Vetting Obama: Leftists Take Steps To Prevent You From Learning Anything

By Tony Katz
Thursday, March 08, 2012

In partial fulfillment of Andrew Breitbart's promise to "vet" the President this time, the Breitbart.com team posted a video of President Barack Obama as a law student at Harvard. It also ran on Hannity tonight. The video shows the young Obama asking his fellow law students to "Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell."

Professor Derrick Bell, the object of young Obama's adoration, was an associate of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and a committed radical. Bell was a proponent of Critical Race Theory, which views virtually all relationships through a lens of perceived race-based oppression.

As Ben Shapiro wrote on Breitbart.com about Bell:

"This is a close associate of Jeremiah Wright, a man who was quoted by Jeremiah Wright regularly. This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we’ve reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it."

(That story became a video, complete with former President Ronald Reagan as the slave trading alien.)

An edited version of the video - minus the section in which Obama heaps praise on Professor Bell - was posted earlier on the BuzzFeed.com. Leftists and Obama apologists dismissed the video as inconsequential and racist. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America tweeted:

"look @mmfa has been saying this for 2+ yrs: the Breitbart crew = complete clowns. tonight more 'n more pple are figuring that out; #good"

Boehlert can't argue with the video's content; after all, it documents actual events. Instead, he resorts to the standard Alinsky tactic of ridiculing the messenger. He doesn't begin to address whether Obama's association with Bell should have been revealed before the 2008 election.

Shapiro reports what Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, a close associate to the Obama campaign, had to say about hiding the tape during the 2008 campaign: "We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now."

Isn't watchdog Boehlert curious about why a tape would be hidden by the campaign? Exactly what does interest a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America?

The liberal website HyperVocal.com couldn't wait to recycle the Racer script. Slade Shomer, whose column is predictably entitled 'What's the Right-Wing End Game of This 'Racist Obama' College Days Video?' lacks even the slightest curiosity about Obama's association with Bell and why the '08 Obama campaign wanted it hidden. Instead, keeping with true intellectually dishonest tradition, Shomer plays the race card: (emphasis mine)

While everyone fights this out in partisan terms via Twitter and their websites, we’ll instead ask a more pragmatic question: What is the end game here? Let’s even say there’s more footage that shows Obama standing there in a shirt that reads “Kill Whitey.” Let’s say he professes his deep hatred of Caucasians and says Jeremiah Wright didn’t go far enough. What then? Hasn’t this man been President of the United States for more than three years and white people as we know them are still hangin’ around?

What was Breitbart, and now (editor-in-chief Joel) Pollak and Shapiro, trying to prove exactly? How does digging up 20-year-old video change anything? There’s only one goal here, and that’s to stoke white fear. It’s almost as if the people promoting a “damning” video and the people who want to believe it most are legitimately scared that a racist, classist Barack H. Obama will wipe white people off the map … in his second term.

Certainly we all acknowledge that class warfare is a major component of Obama's re-election campaign strategy. It's not scary, just dishonest and destructive. But how does the release of this video stoke white fear? The assertion is as ludicrous as it is ignorant (assuming Mr. Shomer actually believes his bizarre allegations).

Try as they might, the video is out and the conversation is being had. Just exactly what do we know about President Obama? Does this video change our minds about him leading up to Election Day? If there is one video, are there others? Who is Derrick Bell, and what do we know about him?

These are just some of the legitimate questions that Eric Boehlert and Shomer, and their fellow Leftists and Apologists, will never ask, and would prefer you didn't either.