IF THE MEDIA
WERE COMPETENT, THE NAME JODIE EVANS would be as well-known as Jeremiah Wright.
According to Ralph
Nader’s Public Citizen,
Evans has bundled
“at least $50,000” in donations for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. “Bundling” is
a process in which people turn over a large number of “individual” political
contributions as a group, in the hope of exerting greater influence if their
candidate is elected.
According
to Human Events reporter Catherine
Moy, “Evans and her son, a student who lives at her Southern California address,
each also gave the maximum individual allowable donation of $2,300 to Obama’s
campaign.”
And who is Jodie
Evans? A former political appointee of Jerry Brown during his tenure as
governor of California and his presidential campaigns, Evans briefly made
headlines in 2003 by arranging for women to claim Arnold Schwarzenegger groped
them. However, she has kept lower company for the last few years. Her official
biography states “her
life has been consumed with Codepink: Women for Peace since September of 2002.”
In
fact, Evans is a co-founder of the antiwar radical group Code Pink
with Medea
Benjamin. As I
reported at the time, Evans and Code Pink delivered $600,000 in cash and
supplies to “the
other side” in Fallujah in December 2004. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, signed
the letter to get them to that city, a recent battlefield and stronghold for
terrorists killing American soldiers.
In
August 2006, she
joined 11 other far-leftists in a Code Pink-sponsored trip to meet Iraqi “political
leaders” with Benjamin, Cindy
Sheehan, and Tom
Hayden. Team member Geoffrey Millard referred to this trip as “diplomatic
communication,” making such a trip potentially
illegal, violating the prohibition for private citizens to conduct their
own foreign policy. Among Iraqi parliamentarians, they met:
Code
Pink announced
after this trip, “We left this historic meeting with a commitment to make sure
that the voices of these Iraqi parliamentarians are heard here in the U.S.”
Indeed, one delegation member, a DailyKos blogger who ran for Congress in 2006,
blogged, “if justice is to ever come to the people of Iraq, the people we call
insurgents will have to be recognized as the ones who are actually defending
their homeland.”
Evans took the opportunity to praise Iraq…under Saddam Hussein:
Let’s go back to the Iraq before we
invaded, there was a good education and health care system, food for everyone.
That system didn’t belong to Saddam it belonged to the Iraqi, it belonged to
years of creating what a civilization needed. If your parents didn’t send you
to school they could be put in jail.
That Evans could write such words about a regime that often
forced parents to watch their children being raped and tortured – even if they
were favorable to Saddam’s government – strains credulity, but not more than
anonymous allegations that American soldiers were plundering murderers.
Evans
related that one nameless source told her, “We witnessed with our own
experience how American tanks used to break Universities and asked people to
loot them.”
Such operations
were part of her long-term plan to sap American soldiers in Iraq of their will to
fight. I also reported
in July 2003, Jodie Evans sits on the Advisory Board of Iraq
Occupation Watch (IOW), a group formed by Castroites Medea Benjamin
and Leslie
Cagan to convince American soldiers in Iraq to declare themselves “conscientious
objectors” and get sent home. IOW similarly spread propaganda stories about
American “atrocities” and emphasize stories of antiwar demonstrations at home to
demoralize U.S. troops in battle.
Not limited to fawning
over Middle Eastern dictators, Evans joined with Cindy
Sheehan and Medea Benjamin to meet
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez in January 2006. Chavez, Sheehan claimed, was “a democratically elected leader who is very popular in his
country.” (He is popular. Or else.) She and her fellow Code Pink
radicals met with Chavez during the visit and even praised his singing voice.
As
Jean
Pearce has noted on FrontPage, Evans is also institutionally tied to Mike
Roselle through as a Director of the Rainforest
Action Network. Roselle is the founder of the
domestic terrorist organization Earth Liberation Front (ELF), “which along with
the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is ranked the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat
by the FBI. The FBI attributes over 600 criminal acts and $43 million in
damages to the two groups since 1996.”
Now she has
found a new champion: Barack Obama. If he has any sense of decency, Obama
should repudiate Evans. At a minimum, he should return her bundled contributions.
It is significant
that Obama, his lapel stripped of any American flag pin, is a magnet for
anti-American radicals like Evans, Wright, and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama’s
platform for near-instantaneous withdrawal from Iraq has increased his stock
with Code Pink volunteers and, undoubtedly, their Iraqi counterparts. When
those who hate this country need a domestic political front, they
know who to call on: the Party
of Defeat. Following Obama’s instructions, Jodie Evans has
placed her “hope” in him. She longs for Americans to buy into his vapid
elocutions and meaningless platitudes. And she is willing to put their money
where her mouth is.
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