Ayers Denial

I am constantly aggravated by how the media writes about Barack's association with Bill Ayers. Here's one of thousands of such examples, taken from today's Boston Globe in an op-ed from Scot Lehigh, a sometimes fair commentator:

With things moving Obama's way, the McCain-Palin campaign has apparently decided its best shot at beating Obama is to try to delegitimize him on character issues. That explains Palin's ludicrous attempt to turn Obama's regrettable but distant relationship with former violent extremist William Ayers into a case of "palling around with terrorists."

Are these people deliberately misrepresenting the Obama/Ayers relationship, are they too lazy too look into it, or are they so biased they can't see the obvious? If the connection with Ayers is regrettable while being distant, why not look into the powerful evidence that it's not actually distant?

At age 34 Barack was made the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a group founded by Bill Ayers. Barack had no experience in the education business, and was just a couple of years out of law school in the early stages of his uneventful law career. Why in the world did Barack get this gig? And wasn't the Annenberg credential essential to his run for the senate the following year?

Even the right leaning Union Leader of Manchester, New Hampshire repeats the cliche argument about Ayers' relationship to Barack.

Barack Obama's political career was launched in the home of William Ayers, a left-wing terrorist who spent the 1970s running from the FBI. Ayers was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a domestic terror organization that bombed the Pentagon, police departments and the homes of government officials. In a 2001 New York Times interview, Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Not only did Ayers host the house party that launched Obama's political career, but he and Obama served on a nonprofit board together for three years.

The point isn't that Ayers did a fundraiser for Barack, or that they were on the board of the Woods Foundation together. The point is to ask - how did these things come to pass? Did Ayers hold the Obama fundraiser because he had seen Barack in the neighborhood? Did they work on the Woods board by accident? These events are significant in that they indicate a pre-existing relationship between the two men, one that runs deeper than Barack's brush-offs own up to. News organizations that are doing their jobs would smell the rat, and pursue it, right off the bat.

Imagine if John McCain's career had been launched at the home of a right-wing terrorist such as Timothy McVeigh. Do you think the media would be shrugging their shoulders?

Imagine if John McCain were closely associated with a right-wing group (like ACORN) that state officials say was actively committing widespread voter fraud running up to this election. Would the media ignore it?

Some bloggers (such as Gateway Pundit, and The World According to Chester) are doing the legwork that journalists in the mainstream media aren't interested in doing, placing Barack at Columbia while Bill Ayers was also living in New York City, and providing a possible link through professor Edward Said.

Barack and Michelle Obama attended several events in the Arab community with anti-Israel speakers including this event in May 1998 where Professor Edward Said gave the keynote speech. (Bill Baar's West Side)

Well, wouldn't you know... Pro-Palestinian Edward Said and Bill Ayers were also very close friends. In fact they were so close that Said wrote a forward to one of Ayer's anti-American books.

It was Barack's modus operandi when in New York to hang around with radicals.

Barack Obama admitted in his first book that he would "carefully" seek out radical and Marxist friends while at Columbia University:

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

It seems obvious that the inexperienced and unqualified Obama would not have been hired for an important education activist position, where he would have the power to dole out millions of dollars in grants to activist groups, if Ayers didn't have the specific goal of helping him launch a political career. Perhaps he had an arrangement with Ayers similar to the one he would make later with his leader in the state senate.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

Jones started handing legislation in progress to Barack - bills where much of the work had already been done - so that he could take credit for them when they passed.

O'REILLY: So how does Jones help Obama?

FREDDOSO: Jones helped Obama — of course, the relationship between the two, according to "Dreams From My Father," goes back even farther. They had run into each other when Obama was a community organizer. But Jones was able to help Obama become a senator. The way he put it himself in The New York Times was that Obama was a smart enough guy, but he needed somebody to give him credibility. And that's what Jones was able to give him. He was the Senate Democratic leader when Obama started and became the Senate president when Democrats took over the Illinois Senate in 2003. He made Obama the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, which put him in charge of issues affecting the Service Employees International Union, which had over 110,000 members in Illinois at the time, and that helped Obama to win the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

O'REILLY: All right. So he basically — he basically handed Barack Obama, and I mean handed him, a tremendous amount of power for a young state senator.

FREDDOSO: He also gave him — right, he gave him popular bills that, in many cases, Obama hadn't written, but he gave them to Obama to carry on the floor. The great example was the 1998 ethics bill that Obama — I think often exaggerates his role in — but that was a bill that Jones designed specifically.

O'REILLY: OK. So Jones put him front and center, allowed Barack Obama to build up his credibility and resume...

FREDDOSO: Yes.

Perhaps mainstream media folk, who are paid to contemplate and investigate such things, might look into whether Barack had formed a similar partnership with Bill Ayers. There are enough Ayers Deniers out there already.