Be careful with whom you associate with, is a comment most children often hear as they are growing up.

They hear it from their parents, but sometimes they hear it from a mentor.

Sometimes kids listen and sometimes they don’t — and those that don’t often pay the price for not listening.

It is apparent that Barack Obama, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, didn’t get this message from anyone, or if he did, he didn’t find it to be of importance.

And, today his questionable associations along the way are coming into play and are cause for concern among the voters — and rightly so.

This is not a racism issue this is an association issue, numerous ones, indefensible ones, philosophical and policy based associations that if carried into the White House can become extremely troublesome for our nation.

And yet when confronted with these associations, Obama denounces some of the comments as not being his, but never disowns the association or the friendship.

Let us begin at the outset and declare an uncontrovertibly fact, that Obama is a screaming liberal.

His associations have not been what one would call the creme de la creme of American democracy: from the anti American sentiments of Louis Farrakhan, who was honored by Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, who himself said the US gave AIDS to blacks and brought on 9/11 on itself; the rabidly anti-Israel Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, who the Obama’s regularly dined with; the terrorist sympathizer Ali Abunimah, who runs an anti-Israel web site; Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; Anti-Israel foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, fired after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster”; Anti-Israel foreign policy adviser Robert Malley, also fired when it was revealed he was holding talks with Hamas; and then there is Hatem El-Hady, former official of the Hamas-linked charity Kindhearts, closed by the Justice Department and a web page that suddenly vanished from Obama campaign’s site with no explanation and of course there is Tony Rezko, a Chicago fixer currently in a lot of legal trouble.

You see, one can’t have all of these anti-American questionable associations and then try to explain why one doesn’t wear the American Flag on his lapel.

Furthermore one can’t put their wife, Michelle, on the campaign trail speaking in his behalf and then tell the world when they attack her for saying it took her 26 years to finally ‘be proud she was American’ that she is out of bounds for criticism.

There is a pattern here in Obama’s associations and their anti-American comments, his wife’s comments and his willingness, as he said, when he becomes President, that he will meet unconditionally with Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is providing weapons to al-Qaeda to kill our troops in Iraq, calls Israel ‘a stinking corpse’ and says the Holocaust never happened, which should be most disturbing to the American electorate.

I’m sorry Obama never got that message to be careful who he associates with, when he was a kid. But he’s still got time to gain some experience.