One of the targets, Tom Burke, was a union organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). He was so confident he would get a fair shake from the Post that he provided the paper with a photo of himself shaking hands with Barack Obama. The other apparent intention was to send a message to the President and Attorney General Eric Holder that any investigation of Burke might lead to Obama.
The Post suggested that investigations of labor union activists might jeopardize their support for Obama’s 2012 presidential run. Indeed, it could therefore threaten his re-election bid, if investigations determine that the activists did more than “cross paths” with the President.
Deep inside the article, in the 29th paragraph, we find out that some of the “activists” are associated with a group known as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Marxist-Leninist organization. Burke is a member of the FRSO, which the Post admitted was “far left.”
The obvious question is why Obama, as a state senator in Illinois, would ever have “crossed paths” with such people. The answer goes beyond just union support for the candidate. The “far-left” networks that include the FRSO, the Communist Party USA, the New American Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America backed and even spawned Obama’s political career. Don’t forget that Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a fundraiser for his first run for political office. The same networks also backed CIA Director Leon Panetta’s career when he was a congressman from Santa Cruz, California. This helps explain why Obama would pick Panetta, with no intelligence background, to run the intelligence agency. They are cut from the same cloth.
