Dr. Quentin Young and Barack Obama 2003
Former domestic terrorists and Weather Underground leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,1 and U.S. Senator Barack Obama share a long-term relationship with their neighbor, Chicago physician, Dr. Quentin Young.
Those among you who have been following RBO’s and Trevor Loudon’s recent posts about Barack Obama’s ties to the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are by now acquainted with Dr. Quentin Young.
Connected by politics
For those of you who are not, just a few days ago, Trevor Loudon provided documentary evidence that Obama was a New Party member. Among those who also belonged in 1995 was Dr. Quentin Young. Loudon writes:
Quentin Young — Chicago doctor, prominent DSA member. Quentin Young is a neighbour, friend and supporter of Barack Obama. He attended the famous 1995 meeting in the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn where Barack Obama was introduced by Alice Palmer as the chosen successor to her Illinois State Senate seat.
In his February 22, 2008, The Politico article “Obama once visited ’60s radicals” (referenced by RW here), Ben Smith secured these facts via information provided to him by Dr. Young:
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (right).
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.
Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.
The June 6, 2008, article “Attendee Describes Obama Meeting at Home of William Ayers” by Fred Lucas, published by Cybercast News Service, is no longer available (apparently totally disappeared; from RBO’s hard copy):
“Young would go on to become the family physician for [Bernadine] Dohrn and her husband William Ayers, who, in a piece published in The New York Times on September 11, 2001, said of his years in the Weather Underground: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Young said that he rarely saw Ayers because “he didn’t get sick very much.”
Young, however, was part of the small party that gathered at the Chicago home of Ayers and Dohrn in 1995 when Illinois State Sen. Alice Palmer said she would be running in a special election for Congress and passed the torch to community organizer and lawyer Barack Obama to take her place in the state legislature.
“It was in Bill Ayers’ comfortable home. It was a small group, half a dozen. There was no fundraising,” Young said in an interview with Cybercast News Service. “Hyde Park is a very political community. It’s probably the most liberal community in Chicago so people are active in politics. Events like this, where you are invited to meet candidates or support them, it’s not uncommon to have a dozen such invitations over a period of months.”
Dr. Young followed up on this meet-and-greet on December 16, 1995, by contributing $150 to Obama’s political action committee, Friends of Barack Obama.
See next page for “Obama, Young and health care”
Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.--Thomas Jefferson.
I’m still humming Bette Midler’s You Gotta Have Friends.
Young is the radical Doc who refuses Medicaid patients.
Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and a longtime champion of liberal causes, has strict rules on the number of Medicaid patients he will see because otherwise, he said, “I’d go broke.” Policy of ‘Reality and Shame’
Problem is you let this crowd run things, they’ll make sure they get a big cut, and the rest of us will go broke.
Is this the Doctor who wrote that outstanding one page Doctor’s note attesting to the fitness of our candidate?
No, different Doc. Q. Young is a long time fixture though in Illinois and Chicago…..
Mccain is our man for sure! Check out this time capzle I’ve been building recently of all his campaign material.
http://www.capzles.com/5c1ba50a-959c-4065-9b62-99e657ede89c
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/obama-terrorist.html
If you havn’t gotten you holloween costume yet, you had better place your order, they’re going fast. I thought it might look better if you added a turban and cigarette. Happy Holloween!
“Problem is you let this crowd run things, they’ll make sure they get a big cut, and the rest of us will go broke.”
They would be the Party elites, who know what is “best” for us little people.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDFkMGE2MmM1M2Q5MmY0ZmExMzUxMWRhZGJmMTAyOGY=
another interesting article worth reading.
WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, NOT WE THE DEMOCRATS NOR WE THE REPUBLICANS, ARE JUST AS GUILTY FOR THE STATE OF THE UNION AS THE POLITICIANS WE BLAME. LOSE THE LABELS AND VOTE AS AN AMERICAN. THE CHANGE MUST START WITH US. IT IS TIME FOR THE SLEEPING GIANT TO WAKE UP AGAIN AND REMEMBER THE ALAMO. LET’S WASH THE MUD OFF OUR WINDSHIELDS, OPEN OUR EYES, AND DO THE HOMEWORK. WITH THAT KNOWLEDGE YOU ACQUIRE IN YOUR MIND, LISTEN TO THE WISDOM YOU POSSESS IN YOUR GUT AND VOTE FOR THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT THAT GLOWS IN YOUR HEART. I AM A HYPROCRITE. I AM 56 YEARS OLD AND NEVER VOTED. I AM NEITHER A DEMOCRAT NOR REPUBLICAN. THESE LABELS MADE ME APATHATIC TO THE WHOLE PROCESS. RECENTLY TWO REVELATIONS MADE ME REALISE APATHY IS WORST THEN BEING A DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN. FIRST, A CANADIAN LADY REMINDED ME THAT MANY AMERICANS HAVE DIED DEFENDING MY PRIVILEDGE TO VOTE.TO THESE FELLOW COUNTRY MEN AND WOMEN, I APOLOGISE FOR MY IRRESPONSIBLY. THE SECOND REVELATION MADE SICK TO MY STOMACH. I LEARNED NOT TO TRUST THE NEWSPAPERS OR NEWS CHANNELS FOR MY EDUCATION, THEY ARE BIGGER LIARS THEN THE POLITICIANS. THE EXCEPTION BEING FOX NEWS, THANK YOU. I TRIED TO KEEP AN OPEN MIND WHILE DOING MY RESEARCH ON THE CANDIDATES. WHAT I FOUND TREATENED MY EXISTENCE AS A FREE AMERICAN CITIZEN AND MADE ME PUKE. I DISCOVERED WHERE THE PLATFORM OF ONE OF THE CANDIDATES ORIGINATED; AND THIS MADE EVERYTHING I LEARNED COME TOGETHER AND MAKE SENSE IN MY MIND AND GUT. I TRUSS YOU GUYS. LET ME KNOW IF I AM CRAZY.
I BELIEVE THIS TO BE OBAMA’S PLATFORM : SDS MANIFESTO
FROM: Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration “all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than “of, by, and for the people.”
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, super technology — these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Shortcut to: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html
(I AM A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES AND KNOW ALL ABOUT THE SDS AND WEATHERMEN)
OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN Bernardine Dohrn Ayers: SDS / WEATHERMEN
SUPPORT STAFF: Bill Ayers SDS / WEATHERMEN
Michael Klonsky SDS / WEATHERMEN
Mark Rudd SDS / WEATHERMEN
THEY ALL Marilyn Katz SDS Carl Davidson SDS
LIVE IN CHIGAGO Susan Klonsky SDS Todd Gitlin SDS
Shortcut to: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78338
Barack Obama’s first public speech was at an Occidental College event sponsored by the Students for a Democratic—Society a militantly leftist organization. (SDS)
Shortcut to: http://www.zimbio.com/Obamamania/articles/622/Repost+Obama+ultra+leftist+backers
[...] JUST YOUR EVERYDAY Hyde Park radicals — Obama, Ayers, Dohrn, Young …. [...]