Barack Obama received a valuable campaign contribution from the
New York Times on Saturday: a front-page piece reviewing
Obama's lengthy association with the ‘60s and ‘70s Weather
Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The Times' key sentence
asserted: "The two men do not appear to have been close."
The
Times' stamp of disapproval was all the rest of the media needed
to reject the idea that Obama's dealings with Ayers should
matter to voters, as Sarah Palin dared to suggest over the
weekend. ABC's David Wright on Sunday called Palin's attack on
Obama "incendiary," while CBS's Bob Schieffer (moderator of the
final presidential debate on October 15) called it a "down and
dirty" move, adding that Palin "took after Barack Obama in a
style reminiscent of Spiro Agnew."
In an
item dated Sunday morning, AP writer Douglass Daniel
slammed Palin's attack as "unsubstantiated" and carrying "a
racially-tinged subtext....Palin's words avoid repulsing voters
with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the
false image of a black presidential nominee ‘palling around’
with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience
that he doesn't see their America?" Bill Ayers is white.
Also
on Sunday morning, CNN "truth squadder" Josh Levs rejected
Palin's charge as "false," apparently because she used the wrong
verb tense: "There is no indication that Ayers and Obama
are now ‘palling around'....Also, there is nothing to suggest
that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity." So while
Ayers' group bombed the Pentagon and Capitol, it's time to
forgive and forget?
National Review Online contributing editor Stanley Kurtz fought
an attempt by Obama allies to block his access and actually
looked at the relationship between Obama and Ayers during the
four years that Obama served as board chairman of a foundation
Ayers helped found, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). "The
group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community
organizers and radical education activists,"
Kurtz exposed in a September 23 Wall Street Journal op-ed.
"Documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr.
Obama were partners in the CAC....As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was
lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical
circle."
As when the Jeremiah Wright story hit last spring, the liberal
media seem loath to ask Obama difficult questions about his
associations with America-hating radicals — all their toughness
is reserved for Obama's opponents.
For more, see the
October 6 CyberAlert.
