Ayers is plainly peripheral so I'm just not that interested in him. Googling him produces vast amounts of contradictory **** mostly on blogs and comment areas: not original sources. Like I said, all I know is what I read (skimmed, mainly) here. Your post is by far the simplest I've seen to read, at that.
However FactCheck.org seems to be pretty neutral, at least it seems to point out errors/lies/etc from both sides, and this article coincides with what you say. mostly, but with some key expansions.
factcheck.org
the CAC $50 million grant and Obama's appointment to be its board president happened in 1995, well before he became a "busy senator, standing for president", before he was even busy voting "present" in the state legislature, and before Ayers hosted a fundraiser at his home to launch Obama's political career.
OK, so this is then many years before Ayers spoke on a platform with Chavez. So that unsavoury link is not an issue.
Brumar had said "a few years back" so I assumed he meant something 2-4 years ago, when Obama was already a senator, and possibly after that link.
Now if someone who's an established professor some years your senior, asks you to chair a foundation to distribute money, in a respectable cause close to your heart, I'd say that's an honour you would welcome.
But anyway, from the link above:
McCain says in an Internet ad that the two "ran a radical 'education' foundation" in Chicago. But the supposedly "radical" group was supported by a Republican governor and included on its board prominent local civic leaders, including one former Nixon administration official who has given $1,500 to McCain's campaign this year. Education Week says the group's work "reflected mainstream thinking" among school reformers. The group was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, started by a $49 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, which was established by the publisher Walter Annenberg, a prominent Republican whose widow, Leonore, is a contributor to the McCain campaign.
Seems a harmless cause to me. If it's mainstream thinking then why would you worry? It sounds normal, and if support was so overtly bipartisan it might be radical but surely in a good way.
And if this CAC has trusted Ayers as one of the three original organisers, and they then selected Obama to oversee distribution, why on earth would he (or anyone else) have queried their right to do so? It's their money.
And why would Obama have queried Ayer's position or respectability? If he even recognised the name, from - what - news reports from 25 years in the past, when he was maybe 9-10? It's just not a connection that would come to mind, surely. Even in the remote chance it did ring a bell it's pretty obvious Ayers was quite accepted in civilised society in 1995, whatever he'd done earlier; so (refer to earlier discussions on the acceptance of former terrorists) Obama isn't going to make enemies by standing on an extremely high-handed point of principle, especially as it would achieve nothing else...
As for the acceptance of "admitted and unrepentant terrorists", well Ayers does sound in that respect like a nasty piece of work. And I'm happy to reiterate that terrorists deserve a painful death and nothing better.
But equally I see that if I were a politician I could hardly refuse to recognise, for example, the president of Sinn Fein
en.wikipedia.org
or the prime minister of Israel
en.wikipedia.org
simply on the grounds that they were murderous terrorist c***s, in fact led such groups, and are unrepentant about it. Now IMO they deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered while still conscious, and I'd love to consign them to acid baths and watch them dissolve, but society has decreed otherwise for them independent of my feelings.
So it is with Ayers, except he's less prominent in every way. |
