RNC creates BarackBook.com to showcase Obama’s ‘friends’

In an effort to highlight some of Barack Obama’s more controversial associations, the Republican National Committee has created a Facebook spoof site called BarackBook.com.

The website, which the RNC says “is a parody of Facebook.com,” looks like Facebook, employing a similar design with a blue palette and even status updates. Obama’s current status update says that “Barack is wishing Speaker Pelosi a good vacation while gas prices remain high.”

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The RNC’s BarackBook

The site has a list of Obama’s current “friends,” as selected by the RNC, including a man accused of once being a terrorist and a convicted Chicago businessman, as well as an application for Facebook users which will inform them of “friend updates.”

One of Obama’s 19 “friends,” according to the site, is William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is a former member of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-war group in the late 1960s and 1970s which was responsible for several bombings.

Ayers’ profile photo is a 1968 mug shot from the Chicago Police Department, and has sections for Who Am I, Facts About Me and Barack, My Donations and Bundling for Barack, What Barack Says About Me, as well as a list of his friends, videos and news articles.

Ayers and Obama live in the same neighborhood in Chicago and were both board members of the Woods Fund of Chicago. (Click here to see an earlier Muckety post on their relationship.)

Another on the list is James Johnson, the former chairman of Fannie Mae who resigned from the Obama VP search team after the Wall Street Journal reported he may have received preferential mortgage loans from Countrywide Financial.

Interestingly, Caroline Kennedy, who is also a friend and supporter of Obama and a member of his VP search committee, is not listed as a “friend” on BarackBook.com.

Others that the RNC chose for Obama’s “friends” on BarackBook.com include:

• Valerie B. Jarrett, former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago board member and former deputy chief of staff to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley
• Penny S. Pritzker, Obama campaign national finance chair
• Eric H. Holder Jr., a partner at Covington & Burling and a member of Obama’s VP search team
• Emil Jones Jr., an Obama mentor and president of the Illinois State Senate
• Antoin Rezko, an Obama supporter who was recently convicted of wire and mail fraud as well as money laundering
• Alexi Giannoulias, an Obama fundraiser and Treasurer of the State of Illinois
• Jodie Evans, an Obama fundraiser and co-founder of Code Pink

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