Guilt By Association

Submitted by Roy Weinberg (United States), Mar 17, 2008 at 19:08

Barack Obama doesn't want us to charge him with any sort of guilt according to the company he has kept in his recent past. Fair enough--many politicians and public figures have hung out with some unsavory characters and that didn't automatically make them bad people.

But consider some of Obama's acquaintances--the infamous Tony Rezko, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's chief political pimp who's currently on trial for influence-peddling; William Ayers, the ex-Weatherman-radical-hippie who once advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and of course the iconoclastic fire-breathing Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a close friend of arch-racist Louis Farrakhan who sounds a lot like Wright who sounds a lot like Farrakhan.

With friends such as those, Obama is making a lot of enemies these days and more importantly, he's demonstrating that he doesn't have the ability to make good judgments about some extremely bad people who don't need to be in his rolodex at this point in time. Obama needs to understand that if he can't make good judgments now before the November election, most intelligent people (this excludes the far left who live in the land of Oz-ideology) won't trust his judgment in the Oval Office.

Obama needs to start giving us better answers to crucial issues such as amnesty for illegal immigrants; the shrinking dollar, the huge trade imbalance, soaring taxes and soaring energy costs. So far, his comments have been ambiguous, trite and banal--not the sort of answers one expects from someone with his intelligence and education. More importantly, he needs to give us better answers as to why such people as Rezko, Ayers, Wright, etc., aren't former friends instead of "misguided" friends.

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