Birds on a Wire
By Pat Racimora on October 31, 2008 at 3:30 AM in Bill Ayers, Emil Jones, Father Michael Pfleger, Obama, Tony Rezko
“You are known by your friends” is a sturdy old saw with a lot of wisdom in it. It’s one thing to buddy up, only to quickly find out that this person violates your deeply-held values about right and wrong and quickly exit the relationship. It’s quite another to know exactly who such people are, and still keep them close by until it is no longer to one’s own advantage to hang on to them.
We know about Obama’s long-term relationships with anti-white religious leaders, unrepentant home-grown terrorists, and a sleazy slumlord who was a major backer and fundraiser for Obama who now sits in prison on multiple sustained charges. We hear less about the bird on the far right, Emil Jones. So let me reprise some amazing quotes from an article about Obama’s “toxic mentors” from March of 2008.
For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.
Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-Mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”
Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.
Jones scares me. Conjures up Tony Soprano. And except for Jones, this avian lineup has by now been exposed in the blogs if not sufficiently in the main stream media. (I ran out of wire space or I could have drawn in a few more). So it continues to surprise many of us that Obama’s long-term relationships with some alarming birds doesn’t seem to phase a lot of people. I think Bud White’s recent post here explains why the best. The Republican Bush years have been so disastrous that many will take anything else without a close look—and the charismatic Obama and his handlers took full advantage of these fears. But, what would we actually be getting instead?


















