Uh, Senator, you’re actually just drawing attention to the issue:
Barack Obama has launched an all-out effort to block a Republican billionaire’s efforts to tie him to domestic and foreign terrorists in a wave of negative television ads.
Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.
Obama has also launched his own response ad, directly addressing Simmons’ attempt to link him to domestic terror.
The project is “a knowing and willful attempt to violate the strictures of federal election law,” Obama general counsel Bob Bauer wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Keeney last week in a letter provided to Politico. Bauer argued that by advocating Obama’s defeat, the ad should be subject to the contribution limits of federal campaign law, not the anything-goes regime of issue advocacy.
Bauer’s letter called on the Justice Department to open “an investigation of the American Issues Project; its officers and directors; and its anonymous donors, whoever they may be.”
“This is a sad ploy to circumvent the First Amendment by a campaign who has no arguments with the merits of our ad. It’s the classic maneuver: If you can’t win on the merits, file a lawsuit,” said a spokesman for the American Issues Project, Christian Pinkston, who said his group’s non-profit status allowed it to participate in elections as long as it does a majority of policy work, which it plans to do.
A spokeswoman for Keeney, Laura Sweeney, declined to comment on Bauer’s letter.
The Obama campaign plans to punish the stations that air the ad financially, an Obama aide said, organizing his supporters to target the stations that air it and their advertisers.
You can see the ad here – its not terribly effective, but it does open up the can of worms Obama would rather keep closed: His ties to radical leftism. Its seems that Jeremiah Wright is just the tip of a kook left iceberg in Obama’s background.
Now, is Obama a wanna-be terrorist? Of course not – first off, he’s not of that generation. He’s of my generation, and we don’t tend to blow things up. If there were “60’s radicals”, we’re more “70’s stoners”, and didn’t have the oomph to go do much of anything. The downside to all this is that a lot of us also didn’t bestir ourselves to really learn about the past. I, on the other hand, did (there was a small upside to being bad at sports and a complete flop with chicks) – and even a cursory examination of 60’s radicals – like Ayers – convinces the knowing to steer clear of them. What profit is there is talking to a man who is unrepentant about the monumentally stupid idea of trying to change American policy via a terrorist bombing campaign? Obama isn’t a stupid man, so the presumption must be that he simply didn’t know, or at least didn’t know enough to draw the proper conclusions. To Obama, Ayers probably seemed well meaning – just as all too many dimbulb kids these days put on Che t-shirts because he seems romantic, and well meaning. As the kids today are unaware of Che’s brutal murders, so Obama is unaware (or only dimly aware) of just what Ayers and his cohorts were up to.
Why is this a problem? Because a man who hasn’t figured out that Ayers is persona-non-grata in decent society isn’t a man who can properly judge persons and proposals. If a screwball like Ayers can seem reasonable to Obama, then any kook out there can seem reasonable. While Obama has stepped out of the leftwing coocoon far enough to understand that people like Wright and Ayers have to be kept at arms length, he still hasn’t figured out that the whole leftwing project – ie, Obama’s whole worldview – is flawed and prone to such things as racist rants and terrorist bombs. Obama has some smarts, and our prayer should be that he’ll figure it out – but I don’t want him trying to figure it out while, during a tense moment with Iran, he’s got Sensible Advisor locked in battle with Nutty Leftist Advisor, and Obama unable to determine which one has it right.
UPDATE: Obama camp: Prosecute Simmons
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