Obama’s Weathermen Ayers and Dohrn revisited

It’s been awhile since RW/RBO posted about former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, that guy in Obama’s neighborhood that he used to know.

FYI (and to toot our own horn), RW’s role in the Barack Obama-Bill Ayers story was recognized by Big Media on April 18, 2008, when Joanna Weiss wrote her article, How Obama and the radical became news. Story highlights the path from blog to mainstream, that was published in the Boston Globe and picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

When Obama became a presidential contender, it was conservatives who picked up on the story. On Feb. 2, the conservative British writer Peter Hitchens mentioned Ayers in a piece titled “The Black Kennedy: but does anyone know the real Barack Obama?” in the London Daily Mail. A week later [on February 11, 2008], a mention of Ayers appeared in an anti-Obama blog known as Rezko Watch.

Soon, the story turned up in the mainstream American press: in the Bloomberg news service, a Washington Post blog, and the New York Sun.

Beginning on page 2, you will find the original February 11, 2008, RW article, followed by a few other posts plucked from the archive of articles about Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

First, though, regular visitor SV provides the link for the audio clip from Milt Rosenberg’s WGN Radio program Extension 72, in which he talked May 5, 2008, “with Sol Stern of the City Journal, Ed Lasky of the American Thinker, and Herb Walberg of the Hoover Institute, about the attempted radicalization of the education system.” In the 75:40 minute audio clip, Milt and his guests also discussed “Bill Ayers, who has been at the forefront of the radicalization effort.”

Next, blogger Bill Baar sends along this blog post by Tom Maguire of Just One Minute who wrote August 13, 2008 (see Maguire’s article for numerous links):

Just prior to the Pennsylvania primary Barack Obama was asked at a Democratic debate about his relationship with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama pretended that he was only casually acquainted with Ayers, describing him as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago…”. Hillary provided a bracing corrective, reminding people that the two men had served on a charitable board together, the Woods Fund of Chicago.

This exchange was newsworthy enough to provoke coverage in the Chicago Sun-Times, and the NY Times; earlier stories had sparked The “Fact Checker” at the Washington post.

And yet! All of these hard-working professionals gave Obama a pass for a very casual relationship with Ayers, citing the charitable board, some joint panel appearances, and a fund-raiser hosted by Ayers. The Barack Obama web site produced a classic of non-disclosure which confirmed these points but added nothing.

None of these sleuths discovered that there was quite a bit more to the story. Barack Obama and Bill Ayers worked together for several years on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an educational reform group co-founded in 1995 by Bill Ayers and chaired by Barack Obama. How did Obama forget this? Possibly because the group’s effort at public school reform were a failure.

And how did Ayers happen to tap Obama for the chairmanship of this group? Probably because they became acquainted in 1987, before Obama headed off to Harvard, in an earlier go at Chicago school reform.

So Obama has a relationship with Ayers that can be documented from 1995 and almost surely came into being in 1987. Jerome Corsi mentions the Annenberg Challenge in his book – any guesses as to whether Media Matters, the Times, or the WaPo will fact-check that? Obama either lied (by omission) or had an absurdly hazy memory at the debate and in the web-site follow-up – any chance the media will wonder what he is hiding and why?

The truth will out – Steve Diamond of Global Labor owns this story and I am riding in his wake – but the Times will be the last to find this news that’s fit to print.

Many of Steve Diamond’s articles on Ayers, as well as those by Pundita, John Batchelor, and WND’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Aaron Klein, can be accessed here in RBO’s archive or by clicking on their names in the category list.

Go to next page for the February 11, 2008, RezkoWatch article “Obama and domestic terrorist William Ayers”.

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