If Obama's Past Isn't A Concern, Why Cover It Up?

Posted 03/14/2012 06:13 PM ET

Public Trust: The Beltway elite mock critics who say the president's hiding his radical past from voters. They say there's nothing there, move along. But if there's nothing to hide, why is so much hidden?

And if the White House isn't worried about the public seeing another side of President Obama, why is it trying to reinforce the image of him as a post-racial, pro-American moderate with a slick new Hollywood-produced 17-minute documentary?

The answer, of course, is that it is very much concerned.

The Obama campaign knows its carefully manicured narrative is wearing thin against the drip-drip-drip of revelations about his extremism. And it can't risk the incumbent being reintroduced to voters this election as an untrustworthy imposter who's hiding things about himself and his agenda.

Indeed, these are things that must be hidden from the average voter. They are unpatriotic and unelectable things. Things that would concern any red-blooded American, if not the parlor Bolsheviks inside the Beltway media and the Ivory Tower.

The videotape of Obama praising and hugging his America-bashing, Constitution-trashing law professor Derrick Bell isn't the only evidence that's been hidden from the public. A 1998 video of Obama praising the late Marxist agitator Saul "The Red" Alinsky alongside a panel of hard-core Chicago communists also exists. Yet it, too, has been withheld.

So has a 2003 video of Obama speaking at a Chicago dinner held in honor of former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi. Anger at Israel and U.S. foreign policy were expressed during the private banquet.

Why have Obama's remarks and actions during the controversial event been suppressed? Perhaps it's because the radical Khalidi — a close friend and neighbor of Obama, who held a 2000 political fundraiser in his home for him — has strongly defended the use of violence by Palestinians against Israel, while expressing clearly anti-American views.

If there's nothing to hide, why keep these tapes under wraps? Why not release them?

Obama's supporters pretend there's nothing all that radioactive about Khalidi or Alinsky, who authored the Left's bible, "Rules for Radicals."

But if Alinsky is not a problem, why did Obama disguise the name of his radical Alinsky trainer Jerry Kellman in his memoir? And why did he also try to shield from readers the identity of his Alinsky mentor John McKnight, who wrote him a letter of recommendation to Harvard?

If his Alinskyite indoctrination is of no concern, why did Obama leave out his weeks-long training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in Los Angeles? This station of the cross for Alinsky acolytes is strangely missing from all 500 pages of his tediously detailed memoir.

For that matter, the late Alinsky is not cited by name in either of the president's autobiographies, even though leftist activists confess this father of community organizing had a powerful influence on Obama.

Moreover, if communist Frank Marshall Davis wasn't a controversial factor in Obama's life, why did Obama also mask his identity in his first memoir? If listening, spellbound, at the feet of a known subversive isn't a red flag, why keep his real profile a secret?

Obama also couldn't find room in "Dreams From My Father" to mention the most striking thing about his father's politics. Obama Sr. was a pro-Soviet socialist, who as a government economist wrote a communist tract for Kenya in 1965.

If this published paper wasn't a big deal, as Obama apologists have suggested, why is it conveniently missing from the 143-page section Obama devoted to boast about his father's career in Kenya?

Likewise, if the papers Obama Jr. himself wrote at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School are not just as radical and offensive to average Americans, why not release them, along with the transcripts (or at least the titles) of the courses he took at these schools? Why the massive gap in disclosure concerning his academic years?

Harvard professor Bell had a huge influence on Obama, who in turn taught his own law students the radical theories he learned from Bell. Yet he never mentioned Bell or the Harvard strike he led on his beloved professor's behalf in either autobiography. If he wasn't trying to fool people, why leave this seminal event out?

Even more radical — and influential — than Bell was Harvard law professor Robert Unger, who taught Obama a couple of courses, including one called "Reinventing Democracy." Like Bell, Unger called U.S. jurisprudence a sham system designed to protect the rich at the expense of the poor. But Unger also taught Obama how to dismantle it. He argued for seizing all private capital and redistributing it.

Obama kept up communications with Unger long after he graduated, but those contacts stopped in 2008. "I am a leftist, and by conviction as well as by temperament, a revolutionary," Unger explains. "Any association of mine with Barack Obama in the course of the campaign could do only harm."

There you have it.

If Obama thought he could disclose all these radical associations to the American people and still get re-elected, he probably would, proud man that he is. But he wisely, if cynically, stays mum.

Some argue that linking him to this vast underground network of radicals is "guilt by association." Actually, it's guilt by participation.

Obama at one point was an employee of the radical shakedown group Acorn, and later trained its goons in Alinsky agitation tactics. He also worked with Pentagon-bombing Marxist Bill Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, where the two comrades doled out cash to other radical groups.

In other words, Obama didn't just rub elbows with radicals, he operated as a one. It's now plain he and his fellow travelers are intentionally suppressing information that could provide the voting public a clearer link between the incumbent and radicalism.

Obama's new campaign infomercial, ironically titled "The Road We've Traveled," is just another attempt to suspend disbelief before the election.

SOURCE: IBD