By Lee Molloy

Barack Obama

For our reality series Make Me the President, we scoured the country to find the most power-hungry, Machiavellian and downright unattractive people in the United States of America (“The Greatest Nation On Earth” ™) to find the man, or woman, who could raise the most money, be willing to break the most promises and offer the most bland reason to become — The President.

This week on MMTP:

Sen. John “Maverick” McCain went into stealth mode as he began to unite the Team Republicans fan base and raise oodles of cash to really stick it to whomever Team Democrats eventually nominates.

Sen. Barack “Nope, no one called Hussein here” Obama took a slim majority of the 12 Wyoming delegates last weekend and then went on to take a massive majority of the 33 delegates from Mississippi on Tuesday — neither of which much matter, because all eyes are on Pennsylvania next month.

Former MMTP vice presidential contestant and supporter of Sen. Hillary “I will survive” Clinton Geraldine Ferraro said this week that “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” which the Obama campaign immediately refuted as “absurd” and “offensive.” This is typical of the bullshit flying around this election — of course if the mainstream media were not terrified of saying anything negative about Obama because they would be accused of racism, he wouldn’t be in the position he’s in now.

In previous episodes of MMTP (you can catch them at www.miamisunpost.com/mmtparchive.htm), we found Obama incapable of standing up against sexism on the campaign trail and of having to have his arm twisted to reject the support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Still, no one in the media has really called him out on it. For those who doubt this is true, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, as a guest on Real Time With Bill Maher last week, claimed that network reporters were being warned in back-room meetings not to say anything on-air that could be construed as racist.

Basically, Obama is a run-of-the-mill Chicago insider politician, and today MMTP producers are going to prove it — not because we don’t like Obama, but because we’re frankly sick of all the cult-like messianic crap that follows him around.

First, a little history: In 1959, Saddam Hussein and his buddy Nadhmi Auchi were charged with conspiring to assassinate Iraqi President Abdul-Karim Qasim. We all know that Hussein ended up living in a hole before being executed, but what of Auchi? Well, funnily enough, he came in at No. 396 last week on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.

So what? Well, we’ll get to that.

A little more-recent history: When Barack Obama made news as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, an Arab-American businessman, took notice. In fact, he offered him a job. Obama turned it down, but that would be the start of a long and, for Obama, very lucrative friendship — a friendship that Obama, however, would downplay when the tough questions started to surface.

As a lawyer, Obama later billed Rezko for five or six hours of work on a low-income housing development in Illinois. However, the Chicago Sun-Times asked Obama, “Have you or your wife ever done any legal work for Rezko or his companies?” Obama answered, “No.”

Rezko donated $2,000 to Obama’s first run at public office in 1995; when Obama ran for a U.S. House seat five years later, Rezko was again there with the checkbook; and, of course, when B.O. ran for the U.S. Senate, Rezko held fundraisers for him at his home.

Although Obama has said he never did anything in exchange for Rezko’s support, in 1998, then-state Sen. Obama wrote on Illinois Senate stationary (as previously reported by the Chicago Sun-Times) an endorsement for funding New Kenwood LLC, a company co-created by Rezko, claiming that: “This project will provide much needed housing for the 4th ward citizens.”   

So, after giving that defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. Now, it is around this time in a man’s life that he decides he needs to move out of his $400,000 condo and buy a mock Georgian mansion on Chicago’s south side. But what does one do if one can’t afford the house in question? In the case of Sen. Barack Obama, one calls up an old friend.

Although he initially denied it, Obama and Rezko toured the $1.95 million mansion together. But because the owners insisted on selling the house and the $625,000 adjoining garden plot on the same day, Rezko agreed to buy the garden plot in his wife’s name for the asking price, and Obama purchased the house for $300,000 below the asking price. So, in all, B.O. only had to come up with $1.65 million, which is all very nice, except that Mr. Rezko was under federal investigation at the time and was flat broke, owing upwards of $10 million. So where did the $625K come from?

Do you remember the name Nadhmi Auchi? (Clue: He plotted an assassination with Saddam Hussein!) Well, The Times of London found that Auchi, who himself was a convicted fraudster who stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the French oil company Elf in 2003, loaned $3.5 million to Rezko. It is this money that, three weeks later, Mrs. Rezko appeared to use to purchase the plot of land next to the Obamas.

The deal was that Rezko would build a fence and Obama would have his gardener continue to landscape the plot. Six months later, however, Obama bought back a sixth of the land from Rezko for $104,500, even though the plot had been appraised at only $40,500. Hmmm, shady….

So far, the Obama campaign has given to charity more than $150,000 that was donated by Tony Rezko and/or his companies “to avoid any questions.” Plus, Obama himself admitted that this deal was “boneheaded.”

To clarify: Nowhere do we claim that Sen. Obama acted illegally. The problem we have here is that Barack Obama has built his campaign on two pillars — the first, his claim to represent a new kind of politics — yet, the more we look at him, the more he represents business as usual. Oratory skills he no doubt has, but the moral high ground? Somehow, we doubt that. The other pillar has been his judgment. He has consistently put this quality above experience in his debates with Sen. Clinton regarding the war in Iraq.  However, going into a real estate deal with a known political operative under investigation for fraud and corruption by the FBI seems to be a case of particularly bad judgment. So, the question must be: Is Sen. Barack Obama the real deal? And even if we accept that to be so, is his judgment sound enough to be the next president of the United States? That, MMTP fans, is up to you. So, choose wisely.

Tune in next week to see how the race for Team Democrats plays out as we approach Pennsylvania and whether Sen. John McCain has come out of hiding yet. Either way, there is only room for one of the three remaining contestants to have the monogrammed pillow on Air Force One.

Hail to the Chief!

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