Obama Lacks a Moral Compass

By: Ronald Kessler

With the election two weeks away, one thing has become clear: Barack Obama is not only the most liberal presidential candidate in recent memory, he lacks a moral compass.

How else does one explain his sitting in the pews of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church as Wright spews forth hateful fabrications about America, whites, and Israel? How else explain his being “friendly” with admitted domestic terrorist William Ayers, who told the New York Times he does not rule out engaging in bombings again?

In a chilling video on YouTube, Larry Grathwohl, a former member of the Weather Underground which Ayers helped found, says the organization planned to take over the U.S. government and give parts of the country to Russia, Cuba, North Vietnam, and China. The plans included “re-educating” Americans as Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries.

In the video, Grathwohl says he asked 25 leaders of the Weather Underground who were discussing the plans, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate, that are die-hard capitalists?”

The reply, says Grathwohl, was that they would “have to be eliminated.” When he pursued the question further, they estimated that “they’d have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people.”

As repugnant as Obama’s relationship with Ayers is, the fact that for two decades Obama attended a church where paranoid hatred of America was preached on a regular basis is more telling. The senator counted as his minister, friend, and advisor a man who says that America created the AIDS virus to kill blacks, puts blacks in prison rather than killing them off, and deserved to be attacked on 9/11 because of its racism.

When the press finally picked up on stories Newsmax was running on Reverend Wright, Obama said he would not have belonged to the church if he had regularly heard Wright’s hate-filled statements. Yet when he announced for the presidency, Obama disinvited Wright from giving an invocation because his sermons can get “kind of rough.” Why did Obama not resign from the church then?

Last December, Wright gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for lifetime achievement. Why did Obama not resign then? Instead, after Newsmax broke the story on Jan. 14, Obama dissembled about the issue, saying the award was for Farrakhan’s work with ex-offenders. Neither the presentation nor the article about it in the church magazine mentioned anything about ex-offenders.

The truth is that Obama joined the church and adopted Wright as his friend and mentor because he feels an affinity for Wright’s radical views. Why else would he expose his kids to Wright’s “God d— America” tirades? Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America, highlights the fact that she has the same blame-America-first mentality Wright promotes.

As with his minister, Obama repudiated Ayers only when press disclosures became too embarrassing.

As Max Noel, a former FBI agent who worked the Weather Underground case, tells me, “They [the Weather Underground] were a violent, violent, anti-government, domestic terrorist organization. Obama has not only associated with those people, he continued associating with racist people like his minister Jeremiah Wright over a period of 20 years. I don’t think that’s by happenstance. It’s just amazing to me. The American people are being led by the nose by people who say this isn’t important.”

In fact, Oliver “Buck” Revell, a former associate deputy director of the FBI who at one time oversaw the applicant and hiring process at the bureau, tells me the FBI would not hire such an individual as an agent.

“One of the principal purposes of the background investigation is to determine who an applicant associated with and the degree of association with any questionable associates,” Revell says. “Obama would certainly not have been hired on my watch.”

The Obama campaign has refused to say when Obama became aware of Ayers’ terrorist background. When Obama began going to Columbia University in 1981, both Ayers and his future wife Bernardine Dohrn, an FBI most wanted fugitive, were frequently in the news. Ayers’ violent past was well known in Chicago, where he was quoted regularly and described as a former radical and former fugitive.

Ayers orchestrated an event at his home that launched Obama’s political career. Obama continued to serve on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago with Ayers for more than a year after Ayers expressed regret in the New York Times for not bombing more people.

According to Grathwohl, Ayers and Dohrn “probably had the most authority” within the Weather Underground.

Last April, Obama defended his relationship with Ayers. Obama said in a Democratic debate that he is also friendly with Rep. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), whom he described as favoring the death penalty for those who carry out abortions.

“Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements?” Obama asked. “Because certainly I don’t agree with those, either.”

Radical as Coburn’s position may be, he was proposing legislation to be passed by Congress. That is quite different from Ayers’s admission that he bombed innocent people in violation of criminal law and that he wished he had set off more bombs.

Instead of finding ways to excuse them, Obama should have been denouncing both Wright and Ayers. Instead of voting “present” 130 times in the Illinois Senate, he should have been doing his job and taking a stand.

As Karl Rove has told me, “The public wants a president with convictions and the courage to act on them. They want a leader who is steady and firm, who can withstand strong political headwinds and won’t be blown about by events.”

As crushing as the financial crisis has been, it seems to me unlikely that Americans will send to the White House a man whose views are not only left of center but who doesn’t know right from wrong.


Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
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