Details about Barack Obama’s days at Columbia and the radical friends he had there are gradually coming out. One connection was Edward Said, the radical Arab activist and postmodern literary theorist, who was a professor there. We even have a photo of the two in earnest conversation:
From Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia? by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online, referring to another Arab radical funded by Obama and Ayers’ organization. He also fills in details about Ayer’s father’s law firm that Obama and Bernadine Dohrn worked for:
Obama and Ayers not only demonstrated their shared view of Khalidi by funding him. They also gave glowing testimonials at a farewell dinner when Khalidi left the University of Chicago for Columbia’s greener pastures. That would be the same Columbia from which Obama graduated in 1983.
Khalidi was leaving to become director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, assuming a professorship endowed in honor of another Arafat devotee, the late Edward Said. A hero of the Left who consulted with terrorist leaders (including Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah) and was once photographed hurling rocks at Israelis from the Lebanese border, Said was exposed by researcher Justus Reid Weiner as a fraud who had created a fictional account of his childhood, the rock on which he built his Palestinian grievance mythology.
We know precious little about Obama’s Columbia years, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that he studied under Said. In and of itself, that is meaningless: Said was a hotshot prof and hundreds of students took his comparative-lit courses. But Obama plainly maintained some sort of tie with Said — a photo making the Internet rounds shows Obama conversing with the great man himself at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.
Said had a wide circle of radical acquaintances. That circle clearly included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When they came out of hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers took education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights — before earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.
Said was so enamored of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant terrorist’s 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days — the book in which the haughty Ayers brags about his Weatherman past — with this glowing dust-jacket blurb:
What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity. Bill Ayers’s America and his family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows: all these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia or “second thinking.” For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading.
Sorry mess, indeed. For his part, Ayers is at least equally enthralled by Said, of whom, even in death, Ayers says “[t]here is no one better positioned … to offer advice on the conduct of intellectual life[,]” than the man who was “over the last thirty-five years, the most passionate, eloquent, and clear-eyed advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people.”
After they left Columbia, both Obama and Ayers went to Chicago: Obama to become a “community organizer” (the director of the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Gamaliel Foundation dedicated to Saul Alinsky’s principles for radicalizing society); Ayers, two years later, to teach at the University of Illinois. Diamond details how they both became embroiled in a major education controversy that resulted in 1988 reform legislation.
Ayers’s father, Tom Ayers, a prominent Chicago businessman, was also deeply involved in the reform effort. Interestingly, in 1988, while Obama and Ayers toiled on the same education agenda, Bernadine Dohrn worked as an intern at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin — even though she could not be admitted to the bar due to her contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist investigation. How could that happen? It turns out that Sidley was the longtime outside counsel for Tom Ayers’s company, Commonwealth Edison. That is, Ayers’ father had pull at the firm and successfully pressed for the hiring of his daughter-in-law.
The next summer, though he had gone off to Harvard Law School (another impressive accomplishment he prefers not to discuss), Obama returned to the Windy City to work as an intern at Sidley. Dohrn was gone by then to teach at Northwestern. A coincidence? Maybe (Diamond doesn’t think so), but that’s an awful lot of coincidences — and a long trail of common people, places and experiences — for people who purportedly didn’t know each other yet managed to end up as partners in significant financial and political ventures.
I can see why Obama wouldn’t want information about his Columbia school days. Ties with Arab radicalism would not go over well, though I hasten to say that Edward Said was a secularist, not a radical Muslim. He was a nationalist, like Yasser Arafat, and a sociallist, like Saddam Hussein. A national socialist.
Do I think Obama is a hard-leftist like Said or a violent revolutionary like Ayers and Dohrn? No. Like many college students in those days, he may have been at the time. He probably changed. But I would like him to explain his political philosophy.
Specifically, I’d like to know if he thinks anything is off-limits for government supervision and control. Does he believe that the cultural superstructure is class struggle? Does he believe that state power can construct a utopia? Does he believe that culture is nothing more than the exercise of power of one group over another? Those are the kinds of questions that don’t get raised in the debates or media interviews, but that is what we need to know.
40 comments ↓
That photo says nothing to me, in and of itself. For all we know, the guy is passionately telling Obama about his favorite soccer team. I do think that Obama needs to briefly address his early days to put the stories to bed.
For something new, a unflattering piece on John McCain is the feature story in the latest Rolling Stone. The article says nothing new, still it isn’t kind. McCain obviously has made a couple of enemies in his lifetime. To his credit, he’s already been open about all the criticisms and seems to be repentant about his mistakes.
good gosh dr vieth:
this is not “gradually coming out”. this ayers thing is being pushed hard by Palin every chance she gets and she is saying that obama is “unpatriotic and doesnt see the usa like ‘we’ do”.
none if this is new news. ALL mc cain has left is negative stuff to throw at obama to try to win.
it seems CRAZY that with the economic meltdown MCCain thinks that anyone is going to care about this. yet they have said on record that if the national attention stays focused on the economy McCain will lose.
when people fear losing their homes, mc cain focuses on trying to pin a terrorrist connection on obama.
does anyone here REALLY believe that obama endorses ANY views on terrorism or terrorist attacks on the usa by ayers or bin ladin?
i do agree that ayers is fair game. i would not shake the man´s hand if i were forced to meet him. but remember that the foundation obama and ayers colaborated on was funded by Annenberg. annenberg is far far from liberal. so the truth is just a little more complex than this last desparate attempt by the mc cain campaign.
is the only thing mc cain has left to attack obama? he can´t win the election on his own positives?
#1 TK
mcCain has all his life used the strategy of public repentance for his errors.
so he knows that confession requires forgiveness in our culture. and like obamas admission about youthful drug use, it disarms critics doesn´t it?
excerpt from the rolling stone article ….
“During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.”
Very insightful article here by David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th
Frank,
What in the heck did you link to? It’s a blog with spanking and Teletubbies! How about the actual source:
Make-Believe Maverick
I think that the evidence shows that Hussein *is* a hard-leftist like his allies and supporters. Unlike the young Ayers, he is pursuing the Alinsky/Gramsci model of how to bring about the Revolution rather than the old-fashioned Bolshevik model of the Weather Underground, though he clearly isn’t above using brown shirts to achieve his end through organized force.
CRB,
Great commentary on the market and on the two campaigns by David Brooks! Thanks for the link.
BTW, I don’t recommend that anyone click on that Prose before Hos link (#3) unless you are prepared for pretty bad stuff.
Oops, you truncated one of your sentences: “Details about Barack Obama’s days at Columbia and the radical friends he had there are gradually coming out … of the McCain campaign since it is polling so poorly and would like to surprise you in October with this old news.” I mean, we’re not seriously supposed to believe there’s an actual ongoing investigation, are we?
Again, this is as important (and worthy of your week-long investigation) as John McCain’s saying
Oh my goodness! McCain’s a 60s-era radical, too! Perhaps the week after that, we can talk Keating? Because, absent any direct mention of these topics by McCain, we must assume these two things are the most formative relationships he ever had, overwhelming anything recent McCain has done.
TK, sure thing!
Here’s another one sort of in the same vein:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson100608.html
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_10/015082.php
Calm down, folks. Perhaps not surprisingly, this line of attack no longer interests even the McCain campaign.
ok.guilt by association. cool.
so does Palin hate the us government and does she want alaska to succeed from the union and become an independent country?
fair and balanced. YOU decide….
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=eniG9l_7its
Of COURSE palin does not espouse the views of the founder of the alaskan independence party. how silly. but the evidence here is as strong as palin questioning obama´s patriotism and implying that he still associates with ayers and shares all of his radical views.
Anon @ #6: I was going to leave it, but I’ve had my fill. Your childish postering has to stop - and don’t make statements that “Hussein” is his middle name - we all know that your using the thinnest “guilt-by-association” arguments imaginable, and unfortunately, it gives (don’t know if it does so accurately)a racial/ethnicist undertone to your writings, which was also seemingly visible in your uninformed posterings about Southern African politics last week. It doesn’t become a confessional Lutheran to indulge in this kind of rhetoric. Please stop?
#5 TK oops! My SINCERE applogies. thanks for pulling me outta the soup!”
Senator Obama allegedly won’t come clean about what he was thinking 20 years ago, but Governor Palin won’t even hold a press conference today. Do I have this right?
[…] hear that Obama supports Israel. The steady drip, drip, drip of his radical Arab/anti-Israel connections goes […]
Scylding - you’re spitting in the wind. Ignore him; most everyone else seems to.
As far as the article - it certainly shows that Obama and Ayers were working together and were in close contact on issues where they had very similar views. This is a concern more because of the way Obama is handling it, not because of anything found so far.
The way in which the campaign seems to be hiding from the Ayers/Khalid/Said association LOOKS like they are trying to hide something damaging. So far nothing has been found to suggest Obama supports the A/K/S views he was around, but the more he tries to completely dismiss the entire issue, the more suspicious he tends to be seen.
So what if Obama did work with Ayers and was even friends with him? The worry this SHOULD bring up is how much might Ayers have influenced Obama. That’s a bit different than guilt-by-association. I just care about what Obama’s views are, and how closely they may follow Ayers’ views, not whether he was ever friends with Ayers. If he was friends with Ayers but doesn’t support any of Ayers’ views, then who cares.
I do know Obama’s publicly espoused views and what he has supported in the past. I don’t like them, so I’m not going to vote for him, but the political tactic of G-by-A is, at best, a tenuous insight into Obama’s views. However, GBA is the standard practice of political fights on both sides, and it’s about all we can expect from either of them. Neither can we completely dismiss the issue just because GBA is being used. We can dismiss it when it’s been dealt with, and so far it hasn’t been dealt with that I can see.
Certainly, Obama and Ayers had/have areas of agreement in their views as can be seen by their multiple areas of overlapping history, but extending that with GBA to imply Obama automatically supports Ayers’, Khalid’s and Said’s terrorist sympathies is nonsense.
However, it does open up the possibility that maybe Obama does/did, and the Obama campaign isn’t handling it very well. Campaigns do all sorts of dumb things, though, and Obama’s certainly isn’t alone in that regard. Maybe there’s nothing, maybe there’s something. Keep digging until a fuller story is shown.
FW, tODD, you don’t think Obama’s political philosophy is important? You don’t care about knowing to what extent he agrees with the hard left? You think we shouldn’t worry about that, and just concentrate on “issues”? I am astonished that you wouldn’t think that what a candidate believes is important.
I’m not talking about guilt by association. Yes, that is about the only way the McCain campaign–with which I’m getting increasingly frustrated–is taking it. So now McCain can be dismissed even more as being “negative.”
I’m looking for substance here, trying to find the ideas behind the candidates. That is far more important than some policy-wonk proposal that may or may not work to address the “issues.”
I would not have thought that the archives of a library in Chicago which had to be forced by court order to reveal those archives on Obama would be considered part of the McCain campaign.
We now know that, in spite of Obama doing all he could to erase the evidence (helped by the Associated Press, by the way), Obama was a member of the New Party, a radical left-wing group trying to move the Democrat Party left.
We know about his campaign’s fascistic techniques:
” * conservative talk radio attacks by flooding the station with hostile phone calls,
* attempting to intimidate donors to McCain’s campaign, (with threats of lawsuits for daring to support him)
* protesting to the Attorney General’s office about anti-Obama ads,
* quasi-terrorist tactics for obstructing the Republican convention,
* using ACORN to clone existing voters, resurrect dead ones, and invent fictitious ones,
* paying out street money to “get out the vote” on election day,
* charges of racism when anyone (even William Safire) dares to criticize Obama,
* using 527 satellite groups to spread preposterous rumors, such as the ones about Palin’s baby,
* Fabricating racial slurs supposedly uttered by Palin,
* setting up phony websites to smear McCain and Palin, and
* planting phony exchanges in question-answering websites.”
Not including the Obama Youth Brigades we’ve seen on Youtube, and the attempt to use law enforcement officials to arrest and under color of law, harass opponents of Obama.
We also know how the Obama campaign through Netroots coordinates a group of bloggers to harass and troll at conservative blog sites, such as this one.
This is the change Obama is actively demonstrating that he wants to bring to America. How can -anyone- want that?
Scylding, try sticking to truth. My sources on the situation in South Africa were unimpeachable. We only have your opinion otherwise. I’m fed up with your interference in our politics and your personal attacks.
Cut and paste that from Kos, Jonathan? It doesn’t sound like your “voice.” You know that isn’t even remotely true. Did the press cover Palin’s kindly but effective come-back to a heckler? No. But they did when Hillary did something similar a year or two ago.
Veith (@18), of course I think “Obama’s political philosophy is important”. I just think this is a goofy way of going about discovering it, akin to playing a record backwards to find out what evil beliefs a band really has, when all one has to do is listen to the actual, forward lyrics to get an idea.
“I am astonished that you wouldn’t think that what a candidate believes is important.” Oh please. You can’t just make any accusation and then say that everyone must pursue this accusation to its end or else they don’t care what that candidate truly believes. Especially when none of us here is able to actually provide any more information. than what is already being circulated. And most especially when that accusation is clearly being pushed by an opponent at the last hour when the opponent is doing poorly, having largely ignored the “important” issue in the preceding months.
I mean, what, should I be concerned that you’re not truly interested in what McCain believes because you’ve ignored his admitted ties to the SDS? (For the record: I’m not concerned about you on that. Apparently, you actually are worried about me. So it goes.)
Yes, I too would like to know the answers to the questions you ask in the last paragraph of your entry — for both candidates (I’d especially like to know McCain’s answer to “Is anything off-limits for government supervision and control?” vis-a-vis government bailouts, surveillance, etc.). But I don’t think the way to go about discovering the answers is to circulate stories with insinuations, associations, and spurious demands for evidence to the contrary, all provided by the opponent’s campaign a month before the election.
The only people that benefit from your asking this question in this way is the McCain campaign. It would seem that their intent, rather than to actually learn anything about Obama, is merely to try and tag Obama with as many smears as possible to bring him down. They’re smart people — they know that any answer from Obama to the tune of “I did know and work with him, but …” would be edited at the comma and circulated as further evidence of Barack Hussein Obama’s desire to, oh, I don’t know, bomb Mount Rushmore or something. As such, I think from a purely political point of view, Obama’s best option is to ignore this gambit — after all, it worked before when McCain “suspended” his campaign.
And by throwing in this whole Maybe Obama’s Secretly A Nazi Because He Hasn’t Explicitly Provided Evidence To The Contrary That He’s Not Exactly Like Some People He Knew as a framework for your legitimate questions, you discredit the actual issue you say you want to learn more about.
Dr Vieth:
“I’m looking for substance here, trying to find the ideas behind the candidates. That is far more important than some policy-wonk proposal that may or may not work to address the “issues.”
“vieth associates with known unrepentant homosexuals (lets add that our contact was over 10 years ago…) and gives them room to push their agenda on his site. we conclude from this that he therefore does not see things the same way we do.”
this is what palin is doing to obama. it is wrong and sinful.
silliness. evil. there is not a direct question to you on this. there is a statement of fact based on a dubious association. where is the direct question in this, and would the person asking this question, framed in this way, appear to mean well? it might be best to ignore it? is there something that you would need to “come clean” on here? or is this like the question “when are you going to stop beating your wife?” except that there IS no question here, only innuendo and GBA.
what nonsense!
and what about palin and her husband then being actively involved with an alaskan separatist organization founded by a man who said literally that he hates the usa government so much he wants to be buried in canada? and mc cains past ties with the sds? I am not seriously asking you dr vieth. but these questions are at least as valid and “important” as you put it. are they not?
where is the balance here, and WHY is the ayers thing resurfacing NOW. it is not like some new info has surfaced recently or like this is an ONGOING investigation…tell me I am wrong here…
dr vieth:
If palin or mccain or surrogate were to ask obama a direct question on how ayers has affected his “ideas” or how he has ideas in common with ayers (which they have yet to do..) that would resolve nagging doubts that obama might be harboring secret radical “ideas”,
what exactly should that question or questions be?
What are the plausible secret ideias that you seriously and sincerely are deeply troubled and concerned that obama might be harboring?
note that obama also was a prof at the university of chigago, a liberal bastion if there ever was one, and he gets high praise (very high!)
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/open_university/archive/2008/06/12/obama-the-university-of-chicago-democrat.aspx
from conservatives there. Might he secretly have ultra conservative “ideas”? or maybe he just works and collaborates well with others even if he does not agree with them? and is that not a virtue we want in a president. really now!
what is your answer dr vieth?
@21 & 22. Here’s a liberal defense for you. FW at least spell Veith’s name right! (some liberals would even tell us that my statement proves Obama is right and McCain is the devil).
Basically, Frank, I want to know if we are electing a communist. That may sound 1950s, retro-McCarthyite, but I think this is a legitimate question. Let me put it differently and in a more up to date term that reflects the political theory of Ayers and Alinsky: Are you, Mr. Obama, a post-Marxist? (That version sees culture in terms of the conflict between groups and races rather than economic classes.) Why would that be an inappropriate question?
#24 Veith
“Are you, Mr. Obama, a post-Marxist? (That version sees culture in terms of the conflict between groups and races rather than economic classes.) Why would that be an inappropriate question?”
Would this speech of Senator Obama work to give you any comfort here?
What you describe as post marxist actually looks to me as a rather exact template for Karl Rove´s strategies. (Please believe that I am being sincere here and not baiting you1) You describe a stragegy that basically boils down to “us versus them”. Tell me where I am wrong. This was always the problem i had with President GW Bush´s world view. after 9/11 he said that we would go out and get the “bad guys”. my former pastor´s take on that, which I agreed with because it was based on the recognition of original sin, was that he would have to aim his guns at all of us with that statement.
Rove: Culture war. Us versus Them. fear. division. NOT looking for common ground. wedge issues.
Isn´t a politicians most valuable asset the ability to get people who radically disagree with one another to work towards a common goal? To look at a problem the same way?
Rove and Bush seem to believe in democracy. If they can get enough votes,it is righteous for that 51% to dictate to the 49% and be antagonistic towards them.
I believe that if Obama is elected, he WILL be mindful that he only had a little over half the population vote for him.
I was president of a Lutheran congretation that exploded under my watch because the voters there voted in a way that made sense to me, but at the same time alienated a good portion of the congretation. I regret that I did not counsel my congretation to hold off on a vote and try to win over those who so adamantly opposed the majority. I have a dim view of majority rule. The opposite of this is the Rule of Law. I DO believe that Obama is in tune to this.
Senator Biden relates a story of how he was attacking Jesse Helms character, and senator Kennedy asked him how he would feel if he knew that Helms had adopted children with disabilities. Biden responded that he would feel like a jerk. He then said that he learned at that point never to question another politician´s character or motives. This sounds so very right to me.
Palin´s message lately has been that “Obama is not one of us, he does not look at the usa like we do.” us versus them. when her supporters scream from the crowd “terrorist!” “traitor!” “kill him!” she should be stopping her speach dead and confront those people. But the point of her comments seem to be to make people afraid of obama like he has some hidden agenda.
It is working. Look at your comments. I am surprised at this given my sincere and great respect for you and your intellectual integrity.
Let me know what you think about this speech. It seems do very directly address your concerns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU
and then watch this video to show the passions of a democratic black woman donna brazile on this whole issue….
http://jezebel.com/5059945/donna-brazile-is-not-going-to-the-back-of-the-bus
Anon @ #19: Your sources told you about 1 attack, which I never denied.
But you said the following: SA invaded Swaziland and Lesotho. #1 is completely false. #2 is misleading - it was a limited military intervention, in conjunction with Botswana, at the request of the Lesotho government, to prevent a military coup. You characterised the Xhosa nation as “thugs”, and in complete control of the ANC. Wrong on both - the first is plainly racist, and the second is also wrong - the new leadership of the ANC is Zulu.
You declared that Mandela personally took up a gun and shot protesters during the Shell House shooting. Up to now, we only now that some security guards shot at IFP protesters. You slandered a venerable man.
You again and again use the “Hussein”, or Baraq, spelt with a q, when referring to Obama, which deries from cheap racist politics, as started by Fox News. It is racist, because it tries to paint Obama as an Arab. Why do I say this? There are lots of Christians in the Arab world as well - think Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt. So the name Hussein doesn’t imply Moslem at all (Sadam ran a secular regime). Thus your propagandistic use of Baraq Hussein Obama boils down to patent racism, pure and simple.
I came from a country that has been devastated by racism, and I have been personally affected. Excuse me if I’m a bit touchy on the matter.
You say you are fed-up with my interference? What “interference”? That I as a non-American dare comment on American issues? I hope not.
Please, lets just discuss things in a more civilised, less sloganeering manner?
FW - you boil down too much. Every conflict can be boiled down to an “us vs them” situation, and it’s worthless to excuse someone’s “us vs them” tactics because of someone else’s tactics since EVERYONE uses them.
Veith asked about a very specific type of “us vs them” mentality - a specific type that is very tightly associated with racial and social prejudice, and the use of violent means to “rectify” situations.
Rove (along with everyone else) did/does use “us vs. them” and that’s a bad thing. But, different groups use u.v.t. to different extents, and the post-Marxist type is a particularly virulent and nasty sort with ties to extremist actions.
Yes, we should be concerned that Palin is so pumping uvt feelings, but those feelings haven’t been carried to the point of setting off bombs like the feelings of Ayers, Khalid, and Said.
By all means, Rove and Palin are wrong to be pumping up those sorts of feelings, but pardon me if I’m more worried about those same feelings in people who have supported setting off bombs to get their way.
Dr. Veith, due to Obama’s membership in the socialist New Party (which found the Democrat Party to be too conservative, not willing to go far enough, and unwilling to engage in Direct Action) and due to his past, his mentorship, his use of millions of dollars of Annenberg funds not to help children learn - he did have that option - but to teach them how to be radical socialist activists, and due to his Camp Obama’s which openly teach Saul Alinsky’s methods, I don’t think that there is any question that Obama is a State Socialist in the mold of Stalin, Mussolini, Heidegger and their fellow travelers whom you once wrote a book about, 70 years ago.
Scylding; you first.
(calling my words ’sloganeering’ is an example of sloganeering, is it not?)
Anon - you’re priceless! And I’ll leave it at that.
#27 webmonk
so if i am hearing you right , the difference between rove and the post marxists is a matter of degree. the post marxist aim is to bring things to violence.
am i hearing you right?
the part about “everyone does it” deeply disturbs me. ´
one thing that i liked about obama is that he says that personal attacks and negative politics need to end because we wont trust the integrity of politicians who get elected that way.
the part i liked best about that was that he then added that he himself was and at times continued to be complicit in all of that.
that is the proper christian attitude. seems to me.
I would think that our attitude should be.. ok the OTHER side does it, but I will scream and holler at my own candidate and very verbally distance myself from my own candidate when he does those things….
You will notice that I do that here. The response I hear from alot of folk here is “…but your candidate is no better” I have yet to hear “yes mc cain lied or he ran an ad that was clearly wrong!” you have all heard that from me about obama.
i would be curious as to why you think this dynamic exists among republicans webmonk , that they need to defend their candidate as though he can do no wrong.
#30 what I miss seeing from republicans and conservatives is a consistent “we are part of the problem” “we are no better than…”
usually what i hear is about the “barbarians at the gate” circle the wagons. us descent folk vs “those people”
as a gay man, well…
I find it refreshing to hear a politician admit to being complicit and part of the problem. that is why i used to like mc cain. but now I am thinking that that was a persona he created. it is easy to do the right thing when it brands you as a maverick and gets you political capital. it takes character to keep your pledge of no negative campaigning when you see that you are losing an election. I am not seeing this character in mc cain these days. sad for me actually. I have always thought that he was one of the more decent republicans.
#30 webmonk
when i hear people respond to palin´s message with “kill him!” , “terrorrist!” , “Traitor!” and palin does not stop her speach and confront those people…..
this sounds just like the radicals you describe webmonk. and if obama gets assasinated because of the frenzy being whipped up?
did you watch the link i posted webmonk? does that speech sound like what you and veith are afraid he might be? I dont see how you can reconcile his speech with those concerns.
get back at me. please.
so what about sarah palin giving the keynote address in 2008 for the alaskan independence party, founded by a man who hated the usa and wanted independence for alaska?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/alaskan-independence-part_b_133261.html
obama, in a recent interview, used the word “heinous” to describe the acts of ayers that took place when obama was 8 years old.
what stronger word would he need to use to distance himself from ayers?
very recent obama video responding to the ayers question
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWvirhXWkAs
@33 A ‘welcome to town’ speech not one of support. quit being a NY Times blow hard
fw, yes, everyone does the uvt thing. That’s a bad thing, plain and simple. Ayers, Khalid, Said, and the movements they are with take uvt and then add bombs and murder. The ideas of uvt don’t automatically lead to bombs - everyone uses the ideas, but far too many Marxist and Islamic groups decide that uvt isn’t enough and decide to start killing people. If Obama is or was involved with those sorts of groups, everyone REALLY needs to know about that.
Obama has tended to hide that area of his life. That’s not an indictment of guilt since politicians will do that whether they’re guilty or not. The youtube video you posted was typical of that - Obama didn’t quite lie, but he certainly set out to deceive about his interactions with Ayers. That’s standard practice for both parties. McCain does plenty of it too, as does Palin, and I don’t particularly hold it against any of them as far as ruling them out for voting.
However, that borderline dishonest statement from Obama about Ayers just makes the suspicion that there really might be even more than what has been discovered so far.
McCain lies. Obama lies. Palin lies. Biden lies a LOT. Just the fact that they lie doesn’t help anyone decide on who to vote for.
And, because I didn’t have time to write it last night …
Yes, I am highly disturbed by Palin’s failure when those shouts were made during her speeches. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t really care for McCain and Palin.
I’m even more worried, though, about what Obama might be hiding. The nasty excesses of a heated campaign have a much lower likelihood of being translated into extremist action than the longer-planned and historically radically active groups of Ayers, Khalid, Said, and Dohrn.
As there are more and more examinations into Obama’s past in that area, the more and more ridiculous Obama’s claims of “I was only 8 years old when …” sound. That sort of avoidance and hiding is very worrying when it’s about groups that celebrate bombings, riots and murders.
#38 webmonk
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/he_lied_about_bill_ayers.html
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/790/
FW, do you really think a biased fact checking service has all the answers? I’m really surprised that you’re drinking the kool aid of the Obama machines.
multiple sources have confirmed the Obama Ayers link. I guess we can thank Clinton was clouded our world to the point where we ask what does “is” mean.
Thanks be to God that Luther knew what IS meant. This IS my body.
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