Already this is strike two for the GOP’s BarackBook and RBO is only just getting warmed up.
Obama’s “friends” page about domestic terrorist (and former Obama boss and “neighbor”) William Ayers has another error.
Not quite sure what to say except that The Politico’s Ben Smith is on a steady losing streak. Why is it such a stretch to expect “journalists” to factcheck their sources?
Obama Chief Strategist David Axelrod: “Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school … They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together.” ( Ben Smith, “Ax On Ayers,” The Politico’s “Ben Smith” Blog, www.politico.com, 2/26/08 )
Even the not always reliable Wikipedia shows how laughable this statement is:
“Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn, with whom he has two adult children. They earlier shared legal guardianship of a third child, now also an adult.
And the Obama children? Trusting the Wikipedia for accuracy, we find Malia Ann Obama born in 1998 and Natasha Obama born in 2001, making them approximately 10 and 7 years old respectively.
Exactly which school is it that these “kids” all went to together?
This is rich.
Ugh. What happened to “News Reporting 101?” Are the professors passing out the kool-aid right in class?
Tisk, tisk. Pesky calendars and facts.
Anything for Barak Obama, David…anything. You are a disgrace, and Ben? Do your kids go there too?
One big happy family in Chicagoland.
God help our country.
Axelrod and The One have been able to lie and spin their yarns without anyone in the MSM investigating or calling them on it.
[...] And one silly link regarding another Obama lie. (H/t: Thomas who blogs here.) Share With [...]
Osama lies, people die. there’s an old spanish saying..”digame con quien tu andas, y yo te dire quien tu eres”
Who you associate yourself with, can tell a person just who you are.
When you hand around with drug dealers (altho you don’t take drugs nor sell them) and police does a round up.
You pay the price just as if you sold or taken drugs.
Same with Osama. He hangs around with Ayers,and other
suspicious character, you betcha that your ideas and
philosophies will be influence, especially if that person is dominant and influential.
Osama Hussien Obama should not be taken with a grain
of salt. He scares me, I have bad dreams about him,
and he’s no good for america.
He’s a manipulator of facts, twisting anything against
him into irrelavancy.
He is a believer in Karl Marxism, and Hugo Chavez ways
of socialism and is itching to CHANGE america into a
Marxist/socialist nation. His wife is even worse yet
just by the hints she has thrown out about, for the
first time being proud to be an american, the US is a
nasty and mean nation etc.
The Osamas has thrown a bunch of hints on ho they want
to RULE this nation and no body is picking it up.
Why do you think anyone will believe this fiction is Ben Smith’s fault?
The quote is from David Axelrod and it is quite plausible that Axelrod was trying to bury the whole matter with a quick disclaimer. He couldn’t ignore the fact that O and A were “friendly” and had to come up with a quick and dirty explanation.
Lol, here’s an excerpt from the Factcheck article on Bill Ayers:
“We find McCain’s accusation that Obama “lied” to be groundless. It is true that recently released records show half a dozen or so more meetings between the two men than were previously known, but Obama never denied working with Ayers.
Other claims are seriously misleading. The education project described in the Web ad, far from being “radical,” had the support of the Republican governor and was run by a board that included prominent local leaders, including one Republican who has donated $1,500 to McCain’s campaign this year. The project is described by Education Week as reflecting “mainstream thinking” about school reform.
Despite the newly released records, there’s still no evidence of a deep or strong “friendship” with Ayers, a former radical anti-war protester whose actions in the 1960s and ’70s Obama has called “detestable” and “despicable.”
Even the description of Ayers as a “terrorist” is a matter of interpretation. Setting off bombs can fairly be described as terrorism even when they are intended to cause only property damage, which is what Ayers has admitted doing in his youth. But for nearly three decades since, Ayers has lived the relatively quiet life of an educator. It would be correct to call him a “former terrorist,” and an “unapologetic” one at that. But if McCain means the word “terrorist” to invoke images of 9/11, he’s being misleading; Ayers is no Osama bin Laden now, and never was.
McCain is not accurate when he says – as he does in the Web ad – “When their relationship became an issue, Obama just responded, ‘This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.’ ” McCain is using the same line in personal appearances, too. He said on Oct. 9 at a campaign rally in Waukesha, Wis.:
McCain: Look, we don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist and his wife, who still, at least on Sept. 11, 2001, said he still wanted to bomb more. … The point is, Senator Obama said he was just a guy in the neighborhood. We need to know that’s not true.
Obama never said Ayers was “just” a guy in the neighborhood. The quote is from a Democratic primary debate on April 16 in Philadelphia, and Obama actually was more forthcoming than McCain lets on. Obama specifically acknowledged working together with Ayers on a charitable board, and didn’t deny getting some early political support from him. Here’s the exchange:
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, April 16: An early organizing meeting for your state senate campaign was held at his house, and your campaign has said you are friendly. Can you explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem?
Obama: George, but this is an example of what I’m talking about.
This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.
Sen. Hillary Clinton then said, “I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation,” and predicted that “this is an issue that certainly Republicans will be raising.”
Obama responded, “President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act than me … serving on a board with somebody for actions that he did 40 years ago.”
We wrote back then that Clinton had gone too far by suggesting that “people died” as a result of Ayers’ actions. And nothing Obama said then has since been shown to be false. It is true that he did not bring up his work with Ayers on a second project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama was board chairman and Ayers was an early organizer, and where the two were together for half a dozen or so meetings. But neither Clinton nor Stephanopoulos asked him about that project. McCain could fairly accuse Obama of not volunteering the information, but it is false to claim he “lied.”
The first to begin using the new line of attack against Obama was McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, after a lengthy article appeared Oct. 3 in the New York Times about Obama and Ayers:
Palin, Oct. 5: Our opponents see America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who would bomb their own country.
She’s repeated the charge again and again at different campaign stops since then, citing the Times. What the Times article actually says, however, is this: “[T]he two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.” The Times says its review of documents and interviews with key players “suggest” that Obama “has played down his contacts with Ayers,” but describes their paths as having crossed “sporadically” since their first meeting in 1995.
And far from palling around with Ayers, the two haven’t spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama came to the Senate in January 2005, according to an Obama spokesman. He said the two last saw each other more than a year ago, when they accidentally met on the street in their Hyde Park neighborhood.
Obama addressed Palin’s claim on Oct. 8, when questioned by ABC News’ Charlie Gibson:
Obama, Oct. 8: This is a guy who engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old. By the time I met him, 10 or 15 years ago, he was a college professor of education at the University of Illinois. … And the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign, that he is an adviser of mine, that … I’ve ‘palled around with a terrorist’, all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points.
Bill Ayers’ notoriety dates from the radical, anti-Vietnam War group he helped to start in 1969, splintering off from the activist Students for a Democratic Society. The members of the new group, the Weather Underground, favored shows of violence to further their cause. On March 6, 1970, though, three of them blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse during a bomb-making session gone badly awry. Ayers and his fellow Weathermen, as they were called, soon dropped out of sight.
Barack Obama, who was born Aug. 4, 1961, was 8 years old at the time.
The Weather Underground continued setting off bombs, including one in a men’s lavatory in the Capitol building in 1971 and another in a women’s restroom in the Pentagon in 1972. Nobody was killed, due to evacuation warnings the Weathermen sent out in advance.
After the Vietnam War ended, the group’s activities petered out. In 1980 Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, another member, surfaced and turned themselves in to police. Because of illegal federal wiretaps, pending charges against Ayers for allegedly inciting a riot and conspiring to bomb government sites had been dropped. Dohrn pleaded guilty to separate charges of aggravated battery and jumping bail; she was fined $1,500 and given three years’ probation. Ayers and Dohrn, who had had two children together while in hiding, married in 1982.
Several other Weather Underground alums, including Kathy Boudin, along with some members of a group calling itself the Black Liberation Army, were involved in a bungled 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Nanuet, N.Y., in which a security guard and two policemen were killed. Ayers and Dohrn have never been publicly tied to the incident, which took place after they had turned themselves in. Dohrn was jailed for seven months for refusing to provide a handwriting sample to the grand jury investigating it.
Dohrn is now a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Locally, Ayers’ radical past hasn’t been much of an issue. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet wrote last spring that it “was no big deal, or any deal, to any local political reporters or to the editorial boards of the Sun-Times or [Chicago] Tribune.” Ayers was named a Chicago citizen of the year in 1997 for his efforts in the field of education.
In Chicago, Ayers is seen less as a “terrorist” and more as a prodigal son of the local establishment. His father was a prominent corporate executive and civic leader. Thomas G. Ayers was president and chief executive of Commonwealth Edison, the electric utility that lights Chicago and northern Illinois. There is a residence hall named for him at Northwestern University, where he was a trustee for 30 years. Bill’s brother John Ayers, according to Education Week, headed a school-reform group called the Leadership for Quality Education, which represented business leaders’ interest in schools. John is now a senior associate of the Chicago-based National Association of Charter School Authorizers.
Despite the fairly mainstream life he lives now, though, Bill Ayers’ image took a hit with an article that appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Ayers was quoted in the lead paragraph as saying, ”I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.” The interview had been conducted earlier, in connection with the publication of Ayers’ memoir of his years as a fugitive. But when the quotes appeared on the same day thousands died at the World Trade Center and elsewhere, they enraged his critics.
Ayers called the story a deliberate distortion of his views. In a response on his blog, Ayers wrote:
Ayers: My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. …
I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength.
That’s hardly an apology, referring as it does to the U.S. role in the Vietnam War as “terrorism.” Ayers has maintained a public silence since then, refusing all requests for interviews.
Even so, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had kind words for him recently:
Daley (New York Times, Oct. 3, 2008): He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally. … This is 2008. People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.
What Kurtz – and McCain in his Web ad – considers “radical,” other observers see differently, however. Veteran education reporter Dakarai I. Aarons, writing in Education Week, says the Chicago Annenberg Challenge actually “reflected mainstream thinking among education reformers” and had bipartisan support:
Education Week (Oct. 8): The context for the Chicago proposal to the Annenberg Foundation was the 1988 decentralization of the city’s public schools by the Republican-controlled Illinois legislature, a response to frustration over years of teachers’ strikes, low achievement, and bureaucratic failure. … The proposal was backed by letters of support to the Annenberg Foundation from Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, a Republican, local education school deans, the superintendent of the Chicago public schools, and the heads of local foundations.
Among the mainstream Chicago luminaries on Obama’s board was Arnold R. Weber, a former president of Northwestern University, who in 1971 was appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon as executive director of the Cost of Living Council and who later was tapped by Republican President Ronald Reagan to serve on an emergency labor board. More recently, Weber has given $1,500 to John McCain’s presidential campaign this year.
Others on Obama’s supposedly “radical” board included Stanley Ikenberry, a former president of the University of Illinois system; Ray Romero, a vice president of Ameritech; Susan Crown, a philanthropist; Handy Lindsey, the president of the Field Foundation of Illinois; and Wanda White, the executive director of the Community Workshop for Economic Development.
Kurtz originally claimed that Ayers somehow was responsible for installing Obama as head of the board, speculating in his “cover-up” article that Obama “almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers.” But after days of poring over the records, he failed to produce any evidence of that in his Wall Street Journal article. To the contrary, Ayers was not involved in the choice, according to Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation. She told the Times, and confirmed to FactCheck.org, that she recommended Obama for the position to Patricia Graham of the Spencer Foundation. Graham told us that she asked Obama if he’d become chairman; he accepted, provided Graham would be vice-chair.
The bipartisan board of directors, which did not include Ayers, elected Obama chairman, and he served in that capacity from 1995 to 1999, awarding grants for projects and raising matching funds. Ayers headed up a separate arm of the group, working with grant recipients. According to another board member, Ayers “was not significantly involved with the challenge after Obama was appointed.” One possible reason had little to do with Obama himself, but instead was related to cautions about conflicts of interest; the group was funding some of Ayers’ own alternative school projects.
And this is just an excerpt.