The Wright Stuff

Rev Wright: God Damn America

I can't believe McCain won't allow mention of Obama's longtime connection to the Right Racist Reverend Wright. Obama himself admitted it was a legitimate issue during the primaries. Here's an excellent jeremiad on Obama and Wright from Victor Davis Hanson. There is no way that Obama marinated in that for 1000 Sundays without buying into what Wright is peddling.

Meanwhile, Stanley Kurtz reveals more about what groups and activities Obama and Bill "I didn't do enough" Ayers were funding together through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers hired the wet-behind-the-ears Obama for what is still Obama's lone executive experience: handing out sacks of money to radical leftists.

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

[Lots of stuff snipped here. Kurtz continues:]

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn’t warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled “rites of passage” as “rights of passage,” hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children’s reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.

Update: A good comment from Paul at Powerline on the same article:

In what I believe was his only stint running anything (other than the Harvard Law Review), Barack Obama wasted more than $100 million that could have been used to improve the education of disadvantaged students. And he did so in order to advance an extremist, anti-American agenda. The people of Chicago can only wish that Bill Ayers had just been somebody who lived in Obama's neighborhood and that Jeremiah Wright was just an eccentric uncle.