Time For Obama To Come Clean on the Tony Rezko Relationship

Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote this great column:

Barack Obama just keeps bobbling the Tony Rezko hot potato, and if he doesn't get a handle on it soon, his campaign for the presidency is going to be badly burned.

On Wednesday, the Illinois senator fumbled again as he continued to try to minimize his relationship with Rezko while making the rounds of the morning news shows.

"My relationship is he was somebody who I knew and had been a supporter for many years," Obama said on CBS in response to Hillary Clinton's "slumlord" attack from earlier this week. "He was somebody who had supported a wide range of candidates all throughout Illinois. Nobody had an inkling that he was involved in any problems."

Somebody who I knew?

Wow.

That's such an understatement that it borders on a falsehood.

Proving, though, that this was one of Obama's preprogrammed talking points, not just a slip of the tongue, he also told ABC: "This is somebody who was active in Illinois politics who I knew. Nobody had any indications that he was engaging in wrongdoing."

Obama certainly did know Rezko. He knew him quite well, although perhaps not as well as he should have.

This was not some guy he used to hang with in high school.

This is somebody who spotted Obama's raw talent and offered him a job while he was still in law school, somebody who gave him one of his very first campaign donations for his first political race. This is somebody for whom Obama and his law firm performed legal work, not a great deal of it by Obama personally perhaps, but enough to know how the man made his money and that he was one of the major developers of low-income housing in his state legislative district.

Obama and Rezko closer than you can imagine.