Dontvote4obama’s Weblog

When you go to the voting booth, the choice is easy.

Candidate A= graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he nearly lost his life in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, badly injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973, experiencing episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer; his war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations.

He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981, moved to Arizona, and entered politics. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, he served two terms, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, winning re-election easily in 1992, 1998, and 2004. While generally adhering to conservative principles, He at times has had a media reputation as a “maverick” for having disagreed with his party. After being investigated and largely exonerated in a political influence scandal of the 1980s as a member of the “Keating Five,” he made campaign finance reform one of his signature concerns, which eventually led to the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. He is also known for his work towards restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the 1990s, and for his belief that the war in Iraq should be fought to a successful conclusion. He has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, has opposed spending that he considered to be pork barrel, and played a key role in alleviating a crisis over judicial nominations.

Candidate B= says he was born in 1961 in Hawaii, to a white mother from Kansas and a black Muslim father from Kenya who met as students at the University of Hawaii. His place of birth is a matter in dispute, however. As Frank Gaffney reported in The Washington Times on October 14, 2008. When he was six, his mother married an Indonesian oil manager, a “non-practicing Muslim,” and the family moved to Jakarta, where his half-sister was born. The family would reside there for four years. His good friend, the attorney and novelist Scott Turow, wrote that “Candidate B” as a child spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school.” School records show that when he attended Catholic school, he was enrolled as a Muslim.

In the Seventies, his family became friendly with Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a black writer and fellow Hawaiian resident. Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record (a Communist newspaper) and was a known member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He soon became the young future candidates mentor and advisor. Just prior to heading off to Occidental College (in California) in 1979, he spent some time with “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.” he writes that “Frank” told him that college was merely “an advanced degree in compromise,” and cautioned the young future candidate not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

This candidate also reveals that during his student years at Columbia he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.” These were Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC) events held at Cooper Union, a privately funded college for the advancement of science and art. SSC events featured the elite of socialist academia as well as union activists, political revolutionaries, reformers, and opponents of “corporate greed.” According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.”

Candidate B was trained by the Saul Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago. (The Developing Communities Project itself was an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.) Alinsky was known for helping to establish the aggressive political tactics that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.

In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse — to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, he worked with ACORN, a creation of the Alinsky network. ACORN was a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s had invaded welfare offices across the U.S. — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them.

He also worked for Project Vote, the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. Project Vote’s professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter-registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights — focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” He was the attorney for ACORN’s lead election-law cases, and he worked as a trainer at ACORN’s annual conferences, where he taught members of the organization the art of radical community organizing.

In 1988 he applied for admission to Harvard Law School. At the time, a Muslim attorney and black nationalist named Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour asked civil rights activist Percy Sutton to send a letter of recommendation to his (Sutton’s) friends at Harvard on his behalf.

Al-Mansour formerly had been a close personal adviser to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, having helped them establish the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. He thereafter became an advisor to a number of Saudi billionaires known for funding the spread of Wahhabi extremism in America. Al-Mansour also would show himself to be a passionate hater of the United States, Israel, and white people generally.

In 1993 he took a job as a litigator of voting rights and employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner), where he remains a Counsel today. In 1993 he also became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, another position he still holds.

In 1994 he worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that challenged the racial makeup of Chicago’s voting districts. His team sought to raise the number of black super-majority districts from 19 to 24. According to the judge in the case, Richard Posner, Candidate A and his fellow litigators held that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward — is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

In a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Candidate A and his fellow Davis Miner attorneys charged that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants, and they won the case.  Also in 1995, he sued, on behalf of ACORN, for the implementation of the Motor Voter law in Illinois. Jim Edgar, the state’s Republican Governor, opposed the law because he believed that allowing voters to register using only a postcard would breed widespread fraud.  ACORN would later invite him to help train its staff. Moreover, he eventually would sit on the Board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave a number of sizable grants to ACORN — including $45,000 in 2000, $75,000 in 2001, and $70,000 in 2002.

In 1995 Candidate A — along with such notables as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright — helped organize the Washington, DC-based Million Man March which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Said Candidate A in the immediate aftermath of the March:

“What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

 In the mid-1990s, he developed a friendship with fellow Chicagoans Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, university professors who hosted meetings at their home to introduce him to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Ayers (who contributed money to his 1996 campaign) and Dohrn had been leaders of the 1960s domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The pair had participated personally in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. To this day, both have remained unrepentant about their former terrorist activities and their hatred of the United States.

In 1995 he sought the endorsement of the so-called New Party for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. By 1996, he had become a member of the New Party.

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson‘s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials — most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.

Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and the militant organization ACORN. The party’s Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.

So the choice is simple this November, Vote Candidate A or Candidate B