Today’s New York Times examines the hard right attempts to smear Barack Obama with the political past of Bill Ayers, and came to the same conclusion that we reached here at Edwize last June:
…the 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, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
…Even some conservatives who know Mr. Obama said that if he was drawn to Ayers-style radicalism, he hid it well.
“I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we were together at Harvard Law School,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Mr. Obama and who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush. Mr. Berenson, who is backing Mr. McCain, described his fellow student as “a pragmatic liberal” whose moderation frustrated others at the law review whose views were much farther to the left.
Don’t expect the smears to stop before November, especially as the prospects for the McCain campaign appears more and more desperate.
Tagged: election '08, New York Times
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6 Comments:
1 Redcatcher
· Oct 5, 2008 at 2:51 pm
…and still the mainstream media has refused to ask the senator how many times Ayers has visited his home or gone out with him and his wife socially.
2 R. Skibins
· Oct 9, 2008 at 12:45 am
My school has just had $500K cut from its budget and is facing another 2.5% in cuts. Three teachers and a paraprofessional are losing positions, and two school aides are being laid off. Meanwhile, Klein has awarded $150 million + in no-bid contracts, spends $50 million a year on consultants for “Quality Reviews” and millions more on school report cards when Albany and Washington already rates the schools. He has a squad of lawyers whose sole function is to find ways to deny tenure and circumvent it. He even has people on the payroll just to post pro-Klein messages on message boards and blogs!!
He pays millions on the New Teacher Project to hire thousands of Teaching Fellows,subsidizes their Master’s degrees, gives them a housing stipend, and half leave after three years! He has millions to do the same for the Leadership Academy, where even the dog catcher can become a principal just as long as they subscribe to his anti-union dogma. And now more educrats are being hired.
It’s time for William Thompson and Andrew Cuomo to launch full-scale audits and investigations. Also it’s time to end mayoral control of the schools.
3 R. Skibins
· Oct 9, 2008 at 12:48 am
Sorry. I posted the above on the wrong thread. It’s late at night.
Barak Obama met William Ayers when Ayers already had been an assistant deputy mayor in Chicago and noted education professor. Obama knew him in this capacity when both served on the board of the Annenberg Challenge, as he was only a young child when Ayers was involved in the Weather Underground. It’s ironic how Sarah Palin is viciously attacking Barak Obama for ties to him considering her ties to the anti-American Alaska Independence Party, through adresses to the group, a videotaped thank you to the group, and being married to a card-carrying member who only gave up his membership when it suited her political ambitions. What hypocrisy.
4 Steve Diamond
· Oct 9, 2008 at 3:41 am
And as I said here last June the reality is quite different than the Obama Cam…oops I mean the New York Times wants you to believe:
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/10/ayersobama-update-david-blaine-award.html
5 R. Skibins
· Oct 9, 2008 at 8:58 pm
People are entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts. Anyone can write anything on a blog.
6 Steve Diamond
· Oct 11, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Indeed, and the Times refused to let its readers know about the detailed written contemporaneous records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that demonstrate that only Bill Ayers had the legal authority to appoint the first board members of the CAC including Barack Obama.
Instead of telling their readers about the letters between Vartan Gregorian and Ayers, they rely instead on irrelevant chatter from two former foundation presidents 14 years after the fact.
Neither Pat Graham nor Deborah Leff had any legal authority whatsoever to appoint Obama. They only had an advisory role to Ayers and Anne Hallett who were the agents of the grant recipient, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative.
I provided the Times with the CAC letters between Ayers and Gregorian. They either wilfully and maliciously ignored them or did not understand their implications.
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