In a quite interesting piece at American Thinker built around Bill Ayers' father's mailman (who believes he long ago met Barack Obama outside the Ayers' home, where, the mailman maintains in more than one interview and in a sworn affadavit, young Obama introduced himself as a "foreign student" who was, well, going to be president), the always compelling Jack Cashill reminds us some of the gaping holes the media, the voters, just gaped at and then moved on from in the last election cycle, and what just might fill in some of the gaps.

Such informed speculation denotes a healthy curiosity and bona fide concern for country; meanwhile, the media continue to flat-line on these are other ridiculously crucial questions.

Cashill writes:

As it happens, I stumbled into my own discovery of Ayers's involvement in the writing of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, when I was investigating how Obama got into Harvard Law School and who paid his way.  What had piqued my interest was an interview with veteran New York power-broker Percy Sutton on a local New York City show called Inside City Hall.  The interview took place in late March 2008 but did not surface until August 2008.

Sutton told how twenty years prior he had been "introduced to [Obama] by a friend."  The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men."  The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.  According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama] ... a young man that has applied to Harvard."  Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.

A few months before the election, it should have mattered that a respected black political figure like Sutton had publicly announced that a fanatic black separatist, backed by an ambitious Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama's career perhaps for the last twenty years.  It did to the Obama-friendly media, but not in a way in which it would have to real journalists.  Moving in swiftly to kill the story were Politico, an insider D.C. journal run by Washington Post alums, and Media Matters for America, an alleged watchdog group founded by the recovering Troopergate author, David Brock.

Ben Smith, then of Politico, took the lead.  Shortly after the story broke, Smith ran the disclaimer that "Barack Obama's campaign is flatly denying a story told by former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton."  After some conspicuous waffling, al-Mansour denied the story as well.  A self-appointed "spokesman for Sutton's family" by the name of Kevin Wardally sent an e-mail to Smith that read in part: "As best as our family and the Chairman's closest friends can tell, Mr. Sutton, now 86 years of age, misspoke in describing certain details and events in that television interview."

For Smith, even though Wardally had gotten Sutton's age wrong by two years, this e-mail was proof enough that Sutton's highly specific claim was manufactured.  Wrote Smith, Wardally's e-mail "seems to put the story to rest for good."  Media Matters, meanwhile, scolded those conservative bloggers who did not accept the various denials at face value.

Like the man about to be carted away in Monty Python's Holy Grail, the Percy Sutton story was not quite dead yet.  Sutton's son and daughter told conservative reporter Ken Timmerman that no one in their family even knew who Kevin Wardally was, let alone authorized him to speak on behalf of the family.  "I'm getting better," pled Monty Python's nearly dead man.  No, he wasn't.  Nor was this story.  With Hillary out of the race, no newsroom in America felt compelled to dig up dirt that could sully Obama.

About that time, I found a diary entry that caught my attention.  Radical-turned-actor Peter Coyote entered it at the time of the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  Coyote wrote, "I inform Martha that I'm dragging her to the apartment of old friends, ex-Weathermen, Bernadine [sic] Dohrn and Bill Ayers, hosting a party for Senator Leahy. Perhaps Edward Said will be there."

Said had taught Obama at least one class at Columbia.  I had earlier seen a photo taken during an Arab-American community dinner in Chicago in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian nakba, or disaster.  The photo [below] shows Obama sitting next to Said, seemingly engaged in an animated conversation at dinner.  The intimacy surprised me.  At the time of the photo, Obama was an obscure state senator while Said, according to the Nation, was "probably the best-known intellectual in the world" and the star of that evening's show.  He would speak on this occasion, as the Los Angeles Times would later report, "against settlements, against Israeli apartheid."

All of this got me to wondering whether an Ayers-Obama-Said-al-Mansour cabal had formed in the early 1980s back in New York City.  If so, such a combine might have generated enough momentum to push Obama's career along.  To see if Obama and Ayers had crossed paths before Chicago, I ordered a copy of Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days.  It was then that I began to realize the depth of Ayers's involvement in Obama's rise to power.

Obama would have needed help to get into Harvard.  Friendly biographer David Remnick tells us that Obama was an "unspectacular" student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school.  A Northwestern University professor, John L. McKnight, although a friend of Obama's and a fellow Alinskyite, reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college."  As to Obama's LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa's body will be unearthed before those are.

How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants' LSAT scores typically track between the 98^th and the 99^th percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.80 and 4.00 is a subject the media have chosen not to explore.  Nor have they asked how Obama paid for that education.  Maybe it is time they ask the mailman.