Under Scrutiny: Obama's Blasts from the Past

Sound bites from long distant pasts can come back to bite you and those you associate with. Bernadine Dohrn's statement on the Charles Manson murders of eight month pregnant Sharon Tate and four other people was and still is one that speaks of a ruthless discard for the value of human lives: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"

This would all seem petty rehashing from a long past period of youthful excesses except for the fact that Presidential candidate Barak Obama was nurtured into the community activism that later led to more ambitious goals by the same group of people of which the above mentioned Bernadine Dohrn is part of.

Oddly enough, while her husband and co-Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers has had some air play in the main stream media, this much more sinister and as sound bites go, much more effective one has not been picked up, not even by the so called pundits and their constant emission of drivel that the Fox Channel Network poisons the air waves with.

Charles Manson is a sinister public figure that resurfaces once in a while in his prison oranges only to be remitted to the oblivion of San Quentin where most likely he will spend the rest of his remaining years. His association with the left of the Sixties never made any sense and if anything, his predatorial, racist and misogynist cult like features were most probably a product of a succession of foster homes, the juvenile court system and eventually the California prison system. That Ms. Dohrn would choose to aggrandize what was a heinous crime shows either a penchant for efforts at self promotion, or as mentioned above a serious disregard for human life. That she has been a child and human rights advocate for the last decade or so indicates a turn about that must have required a great deal of self criticism and re alignment of ideologies.

Barak Obama, has claimed that he knows both Bill Ayers and his wife Ms. Dohrn, has been to their house, and served with them on the board of the Woods Fund, a community organization that works on projects aimed at less advantaged population of the South Side of Chicago. And yet not a peep! Not a sound bite, not a comment on the mainstream media on these oh so controversial associations. Oh! Anne Coulter has brought them up and they do circulate in the blogosphere. But where are the serious "pundits", the vultures of the of the thoughtless comment, the off camera remark, the out of context sentence, ever ready to eat , digest and regurgitate the original as the fecal outcome of their overblown egos. What do they wait for? Why the code of silence? Is it that the time has not come up yet? Will the "dirt" surface after the now probable nomination? And will the mainstream American public, already cast as a bunch of gun toting church going fearful and bitter group of people by Obama, in a less than fortunate moment, back a man with associations as radical as these?

Perhaps it is "the economy, stupid", that people are mostly worried about. Perhaps the war in Iraq has become too much of a burden leaving Americans with decaying infrastructures while they claim to rebuild a country that didn't ask to be dismantled in the first place. Perhaps Obama's eloquence and brilliancy will over shadow whatever dirt is thrown his way. Perhaps he is akin to Reagan, the Teflon Man, to which nothing sticks. Whatever it is, I hope that these verbal Weapons of Personal Destruction aren't being saved up to be hurled at the right moment, thus sending the Democratic expectations of putting a president in the White House in January down the "tubes".