Ken Berwitz

Let's start with the basis for that title. 

National Review's Stanley Kurtz has uncovered what he describes - and what sure looks like - indisputable proof that Barack Obama was a member of the far left, ACORN-affiliated New Party.  If that is true, than he lied in 2008 when, while running for the presidency, he claimed never to have been in any but the Democrat Party. 

Here are excerpts from his truly disturbing online article - a longer, more detailed version of which will be in the next issue of National Review:

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office

 

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

The documents reveal that the New Party’s central aim was to move the United States steadily closer to European social democracy, a goal that Mitt Romney has also attributed to Obama. New Party leaders disdained mainstream Democrats, considering them tools of business, and promised instead to create a partnership between elected officials and local community organizations, with the goal of socializing the American economy to an unprecedented degree.

The party’s official “statement of principles,” which candidates seeking endorsement from the Chicago chapter were asked to support, called for a “peaceful revolution” and included redistributive proposals substantially to the left of the Democratic party.

To get a sense of the ideology at play, consider that the meeting at which Obama joined the party opened with the announcement of a forthcoming event featuring the prominent socialist activist Frances Fox Piven. The Chicago New Party sponsored a luncheon with Michael Moore that same year.

I have more to say on the New Party’s ideology and program, Obama’s ties to the party, and the relevance of all this to the president’s campaign for reelection. See the forthcoming issue of National Review.

In the meantime, let us see whether a press that let candidate Obama off the hook in 2008 — and that in 2012 is obsessed with the president’s youthful love letters  — will now refuse to report that President Obama once joined a leftist third party, and that he hid that truth from the American people in order to win the presidency.

How should we feel about this?  Here are my thoughts.

-The fact that Barack Obama belonged to a far left, socialist-oriented party is not a shock to me - not after watching him in action for the past three years. 

-The fact that he lied about it is certainly not a shock to me, for the same reason.

-And the fact that our wonderful "neutral" media did not do the digging necessary to find this out is hardly a shock either:  these are the same media that let Mr. Obama get away with the palpably fraudulent claim that he barely knew william ayers - and that, after spending 18 years in Black liberation theologist jeremiah wright's church he did not know that wright had Black liberation theology views.

So if none of these factors is shocking, what is the problem?   

The problem is that, while experience precludes me from being shocked over Barack Obama's far left affiliation, his lying about it, and media's protecting him at all costs, it does not make these things acceptable to me. 

It makes me angry.  Because, due to Mr. Obama's lies and his Accomplice Media's willingness to look the other way on his behalf, we have endured 3 1/2 years of a misguided, disastrously incompetent President - one the country might never have elected if media had done its job instead of acting as a propaganda arm of Obama & Co.

And it makes me even angrier to think that these same media are, more than likely, either going to barely report Mr. Kurtz's discovery, or ignore it altogether.

How can they call themselves journalists?  How can they even look themselves in the mirror?