Obama's past, right at him

The Washington Times reports:

Sen. Obama's preacher trouble will not go away, and there may be more where that came from. The racist rants of another Chicago preacher with whom the senator has political ties, tenuous so far as we know now, is bubbling on YouTube.com, where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to invoke the damnation of God on America. This second preacher is the Rev. James Meeks, an Illinois state senator and key player in the Rev. Jesse Jackson's political organization, which strongly backs Mr. Obama. Mr. Meeks inveighs against white mayors as "slave masters" and scorns blacks who disagree with him as "house [servants]." The more we learn about who Sen. Obama hangs out with in Chicago, the less authentic his mantra of "brotherhood" and "unity" sounds. We could get the wrong idea about him.

"As the high-water mark for Barack Obama recedes," says Charles Lipson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, "his campaign must now confront several dangerous stumps that were once hidden below the surface [of the water]." Writing on RealClear Politics.com, he identifies one "stump" from the radical-left past that Mr. Obama has diligently hidden. He served on the board of the Woods Fund, a small radical foundation, with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn late of the Weather Underground, the radical cell that killed cops and tried to plant a bomb in the U.S. Capitol. They're married to each other now and after a decade on the run turned themselves in and served prison time. They're unrepentant. In an interview with the New York Times, Prof. Ayers boasted that he had no regrets about setting bombs to kill innocents: "I feel we didn't do enough."

When the senator and the unrepentant bomber served together on the Woods Fund board, the Fund awarded $6,000 to Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church "in recognition of Barack Obama's contributions of Woods Fund as a director." Later the Obama-Ayers board awarded a generous grant to the Arab-American Action Network. It's entirely possible that Barack Obama missed the board meetings when such awards were made. He says he missed Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermons, too. The man has a gift for avoiding the wrong place at the right time.

Obama's radical past.