant bomber served together on the Woods Fund board, the Fund awarded $6,000 to Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church "in recognition of Barack Obama's contributions of Woods Fund as a director." Later the Obama-Ayers board awarded a generous grant to the Arab-American Action Network. It's entirely possible that Barack Obama missed the board meetings when such awards were made. He says he missed Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermons, too. The man has a gift for avoiding the wrong place at the right time.

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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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