The charge of the fake brigade [Mark Steyn]
As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from "Mr Fake Donor" of "23 Fraudulent Lane", but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message saying "Thank you for contributing to the Obama landslide, Mr S Hussein of 47 Spider-Hole Gardens (basement flat), Tikrit!" is no reason to believe any real money is actually leaving real accounts.
The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names "John Galt", "Saddam Hussein", "Osama bin Laden", and "William Ayers", all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it's worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor.
The reader adds:
Last night on Sheppard Smith's 3pm-ET show this issue was brought up briefly and they cited the Obama campaign falsely claiming that this sort of thing happens at the McCain site and that they catch these errors later in the processing. Well, it took three days to process my donations and they all skated through their rigorous screening.
And it doesn't happen at the McCain site. This reader tried donating under "John Galt" and "Saddam Hussein" to the McCain campaign and they rejected it.
This should be Journalism 101. I'm not the guy who made Obama's fundraising a story. The media did that when they ran hundreds of puff pieces marveling at his record-breaking cash haul, and in particular the gazillions of small donors. Isn't the fact that his website has chosen to disable basic fraud protection procedures at the very least a legitimate addendum to those stories?
Oh, sorry, I was waiting for the chirping crickets. But evidently Mr C Cricket is over at Obama Central charging 20 bucks to his MasterChirp.
Ayers-Khalidi Quotes [Stanley Kurtz]
Thanks to Andy for posting below about the Obama/Ayers/Khalidi connection, and to Hugh Hewitt for giving me a chance to discuss it. I'm finding that I simply don't have time to write up all the material I have on Obama's troubling background prior to the election. So in lieu of the article I would write if I had more time, let me include some material from the acknowledgments of books by Ayers and Khalidi.
In the acknowledgments of Ayers' 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent (the book Obama publically endorsed in the Chicago Tribune), he thanks Rashid Khalidi's wife, Mona Khalidi, calling her a "co-parent:"
Thanks to friends and family who provided models and standards and shared struggles of parenting:...Mona Khalidi, sister, friend, and co-parent today....
Thanks to...Mona Khalidi...for careful critical comments.
And in the acknowledgments of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi begins like this:
There are many people without whose support and assistance I could not have written this book or written it the way that it was written. First, chronologically and in other ways, comes Bill Ayers. He persuaded me a little over a year ago that I should write this book, and he put me in touch with my editor, Helene Atwan, who has done all that I imagined a good editor could do and more. Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some of the writing for the project....
Bernardine Dohrn continually encouraged me to keep working on the book when I was traveling and at home....
Obviously, the Khalidi and Ayers-Dohrn families were very close, intellectually, personally, and politically. Both Ayers-Dorhn and the Khalidis gave separate campaign events for Obama. Khalidi did exchange ideas with Obama, and it's hard to believe that Khalidi's political backing of Obama and exchanges with Obama on the Middle East weren't thoroughly discussed with Ayers, whom Khalidi would surely have known had a history with Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and on the juvenile crime battle.
Ayers' 1998 edited book, Teaching for Social Justice, features a contribution by Rashid Khalidi (pp.186-187). Here are some excerpts from Khalidi's piece:
Much of what I do involves teaching for justice, because the very terms I teach about are subversive of so many categories of public knowledge. This is because teaching about the modern Middle East in the United States means confronting a great deal of resistance, notably where the subject of Palestine is concerned....
Beyond generalized prejudices and often not-so-veiled racism against Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners, the main problem comes when I have to confront firmly held and profoundly wrong ideas, particularly one which are widespread in our culture....
Things get harder when such misunderstandings, which at times are honest and innocent, are combined with the "idiot wind" which blows whenever government policy is discussed, and the lemmings in the media and the inside-the-beltway chorus echo whatever those in power are saying. It is nevertheless vitally important to try to talk sense about such things, whether about the Gulf war back in 1991, or about the "peace process" today, which has so far given us a lot of process and very little peace."
For more on Khalidi, see this post by Martin Kramer.
It's also of interest that in the back of Teaching for Social Justice Ayers includes a list of books he believes can serve as "resources for teaching for change." Among those books is Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
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