Just imagine if another candidate (a Clinton maybe)was referenced in a suicide note. The crowd from Chicago would have demanded a special prosecutor by now.
Obama named in a suicide note:
From today's LA Times:
On the day he disappeared, Norman Hsu, the disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, sent letters to friends that recipients viewed as a suicide note, people familiar with the letter have said.
In his letter, Hsu apologized for any embarrassment he had caused recipients of his largesse. In the last four years, he has generated donations of more than $1 million for Democratic politicians across the country.
Hsu’s undoing began two weeks ago with articles raising questions about his fundraising activities in the Wall Street Journal and about a criminal case in his past in The Times. In his letter, said a person familiar with its contents who asked to remain anonymous, Hsu contended that those articles were planted "by a politician who pledged ‘hope and change’ " — an apparent reference to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"This is a sad and baseless allegation," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. "We had no knowledge of his past criminal behavior, fugitive status or a potential straw-donor scheme until reading it in the newspaper."
But remember, Obama's Communication Director Robert Gibbs is the same man who four years ago put up the ad in Iowas comparing Howard Dean to Osama Bin laden. Did Team Obama hire Gibbs despite that moral horror of an act, or because of it?
Notice how the L.A. Times calls Hsu a "disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign" downplaying Hsu’s ties to Obama - even as it appears Obama is the one apparently named in the suicide note. Hsu was not called a fundraiser for the Innocence Project, even though he was a fundraiser for them and sent them the suicide note. No Hsu is tied instead to Hillary Clinton.
Before boarding an eastbound train later that day, Hsu apparently typed the one-page note and sent it by FedEx; it was received last Thursday.
Among the recipients was the Innocence Project, the New York-based organization co-founded by attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld that seeks to prove the innocence of people in prison. Hsu was one of the organization’s donors.
"We did receive a letter from him, the contents of which I don’t want to divulge out of respect for his privacy," Eric Ferrero, the organization’s communications director, told The Times on Friday.
Ferrero said the Innocence Project forwarded the letter to Hsu’s defense attorneys in San Francisco and to the California attorney general’s office. Hsu helped sponsor a dinner for the organization in April, Ferrero said, describing him as a "strong and committed supporter."
Buried in the story is the Obama connection to Hsu:
Until recent weeks, Hsu was a darling of Democratic politicians, donating at least $600,000 himself during the last four years and raising far more than that from associates.
Among the candidates to whom he donated was Obama — a total of $7,000 in 2004 and 2005. Obama recently gave that same amount to charity. Hsu’s associates have given Obama at least $12,600 more.
Was Obama responsible for planting the Hsu stories in the press? We dont know the details yet but, this is typical for the Chicago Obama Gibbs crowd.
The Barack Obama campaign has been caught peddling dirt against Hillary and Bill Clinton over and over and over. team Obama is desperate to rescue his failing incompetent campaign so he is slinging mud.
No surprise, that is how Chicago Obama has always operated. Obama talks about running a clean campaign but he and his "strategist" are and have been, dirt peddlers.
During the early summer, according to the New York Times and amplified in a Talking Points Memo post, Team Obama got caught in their usual anonymous mud-slinging:
"We’ve just obtained an email that shows that the Obama campaign yesterday circulated a negative, and ultimately false, story about Bill Clinton – that he allegedly made money giving a speech on September 11, 2006."
Bill Burton had his typical answer then too:
"Asked for comment on whether it was appropriate to spread negative stuff about Bill, given that he’s not running in the primary and is popular with primary voters, Obama spokesman Bill Burton declined to directly address the question about Bill, instead saying: "I don’t know why anyone would take umbrage with the circulation of publicly available information."
The Obama campaign has yet to apologize for this smear against Bill Clinton.
Back then Taylor Marsh smacked Obama for his usual "I don’t know anything about this" attitude::
"When the Obama campaign found out about Clinton’s investments, they decided to do a hit on her regarding one in particular. The thing is, they did it anonymously. Charming, isn’t it. Now this type of hit job isn’t anything new in the political world, but for a candidate that prides himself on being above petty politics, or beyond the smallness of politics, this is just a tad bit disingenuous. So if you want to keep your squeaky clean image intact, this type of move only works if you cover your tracks. The Obama camp blew it and Clinton’s campaign found out. The coup de grace is that, according to Obama’s spokesman, this isn’t a problem at all. The next thing we’ll hear is that Candidate Obama didn’t know anything about it."
Are we being unfair, or is this typical for the Obama Chicago crowd?
Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had "worked aggressively behind the scenes" to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign started at almost the same time. Axelrod swears up and down that "we had nothing to do with it" and that the campaign’s television ad schedule was long planned. "An aura grows up around you, and people assume everything emanates from you," he told me.
What about the ad portraying Hillary as the fascist Big Brother? How clean or stinky were Obama’s hands?
Lynn Sweet has documented Obama’s bull regarding the 1984 ad. She wrote
"Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday that his campaign was not damaged by the revelation that the ad maker, Phillip de Vellis, worked for Blue State Digital, the Washington D.C. firm whose co-founder, Joe Rospars is on leave—to work for the Obama campaign handling new media and the Obama web operation. Blue State holds a contract with the Obama campaign to provide technical internet support and oversee its server."
"Asked for his reaction to the links between his campaign and de Vellis, Obama said, "Yeah, very attenuated ties. ... Obviously, as I said before, we have no idea who this person was, we have no way of knowing who this person was. He doesn’t work for us and my understanding is that the vendor had a policy of not doing this kind of stuff and as a consequence he has left."
But that was just another Obama untruth, his campaign staff knew De Vellis quite well:
Last year, Obama’s Senate press secretary, Ben LaBolt, was the spokesman for the Brown campaign and roomed with de Vellis in an Ohio apartment. LaBolt only would echo the statement released by the Obama team: "The Obama campaign and its employees had no knowledge and had nothing to do with the creation of the ad."
We understand the calculation of why Obama sent the anonymous memo attacking President Clinton (the 42nd president). [N.B. We have heard from several John Edwards supporters that they suspect it was the Obama campaign that sent an anonymous whisper to the media alerting them to the infamous John Edwards $400 haircut.] An interview from February 17, 2007 with Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod , called The Politics of Going Negative foreshadowed what the mudboys were really thinking. Its The Audacity of Desperation.
"As anyone not living in a cave surely knows, Obama launched his campaign for president last weekend by deriding the "smallness of our politics" and promising to change the tone of political discourse in America. But with Hillary Clinton leading Obama by an average of nearly 20 points in the six major polls taken so far this year, will Obama be able to close the gap over the coming year without playing hardball? And how can he attack Clinton without looking small himself and undermining the core rationale for his candidacy?"
"I put that question to Obama’s senior strategist, David Axelrod, before Obama’s presidential announcement last Saturday in Springfield."
"If you have a difference over an issue that’s something different than a gratuitous personal attack," Axelrod said. "But the real point is the premise that if you can inspire people and if you can give them something real to believe in, you can advance your campaign without tearing everybody else down. And that is our premise and we’re going to try and see if it works. If it does work, then we truly have changed our politics for the better. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. But that’s the only kind of campaign that he [Obama] really can run."
"So, I quickly followed up, Obama won’t go negative?"
"I . . . I . . . I don’t . . . I would not say that he won’t draw contrasts where contrasts should be drawn," Axelrod hedged. "But if you’re asking me, do we have a strategy to tear people down? We don’t. And maybe that’s incredibly naive, and maybe that is not feasible in modern politics. But we believe it is, and we believe it’s important to run a campaign like that."
Axelrod is the mud-meister who, according to the New York Times "is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle." Axelrod is also the one who flung anonymous mud against "the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls..."
In that race Obama’s Axelrod secretly garbage dived into the Hull divorce, a typically nasty legal proceeding. Obama’s mud-slinging worked back then, "In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory." Of course the Tribune was printing Obama’s mud. "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had "worked aggressively behind the scenes" to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign started at almost the same time."
To expect that these cats will be changing their spots in this election seems quite unlikely to me.