The Vetting Begins
By Bud White on August 22, 2008 at 9:30 AM in Bernardine Dohrn, Current Affairs, Debates, George Stephanopoulos, Hillary Clinton, Terrorism, Weather Underground, William Ayers, Woods Fund
The American Issues Project, a conservative 527 group, is running the following ad in Michigan and Ohio.
The strength of the ad is its accuracy. Unlike the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s ads, there is no available counter-argument. Bill Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist. Obama’s political career was launched at Bill Ayers’ house. Obama did serve on the Woods Fund board with Ayers. The ad hits Obama hardest on his self-proclaimed good judgment. As law professor Steve Diamond states, Obama wasn’t just friends with Ayers, he wasn’t just a guy in the neighborhood, he was Obama’s benefactor for 20 years.
Obama’s slide from national goodwill coincided, not coincidently, when Americans began to learn more about him. It occurred on April 16, 2008, when George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson did something unique that night, they questioned Obama about his troubling associates. The liberal blogs and the MSM were in hysterics; bias, they screamed. Rick Hertzberg, writing in The New Yorker, complained that:
Yet for most of the next hour Gibson and Stephanopoulos limited their questioning to the following topics: Obama’s April 6th remark about “bitter” small-towners; whether each candidate thinks the other can win; the Obama family’s ex-pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. … Obama’s failure to wear a flag lapel pin; and Obama’s acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground. And the problem wasn’t just the questions’ subject matter, or the fact that all but the last had been thoroughly raked over already; it was their moral and intellectual vacuity.
Regardless of what Hertzberg considers moral and intellectual vacuity, it’s incontrovertible that Obama is good friends with a terrorist and, because of Ayers’ past, many of us consider that immoral. What really happened during the debate in April was that Obama experienced a real vetting (which was mild next to what Hillary had been subjected to in previous debates), and then Clinton cleaned his clock in every important contest after Americans learned of his despicable friends and watched his evasive answers. But of course no one was allowed to criticize Obama then; it was in such bad taste to question The One.
Although Hertzberg downplays Obama’s association with the odious Ayers by making his views seem like something from the past, the picture below from 2001 shows his hatred for the United States continues to today:
In May, Larry Johnson wrote that:
if you are involved with politics you ought to understand that if you hang with, work with, and politic with a guy who is an unrepentant terrorist that it might reflect badly on you. In fact, you should put some distance between yourself and said terrorist.
Sensible advice for a politician. Because, Johnson continues:
The only doubt is whether the Democrats will insist on finding out the truth first or will let the Republicans serve them a steaming pile of crap come the fall. And while the image of Bill Ayers gleefully stomping the American flag makes the rounds, Obama’s vain attempt to portray himself as a new kind of non-politician will be stomped into oblivion.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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