The new 90 second McCain ad trying to protray William Ayers and Barack Obama as part of some kind of secret terrorist network is painfully ridiculous. By this logic, everyone who has ever known or worked with this guy must be an anti-American terrorist.
Poppycock. About three minutes of Googling reveals a completely different picture.
In 1997, the city of Chicago awarded this "scary man" who happens to be a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Education with it's Citizen of the Year award. For the text of the ad and how every damn word of it is a LIE on the jump.
Here's the ad text. You can skip it if you want to.
Barack Obama and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Friends. They've worked together for years.
But Obama tries to hide it. Why?
Obama launched his political career in Ayers' living room.
Ayers and Obama ran a radical "education" foundation, together.
They wrote the foundation's by-laws, together.
Obama was the foundation's first chairman.
Reports say they, "distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in education."
When their relationship became an issue, Obama just responded, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood."
That's it?
We know Bill Ayers ran the "violent left wing activist group" called Weather Underground.
We know Ayers' wife was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
We know they bombed the Capitol. The Pentagon. A judge's home.
We know Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. .... I feel we didn't do enough."
But Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue.
The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor.
When Obama just says, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood."
Americans say, "Where's the truth, Barack?"
Barack Obama. Too risky for America.
The "radical 'education' foundation"?
It was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, funded by a $42 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, which Ayers had authored.
In October of 1993, billionaire publisher and personal friend of Ronald Reagan, Walter Annenberg, in a ceremony at the White House with then President Bill Clinton announced he was giving away $500 million in Challenge grants to improve public education. Annenberg appointed Varten Gregorian, president of Brown University (1989–1987); president of the Carnegie Corporation (1997– ) and former president of the New York Public Library to oversee the awarding of these grants.
In December of 1993, Ayers along with two other education reformers, Anne Hallett and Warren Chapman, met to begin working to bring together a group of others working on education reform to make up the Chicago School Reform Collaborative Working Group. Members of the Working Group then helped Ayers and Hallet write the grant proposal and negotiate its approval by pledging matching funds. Among those working with Ayers from this group were Adele Smith Simmons (president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 1989-1999), and Deborah Leff, president and CEO of America's Second Harvest (1999–2001); director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (2001–2006); and former director of public affairs at the Federal Trade Commission (1980–1981), and Patricia Albjerg Graham, president of the Spencer Foundation (1991–2000); and former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1982–1991).
An 8-member Board of Directors made up of representatives of organizations that had no vested interest in Annenberg money was recruited to approve grants, hire an executive director and project staff, and determine which funds could count towards the required $98.4 million match. The Board of Directors was handpicked by Adele Smith Simmons, president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, who was asked by Gregorian to "work with foundation leadership to create a board that would be diverse, including people from the community, business interests and civic leaders, and include no more than nine people."
At a meeting with Simmons and Patricia Albjerg Graham, Deborah Leff suggested that Barack Obama would make a good board chairman. After meeting and being impressed by Obama, Graham told Obama that she wanted him to be chairman of the Board of Directors. Obama said that he would agree to serve as chairman if Graham would be vice chairman, to which Graham agreed
Ayers DID NOT serve on the board of directors! He wrote the grant, but had nothing to do with Obama being on the board.
The board met once a month for the first six months and then quarterly thereafter. Obama stepped down as chair in 1999. The records of Chicago Annenberg Challenge are public records donated to the Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The final report is online.
I downloaded the 270 page final report on the successes and failures of the program. No where does the report say they, "distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in education." Sorry Sen. McCain. That would be a lie. The report does honestly say that there was little difference in improve between Annenberg and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. But they did learn a heck of a lot about how to improve schools, and that was the point.
Ayers and Obama did serve together on another board, The Woods Fund of Chicago, part of the Woods Charitable Fund which was established in 1941 as the philanthropic expression of the Woods family of Lincoln, Nebraska and later, of Chicago. Obama was on the board from 2000 to 2002, during which time the board met 6 time. Ayers still serves on the board.
Oooo Scary! Scary stuff.
Next up Obama launched his political career in Ayers' living room.
Um. No. The only part that the Ayer's living room played in Obama's early political career was a coffee the Ayers hosted for him when he ran for state senate. In 2006 I offered to host a coffee for someone running for our state house. I'd shook his hand once before then. Oh and I hosted a coffee for Howard Dean in 2003 in my living room. Even though I've never met the good doctor, does this mean he started his career in my living room? I don't think so.
And then we have the unrepentant domestic terrorist: We know Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. .... I feel we didn't do enough."
Wrong again Mr. McCain. While the New York Times article does quote him as saying that, it was taken out of context. Actually, according to Mr. Ayers in a letter to the editor of NYT,
Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.
And I would think that the McCain campaign would know all about how journalists can distort interviews.
But in fact, Ayers does have regret.
From a interview in the San Franscisco Chronicle back in 2001,
Ayers knows a thing or two about the consequences of terrorism; he used to practice a form of it. Once he and co-conspirers detonated a pipe bomb in a little-trafficked corridor of the Pentagon, knocking out the building's computer system for several hours.
As a rule, the Weather Underground took care to strike when buildings were empty and phoned in warnings ahead of time. Still, press Ayers on the point, and he'll admit that they took some chances worth regretting and that anyone could have blundered down the wrong stairwell and made a murderer of him.
"I'm 56 years old," he begins, speaking in impassioned paragraphs like the college teacher he is today, "so I have a world of regrets to point to. But what I don't regret is throwing myself into this effort to end this one particular war, to bring about some sense of peace and justice, with every fiber of my being. I don't regret that. I think we were restrained, and by 'restrained' I mean we tried very hard not to do the scenario you just imagined. Had we done it, it would've been indefensible. There would be no way to defend the killing of an innocent person, even though our goals were just."
And
When Obama just says, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.
"
Well, Ayers was a neighbor.
Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.
But the issue here is not what a great Mr. Ayers may or may not be, or if he did some dumb things when he a young man, not unlike a lot of other young men.
The issue is that John McCain is a LIAR!
I say, "Where's the TRUTH, John?"