Andrew Zajac
Lest anyone fail to remember the link between accused influence peddler, Antoin (Tony) Rezko, now on trial in Chicago, and Barack Obama, a new web site, rezkorama.com
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launched yesterday to help cement the connection.Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt claims credit for the site and offers this explanation for it. There’s a bit of high-mindedness about the need to know who Obama really is, but Hewitt doesn’t hide from his bare-knuckle political motivations in taking the Illinois junior senator down a peg or two. He closes his explanatory column thusly:
“Did I mention that Obama’s name come up in opening arguments in the Rezko trial? Or that Obama fled a press conference focused on the matter? Or that Hillary brought up Rezko in a debate?
Suddenly the prince of fresh and the king of change looks very old fashioned, and way too close to the kind of political sleaze that he is pledged to exile from the Beltway.
All of this has exploded on the national scene in just a few short days, and Team Clinton has every incentive to throw gas on the fire, which it certainly has and will again. (Let the record show that no one from the Clinton campaign formally encouraged me to cover Rezko.) By this time next week, who knows what we will know.”
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A postscript:
Hewitt returned a call this afternoon and said he was moved to set up the site because “I think this is a huge story…I had no idea that the relationship (between Obama and Rezko) is that close.”
He said rezkorama.com had 5,000 visitors on its first day.
Hewitt said the site merely is an aggregator of stories that mention Obama and Rezko and doesn’t contain any added anti-Obama editorializing. Not that any is needed to maintain what has become a large political headache for Obama.
As for the money behind rezkorama.com, Hewitt said the costs are being absorbed by Rob Neppell, of Kithbridge Inc., the conservative-oriented new media company that built the site.