Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies?

Maybe it's because they're so comfortable around him.

He presents as the transcendent agent of "change." Sounds platitudinous, but it's really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media's Chosen One, he hasn't had to.
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MICHELLE
So, instead, we get glimpses. The most profound influence in his life, his wife Michelle, is notoriously less circumspect than her careful husband about where she's coming from. Her college thesis, which Princeton tried to keep under lock and key, testifies to a race-obsessed worldview. She may have refined it, but she's never grown out of it.
THE REV. WRIGHT
Years earlier, the Obamas had gravitated to the baleful Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an unapologetic racist and hard Left firebrand. They were comfortable with him -- and he with them.

By the senator's own account, Wright is the inspiration for his memoir, The Audacity of Hope -- the title is cribbed from a Wright sermon ("The Audacity to Hope"). For Michelle, who had written that a racial "separationist" would have a better understanding of American blacks than "an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight," Wright's Trinity Church mission statement had to resonate, right from its opening declaration:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization....

and on the mentor of Wright, James Cone, as suggested reading to Sean Hannity by Wright we find this:

there is Cone's 1969 opus, Black Theology and Black Power, in which he helpfully explains: Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. SNIP

BILL AYERS AND BERNADINE DOHRN
With this as background, is it really all that startling that Sen. Obama enjoys a friendly relationship with Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of terrorists?
I want to be clear here: Not terrorist sympathizers. Terrorists.

The mainstream media, in their zeal to elect a Democrat, are assiduously airbrushing Ayers: "an aging lefty with a foolish past," as the Chicago Sun-Times has so delicately put it. In fact, it is the press that is rife with foolish, aging lefties. Ayers, by contrast, is an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past -- one who beat the system he so reviles when, after his years of fugitivity, terrorism charges were dropped due to government surveillance violations. He's "guilty as sin," by his own concession, but "free as a bird."

Ayers didn't just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it. As his memoir gleefully recalled, "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

It was at the Chicago home of Ayers and Dohrn that Obama, then an up-and-coming "community organizer," had his political coming out party in 1995. Not content with this rite of passage in Lefty World -- where unrepentant terrorists are regarded as progressive luminaries, still working "only to educate" -- both Obamas tended to the relationship with the Ayers.

Barack Obama made a joint appearance with Bill Ayers in 1997 at a University of Chicago panel on the outrage of treating juvenile criminals as if they were, well, criminals. Obama apologists say, "So what? People appear with other people all the time." Nice try. This panel was orchestrated by none other than Michelle Obama, then an Associate Dean of Student Services. Ayers didn't happen to be there -- he was invited by the Obamas to educate students on the question before the house: "Should a Child Ever Be Called a 'Super Predator?'"

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RASHID KHALIDI
In the interim, Ayers and Obama had teamed up for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charitable organization. Together, they voted to donate $75,000 of the largesse they controlled to the Arab American Action Network. The AAAN was co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a longtime supporter of Palestinian "resistance" attacks against Israel, which he openly regards as a racist, apartheid state. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Khalidi peremptorily denies having been a PLO operative or having directed its official press agency for six years (from 1976 to 1982). There can be no gainsaying, though, that he was an influential apologist for Yasser Arafat, the terror master who spawned two Intifadas and ordered the murder of American diplomats.

In the mean, besotted United States, of course, being a terrorist, a terror apologist, or simply raging at the machine qualifies one for a cushy academic soapbox. Thus did Khalidi eventually land on his feet at the University of Chicago, where he ran in the same circles as Associate Dean Michelle Obama, Law Professor Barack Obama, University of Illinois-Chicago Education Professor Bill Ayers, and Northwestern Law Professor Bernadine Dohrn (who prepared for a career in instructing future officers of the court with a stint in federal prison for flouting a judge's order that she testify in a grand jury investigation into the Weathermen's infamous Brinks robbery-murders).
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Ayers is virtually channeling Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright when he wails that American "society is not a just and fair and decent place."

"God, what a great country," he scoffed to the Times. "It makes me want to puke."

Hey, right back at you there, Professor. At least that's how most of us are likely to feel. But not Sen. Obama. And that's why Ayers -- like Khalidi and Wright and Michelle Obama, and others who know the senator well while we've been told precious little -- sees in Barack Obama the change he's been waiting for.