WingRight

FOB - Friends of Barack - Part 2

Here’s a prediction, the relationship that Barack Obama had with 60’s domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is going to swamp the Obama campaign between now and the election.

Obama and the campaign have assiduously attempted to minimize the Ayers connection, most notably with Obama’s “a guy in my neighborhood” characterization of his relationship with Ayers.

First, a little background on Ayers. He was a founder of the Weather Undgerground (not completely unbiased description here), an anti-war, anti-capitalism group. The Weather Underground was an extremely violent, most notably successfully bombing the United States Capital (something Al Quaeda tried, but couldn’t pull off), conducting an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in which the driver and two policement were killed and blowing up a Greenwich Village townhouse that it had converted into a bomb facory. Several members of the Weather Underground are still in prison for charges related to the Brinks case. Rudy Guilani was the US Attorney in charge of many of these prosecutions.

Ayers plead guilty to federal charges of possessing explosives, but a judge suppressed wiretap evidence that would have supported serious felony charges, potentially including murder. Ayers has bragged that he got away with bombings.

Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn, also a Weather Underground founder, who, with Ayers, spent 11 years as a fugitive, including 4 on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, avoiding arrest warrants for bombing activities. Due to problems with the admissibility of evidence (a lot of that was going around the family), she plead guilty to lesser charges and spent seven months in jail.

It is interesting to note that, while Obama attended Columbia, he lived 3-4 blocks away from where Ayers and Dohrn were hiding from authorities. There are no witnesses who have states that Obama met Ayers during this time period, but the Obama campaign will say virtually nothing about Obama’s years at Columbia.

After coming out of hiding, Ayers eventually became a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His principle area of expertise is in the use of schools to teach radical political attitudes. Among other things, he has recently traveled to Venezuela to meet with Hugh Chavez and praise the Venezuelan “peoples revolution” and the way that Chavez has radicalized the school system.

Ayers was the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and (although Obama denies it), recruited the then-unknown Obama to be the president and chairman of the board of the CAC. CAC was supposed to improve student performance in the Chicago schools. Obama was the only member of the board who was not either a well-known education expert or a prominent Chicago leader. The CAC distributed over $160 million during its existence.

Obama and Ayers worked for seven years with the CAC during which time, Obama approved large ongoing grants to other Ayers organizations. The Annenberg Foundation, the source of $50 million in grants to CAC, conducted an evaluation of the activities of CAC in improving student performance in Chicago schools and found that the $160 million did no good whatsoever.

A number of investigators (including none from the mainstream media) are looking into the Obama/Ayers connection. A recent trove of CAC documents was recently released by the University of Illnois-Chicago library and some very interesting facts are coming to light. One interesting fact is that the former executive director of the CAC, after being contacted by the Obama campaign, tried to prevent the release of the documents.

The website, Global Labor and Politics, created by Steve Diamond, a law school professor, has taken a leading role in uncovering the Obama/Ayers relationship. It is interesting to note that Diamond is very much a liberal and an advocate for organized labor, but is greatly concerned with the Ayers brand of radicalism. He points out that Ayers’ use of the CAC funds involved supporting groups that engaged in harmful teacher bashing in the Chicago schools.

Following is a quote from one of Diamond’s posts:

Thus, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was far more than just a chance for Ayers to engage in “radical” efforts to raise the political consciousness of young students. It was that but it was much more - it was a front in an important battle for control of the Chicago Public School system. In fact, according to the Ken Rolling, Daley himself tried to wrest control of the Annenberg grant money away from Ayers and Obama.

The Challenge was radical, but not the right wing’s simplistic view of “radicalism.” Rather it represented an authoritarian and bureaucratic agenda - a desperate attempt to foist upon troubled classrooms a “politically correct” curriculum, yes, but more importantly to use parents as canon fodder in a battle to control teachers and administrators. This authoritarian approach is entirely consistent with Ayers’ long held views as he has consistently sided politically with the most undemocratic regimes available, including most recently that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

And at Ayers’ side the entire time during this battle was his comrade-in-arms, Barack Obama, who served as President and Chairman of the board of directors of the Challenge.

Another key investigator is Stanley Kurtz, who has written on Obama/Ayers for the Wall Street Journal and National Review. Kurtz works with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where you can find links to his articles.

I said earlier that the MSM has ignored this story, and that is largely true. However the Chicago Tribune today had an article on the attempted suppression of the CAC records in the UIC library.

I don’t think this story can be successfully suppressed through the election. If it comes out in the form the documents appear to support, Obama’s credibility will be substantially impaired because of his direct lies concerning his relationship with Ayers and he will be inextricably linked with a violent domestic terrorist.

Here’s a more recent photo of Ayers, taken for an August, 2001, article in Chicago Magazine entitled No Regrets:

Tags: Ayers, Liberal Fascism, Obama Problems //