Family Fugitive

This is the end. The very last post I'll ever do on Barack's White Lies. But it is also the beginning. Barack's White Lies is moving, and evolving. Think of it as Change You Can Believe In. The new blog will be called, after an adjustment period, Real Clear Thinker. All future posts can be found at realclearthinker.com. Starting now.

Just because the election is over, don't expect people like Bill Ayers to be forthcoming regarding friendship with Barack Obama.

Ayers was on Good Morning America today, trying to make it seem that the history between he and Barack consists of little more than the two being neighbors. Ayers states, remarkably, that the first time he "ever really met him" was the day in 1996 that he held a fundraiser in his home for Barack.

The college professor also argued to "Good Morning America's" Chris Cuomo today that the bombing campaign by the Weather Underground, the group he helped found, was not terrorism.

The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the New York City Police Department in protest of the Vietnam War.

"It's not terrorism because it doesn't target people, to kill or injure," Ayers said.

Keep in mind that the year before the fundraiser, Barack was made the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an organization founded by Ayers that year, and a position for which Obama was immensely unqualified. They worked on the same floor of the same medium sized office building together.

Keep in mind, also, that in the release of his 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days," which Ayers is apparently out promoting, Ayers writes this:

"[W]e had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."

Notice he calls he and Barack "family friends," a deliberate attempt, it would seem, to tease people anew about the closeness that he and Barack maintain. If you're not convinced that this is a little bizarre, Ayers explanation for it certainly is. He claims the reason he called Barack a family friend in his book is because that's how the relationship was portrayed during the campaign.

"I'm talking there about the fact that I became an issue, unwillingly and unwittingly," he said. "It was a profoundly dishonest narrative. ... I'm describing there how the blogosphere characterized the relationship."

"I would say, really, that we knew each other in a professional way on the same level of, say, thousands of other people," he said.

Ayers has a detached manner, free of remorse, that makes him read as a psychopath in the interview, arguing that he's been unfairly demonized in an attempt to taint Barack with guilt by association.

"The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our government. ... I never hurt or killed anyone," Ayers said.

"Frankly, I don't think we did enough, just as today I don't think we've done enough to stop these wars," he said.

It seems to me that voters had a right to know the truth about their relationship, that it's up to us to decide whether Barack's association with Ayers was a valid campaign issue, and that Ayers is plainly misrepresenting the relationship.

Further, Barack lied about his friendship with Jeremiah Wright before the Ayers matter became part of the conversation, and the evidence indicates that he's being equally dishonest regarding Ayers.

Know Nothings

Are you feeling Bill's pain?

“It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.”

Poor Bill - life as the former bomber friend of a candidate for president was not easy!

Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.

Yup. He was cut off after he became Kryptonite to the campaign. Which means that until his name became part of the conversation they were in regular contact?

One night, Ayers recalled, he and Dohrn were watching Bill O’Reilly, who was going on about “discovering” Ayers’s 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire.” “I had to laugh,” Ayers said. “No one read it when it was first issued!” He said that he laughed, too, when he listened to Sarah Palin’s descriptions of Obama “palling around with terrorists.” In fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”

Oh, I see. When you gave Barack the job of his career, and had an office on the same floor of a small office building, and when you served on the board of the Woods Foundation, your relationship with Barack was like thousands of others in Chicago???

As we were getting ready to go, after an hour of front-stoop conversation, a neighbor came by and ironically reminded Ayers of the event that he and his wife held for Obama in 1995 when Obama was making his run for the Illinois state senate. "Everyone, including you, wants to have a coffee here," he joked to the neighbor. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do!”

That's right - I forgot about that fundraiser.

The Wright Vote

Are you thinking about Reverend Wright as you go to vote today?

$6 Million

Sorry - am I really posting this commercial for the third time? I believe so, but with good reason. It's a great ad, it's one that should have been running for weeks, and it could tilt the election to where it should be.

He built his power base in Wright's church. Wright was his mentor, adviser and close friend. For 20 years Obama never complained until he ran for President.

This weekend, the National Republican Trust is spending $6 million in TV buys for this one ad. Is it too little too late?

How Would I Know?

How would he know?

Sen. Barack Obama didn't know his aunt might be living illegally in the United States, as media outlets are reporting, his campaign said Saturday.

How would he know? He didn't know that Reverend Wright was a racist, and he spent 18 years going to his church.

He didn't know Bill Ayers was an unrepentant terrorist, even though Ayers was his mentor. So how would he know that his favorite Aunt was living illegally in Boston on the public dole?

Lying, Actually

Want to see a malicious campaign? Remember how Biden claimed a couple of weeks ago that Barack would be tested, like a young John Kennedy was, if he's elected. It was a shockingly stupid thing to say, but also something that you'd expect to hear out of a McCain supporter, not Obama's running mate. Look at the nasty trick used by Barack to try to escape responsibility for Biden's true words.

Biden did wrap up by saying that Barack would respond well to the threat, but that's not what he "actually" said. Here's what he actually said.

Barack has built great trust in his followers which he betrays on a daily basis. But they follow with religious ferocity, and their eyes no longer see.

Sirhan Ayers

It's starting to feel pointless trying to present facts supporting the obvious, but this Hannity and Colmes story on Bill Ayers slipped by me last week, and provides good corroboration of the sort of guy Ayers is, and the sort of people Barack embraces.

Palling Around with Dash

What is terrorism?

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

What friends of Barack Obama do we believe to have been involved in, or to have supported such activities?

• Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground and active bomber of U.S. government buildings.
• Rashid Khalidi - university professor and reputed former PLO spokesman.

Is it unfair, inaccurate or code to say that Barack is guilty of "palling around with terrorists?" Rashidi is a close personal friend. The evidence is strong that Ayers is a critical partner in Barack's career, but he has not been forthcoming with details, so we are left to speculate. But some, like Anil Dash at Dashes.com, are upset with Sarah Palin's use of the palling phrase - without, it seems to me, bothering to test its accuracy.

But a closer look at her deliberate use of vernacular and language reveals that she has gone far beyond any other candidate in vice presidential history in the dangerous and irresponsible implications of her attacks. She has phrased her attacks on Obama in a way that avoids accountability to the press while specifically addressing the subset of her audience who are most likely to advocate extreme actions against Obama.

The crux of the issue is simple:

1. Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".
2. Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party's platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.
3. George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
4. Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

...she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror.

This is, of course, is an appearance that only presents itself to some. That Barack has built his career while partnering with bizarre and bad people is not in doubt, nor is the fact that some engaged in terror or supported terrorist activities. Palin's statements are factual and fair.

She has done this knowing full well that she can retain plausible deniability thanks to the ambiguity of her statements as they'll be interpreted by the media, by her detractors, and by her more reasonable supporters.

It would seem that Mr. Dash is jumping to conclusions. It's a hazard of doing too much thinking and not enough assuming of the obvious. For starters, Dash's assertions fail the reality test. Did Palin succeed in throwing the press off course, or did she suffer attacks for her "palling around with terrorists" language? She was attacked.

Did anyone, besides Dash, that is, posit that she was really demanding that Barack be arrested and sent immediately to Gitmo? He's the first one I've heard suggest this. Has anyone, in response to Palin, made demands that Barack be arrested? Not that I've heard.

Dash goes on to explain the idea of Code Switching - think Oprah slipping into black vernacular to ingratiate herself with her target audience - to make her language more impactful to the chosen audience than proper English would be to the larger population.

Put simply, if Palin says "Barack Obama consorts with terrorists," she is making the assertion that he supports acts of violence against American citizens and the media will refute this obviously false assertion. If, instead, Palin says he "pals around with terrorists", she's used code-switching to mask the seriousness of the charge, obfuscating her meaning enough to get away with making an assertion that inevitably calls for the imprisonment or even assassination of a political opponent.

This clever use of language only hides Palin's meaning from members of the press. Because writers for traditional media are usually highly educated and pride themselves on their mastery of Standard American English, they can often look down on dialects like AAVE and North Central English. Instead these forms of language being seen as legitimate and interpreted in the social context where they've formed, they're dismissed as being the words of "people who don't even speak proper English!" In the cases where the ideas aren't outright dismissed, there is still rampant misinterpretation of meaning: Reporters wrongly see a term like "palling" as imprecise, when compared to a word like "consorting."

In my mind, consorting is simply not a word that people use and readily understand the subtleties of. It might carry more baggage than Dash assesses is delivered by palling. Palling is, after all, friendly and warm - consorting sounds legalistic and dangerous.

On top of this, by deliberately omitting the word "domestic" as a descriptor of "terrorist" after its initial mention in her speeches, Palin has amplified the recurring theme of "otherness" that the McCain campaign and its surrogates have pinned on Obama. There is an unequivocal attempt to assign a commonality of purpose and intent between Obama, his supporters and campaigners, and terrorists who would attack Americans.

Yes, if Barack only had hung out and planned his career with domestic terrorists, then we'd have nothing to fear! It's like how domestic flights are safer than international ones.

Sarah Palin's conduct has gone far past the bounds of decency, and far past even the most dangerous efforts of any previous candidate for such high office. This is an inexcusable, unforgivable, and unacceptable transgression and my belief is that she should be removed from consideration for the office of Vice President for her dangerous, unethical and unamerican display of irresponsibility.

This sort of obsessive analysis distracts the educated class, and allows the elite to miss the obvious flaws in Barack's candidacy - inexperience, youth, radicalism and the natural questions of judgment and character that arise from his long partnership with dangerous people such as Wright, Khalidi, Pfleger, Ayers, Rezko, Farrakan, etc. And, of course, there's his stated displeasure with the work of the Founding Fathers.

PS - is there a hidden message in Dash's obviously deliberate failure to properly capitalize un-American?

Sorry - it's contagious.

Here's a refresher course on how Barack used to brag about his Chicago Annenberg Challenge experience, which is omitted from his resume today.

Ayers Cares

O'Reilly's guy chases down Ayers, who exercises his right to remain silent. Proving how badly he wants Barack to win.

Wright didn't care - he talked. But Ayers cares.

Barack's Lines

Presidential politics is like making a movie. The candidate is the actor, his job is to deliver the lines written for him by the script writers. Politicians who don't get this, or have a conscience, don't do as well.

Barack is the first candidate, perhaps, to fully embrace this requirement of the TV era. Everything is a prop, every speech a hustle. His grandmother, his preacher, his mentors, they are all props when push comes to shove.

John McCain has a problem with this. He's an old fashioned man, built on dated ideas such as values and honor. So he's uncomfortable at debates when he is forced to recite lies.

Barack spews them with relish - with utter comfort. Unburdened by a sense of responsibility, he thinks only about performance while delivering his well memorized lines. He performs without flaw.

Barack lies about Bill Ayers, his mentor. He lies about Jeremiah Wright, his mentor. He covers up his connection to Tony Rezko, his most important money man during his Chicago years. He doesn't mention his job as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, his only managment credential.

Harry Smith: The rancorous tone of this campaign - I was with John McCain on Monday, and I said, 'Our poll data shows that it's actually hurting you.' He says, 'I wouldn't be doing it if he weren't doing it.'

He lied about his policy on the war. He lied about his commitment to public financing. He lied about FISA. The list goes on an on.

Barack Obama (laughing): Well, look. I - I mean - politics is tough. ... But I will say this: I don't think there's any equivalence between what we've been doing and what John McCain's been doing. ... Witness some of the comments that have been made just over the last several months, his last several weeks, 'Socialistic.' You know, 'Pals around with terrorists.' I mean, just - the kinds of stuff that - that I can't imagine saying about an opponent of mine.

Isn't that funny? Barack's political and spiritual mentors are Marxists, socialists, criminals and anarchists, but he just can't imagine talking about anyone the way the GOP talks about him. Poor Barack.

Barack may be the best political candidate ever. Because he doesn't let the truth get in the way.

Enough Not Said

With his radical past and slimy friends, Barack remains the most beatable candidate in the world. Yet the people with the money, who could have financed the sort of PR campaign needed to educate voters, have never stepped forward.

“It’s Oct. 21, and if you can’t say it by Oct. 21, then chances are you’re not going to say anything,” said Chris LaCivita, the strategist behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. LaCivita has been working for a new conservative third-party group this year, the American Issues Project.

I don't think Ronald Reagan could win this election if he'd built his career with the likes of Wright, Pfleger, Rezko and Ayers as his major allies. So why Barack? American Issues Project, known as AIP...

...was eyed by some in the GOP as a potential major player in taking on Obama. It spent nearly $3 million in key states in August on a tough ad tying the Illinois senator to '60s-era domestic terrorist William Ayers and promised additional spots in the fall campaign.

That never happened.

It turns out that the financial crisis was more than just bad politics for McCain.

“Donors just weren’t willing to give the money,” explains LaCivita. “They were hurt badly in the market crash and they were always concerned about how McCain would react.”

The timing of the financial crisis couldn’t have been worse for Republicans. When Lehman Brothers went under on Sept. 15, McCain was tied or in the margin of error in national polls. But when his poll numbers fell along with the stock market, wealthy conservatives saw little reason to invest their shrunken holdings on what was far from a sure thing.

But, surely, some of it must have been personal. There should have been a Swift Boat style campaign going on over the summer, long before the mess on Wall Street materialized.

And it wasn’t just the economic bad news — McCain did little to help his own cause... And donors were always fearful they would be rebuked by their party’s notoriously unpredictable nominee if they underwrote a major effort.

“McCain never gave a real wink and said, ‘Go ahead, boys,’” explained one operative close to a third-party group this year.

Another GOP strategist lamented that McCain lacked a core group of rich friends who were willing to part with their money. Harold Simmons, a Dallas billionaire, underwrote the entire cost of the initial Ayers ad for AIP — but his investment wasn’t matched by other wealthy Republicans.

It's tragic to think that we'll get to election day without voters having been presented with a cohesive image of Barack's radical roots. While liberals think that Ayers and Wright have had their story told, that's just silly. Most Americans, while they may have heard the names, don't get the big picture, and don't realize the degree to which they've been lied to by Barack.

“Time is drying up but not gone,” said Evan Tracey, who heads the ad-monitoring Campaign Media Analysis Group. “For ads to work, they need repetition, so if anyone is going to get involved, they either need a very strong (and unique) message or some kind of national footprint to have any impact.”

By law, campaigns are not allowed to coordinate with outside entities. But McCain aides don’t seem hopeful that help is on the way or interested in sending any signals.

“I have no idea what’s going on with third-party groups,” is all Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, would say this week.

Busted

It's clear to anyone paying attention that Barack has been outright lying about his connection to Bill Ayers - but most people aren't paying attention. They prefer to focus on the issues. From my point of view, Barack lies about his positions on the issues even more readily than he does on his radical past, so I'm not sure what the benefit is in listening to him talk about the issues. The radical past can be investigated. The best way to know what he believes on the issues is to follow his roots.

Were Ayers and Barack close? In a book that Ayers published on parenting in 1998, this was his description of the neighborhood where he and Barack lived.

Were Barack and Ayers connected beyond seeing each other raking leaves? The blog Verum Serum offers:

(The) Chicago Annenberg Challenge website from 2002 shows the total amount of funds given to Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop from 1995 to 2001. ..... According to this page, the total given under Barack Obama’s direct supervision was $1,056,162. Adding that amount to the money given by the Joyce Foundation and Woods Fund during Obama’s tenure brings the grand total to $1,968,718. Just shy of two million dollars! That’s a lot of scratch, to put it bluntly. And don’t forget, this doesn’t count the 3/4 million that went to John Ayers during the same time period.

..... (Also) Bill Ayers and Barack Obama shared an office. Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop, the one Obama directed all that money too (sic) is located at 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607.

..... In 1998, the address for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Obama presumably worked, was 115 S. Sangamon Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607.

They were clearly business partners for a number of years, but more importantly, it seems obvious that Ayers was mentoring Barack - giving him power and influence that he was unqualified for, but could use to build a political career.

For those who say they don't care about Ayers - they want to talk about the issues, not about Barack's shady past - I say fine. No need for you to care. However, Barack cares deeply that you don't know the truth. Doesn't the cover-up make you curious?

Watch the clip in this video where, when he was running for congress as an unqualified candidate in 2002, he doesn't hide his one executive position as he has done in the presidential race, but instead offers it as an important qualification.

One more thing - back to the book excerpt at the top of this post. Remember how Ayers labeled Barack a writer? Why would have called the politician a writer? Could this be evidence of the strong connection between them?

In his analysis of Barack's book, in which he promotes the idea that Bill Ayers provided the editing touch that brought Dreams of My Father from ordinary to great, Jack Cashill wonders about the "writer" label.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.

Wacko Web

Barack's leftist world.

The Wright Stuff

I am living in a world with two realities. On the one hand, there is the pile of polls that indicate that Barack Obama has a lead of a few points that, barring some game changing event of some significance, the current trend will solidify into an unavoidable outcome on November 4.

On the other hand comes the certainty that Barack Obama is unelectable.

I've not heard others say this, until today, when I was happy to read Dallas talk host Mark Davis write the same thing in an open letter to John McCain.

But it is my faith in something else that leaves me still thinking you can win: My belief that Barack Obama is unelectable.

I have faith that America will not turn in these serious times to a candidate so wholly unfit to lead the free world. Your campaign's flaws are playing out in an arena that will be more forgiving as Nov. 4 approaches.

I know that all of the fundamentals of this election scream out for a Democrat, it doesn't matter who, just a Democrat to win. But I don't see how someone so young, inexperienced and radical can get the nod of the American people.

The Obama ride has been historic and scintillating. His political gifts are vast and his campaign skillfully run. But when it comes time for voters to determine who will take the oath Jan. 20, an appreciable number will realize that showering him with adulation on the campaign trail is one thing; handing him the keys to the Oval Office is quite another.

This opinion is not unique to Barack Obama. I don't think anyone can win the presidency carrying around the burden of Barack's resume and Barack's friends - what I affectionately refer to as the Obamafia.

You will win not because your voters are actively thrilled with your agenda, but because they are sufficiently repelled by his.

Bring back Abe Lincoln for another run at the White House, but have the co-founders of his career be Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, and I'd put my money on his opponent.

This is every bit as valid a basis for victory, and you will then have a clean slate on which to write a legacy that I hope is more coherent and compelling than your campaign has been.

Then I ask myself - what if they don't know? What if voters just aren't conscious of who Barack is, and who is friends are, and how seedy his past associations are? If the desire for change is so great that they never bother to look? Sure, Reverend Wright had his time in the news cycle, but that was months ago. And the mainstream media is doing it's best to keep the truth about Bill Ayers from being explored.

I have no idea whether you should try to rhetorically wrap unreformed terrorist Bill Ayers around Mr. Obama's neck tonight. Frankly, I don't know if you can do it skillfully enough to defuse criticisms that you are bringing this sudden concern to the campaign too late.

On the one hand, it is impossible for Barack to win the presidency. On the other, it seems that events have conspired to make him unstoppable. I'm living in both worlds at the same time, trying to figure out which one is real.

Ayers

If you're longing to know more about Bill Ayers, and what he believes, here's an introduction. Not just to Ayers, but to his terror organization.

This is important because when the truth comes out, you'll know that Barack received his most important job credential, Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, as a result of his friendship with Bill Ayers.

RNC Ayers

The McCain campaign is looking at the polls, and the polls show that voters aren't happy with him and his use of Bill Ayers against Barack. They think he cares more about attacking than he does about the issues.

Fortunately, the RNC can do what it wants, and the party has rolled out a new internet ad on Ayers.

Barack's Nuts

Did Barack work for ACORN?

While Barack says he never worked for ACORN in any capacity, might he be lying, or, perhaps, parsing - working with as opposed to for?

"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."

At his Fight the Smears website, Barack denies the linkage.

Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

For me, Barack's denial is confession enough, as it creates more questions than answers. Why is he so horrified to be linked to ACORN - Why is that so bad? And if it's such a disgusting organization, why did he visit each year to train, and why did he represent them?

Barack learned an important campaign lesson from the Jeremiah Wright scandal - never tell the truth about your radical past. Since then, he's pretended not to know Michael Pfleger, one of his self-avowed personal advisers, he's pretended not to really know Bill Ayers (just a guy in my neighborhood), and now he's struggling to keep ACORN at some arbitrary distance to avoid disclosing the truth.

Fight over details and semantics all you want. These are Barack's People.

Which explains why, when he wanted help with voter registration, he turned to ACORN.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of ACORN, the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

Who cares whether he worked for them when we know they work for him?

Changing Focus

McCain is in the unique position of having to calm down his crowds, protecting Barack from folks angry over the possibility of Obama winning the election.

In Lakeville, Minn., this evening, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., found himself confronting some of the anger at and fear of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., that has reared its head at his campaign rallies just as his campaign and the RNC have begun waging a character assault on Obama, painting him as connected to terrorists foreign and domestic, a "liar" who is hiding his true self.

"Frankly we're, we're scared," one voter told McCain. "We're scared of an Obama presidency. And I'll tell you why. I don't want to bring a child up in a country uh where -- I love this country, we'll bring our child up no matter what -- but I'm concerned about someone that cohorts with domestic terrorists such as Ayers."

Said McCain, "I want to be president of the United States and I obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be. But I have to tell you, I have to tell you, he is a decent person. And a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States."

The crowd booed.

Turning the focus of the election back to Barack is the purpose of the Ayers comments and ads. While Democrats will call this smears, the focus is a legitimate one. Without a track record of leadership, the questions asked about Barack's judgment are important ones.

All week, supporters of the GOP ticket have yelled ugly accusations about Obama as McCain and running mate Gov. Sarah Palin proceeded down a path where Obama was painted as someone sinister.

"Treason!" "Terrorist!" "Kill him!" audience members yelled when McCain or Palin invoked Obama's name.

The McCain-Palin campaign today defended these comments as those of "real Americans."

Tonight McCain tried to defuse the volatility.

Voters, as they become more savvy about Barack's connection to radical individuals (Wright, Pfleger, Ayers, Alinsky, Farrakhan, etc) and groups (Acorn, CAC, etc), will naturally grow more concerned about his own radicalism.

Said another voter, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight this next time in your debate."

McCain said, "we want a fight and I will fight. But we will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him."

Again, the crowd booed.

"I want everyone to be respectful," McCain said. "And let's make sure we are. Because that's the way politics should be conducted in America. So lets -- make sure -- you're all respectful. I don't meant that has to reduce your ferocity. I just mean it's gotta be respectful. OK? And I would say that 99 and forty-four one-hundredths of every person who's come to my town hall meeting has been respectful. I am proud you're here and I'm grateful for it and I appreciate your enthusiasm."

Barack is a radical - that is clear. The unknown is whether his ideology will remain relevant if he assumes the presidency, or if he will leave his radicalism, and his radical friends, behind in order to be a successful president.

Another woman stood and said, "I got to ask you a question. I don't believe in -- I can't trust Obama. I have read about him. And he's not, he's not – he's an Arab. He's not."

Shaking his head no, McCain grabbed the microphone away from her.

"No ma'am," McCain said. "No ma'am. No ma'am. He's a, he's a, he's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about, he is not. Thank you."

Chicago Way

Truth about Barack - a good ad from the GOP.

Barack throws up the shield, accuses McCain of taking the low road because it's the only route open.

Ayers Denial

I am constantly aggravated by how the media writes about Barack's association with Bill Ayers. Here's one of thousands of such examples, taken from today's Boston Globe in an op-ed from Scot Lehigh, a sometimes fair commentator:

With things moving Obama's way, the McCain-Palin campaign has apparently decided its best shot at beating Obama is to try to delegitimize him on character issues. That explains Palin's ludicrous attempt to turn Obama's regrettable but distant relationship with former violent extremist William Ayers into a case of "palling around with terrorists."

Are these people deliberately misrepresenting the Obama/Ayers relationship, are they too lazy too look into it, or are they so biased they can't see the obvious? If the connection with Ayers is regrettable while being distant, why not look into the powerful evidence that it's not actually distant?

At age 34 Barack was made the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a group founded by Bill Ayers. Barack had no experience in the education business, and was just a couple of years out of law school in the early stages of his uneventful law career. Why in the world did Barack get this gig? And wasn't the Annenberg credential essential to his run for the senate the following year?

Even the right leaning Union Leader of Manchester, New Hampshire repeats the cliche argument about Ayers' relationship to Barack.

Barack Obama's political career was launched in the home of William Ayers, a left-wing terrorist who spent the 1970s running from the FBI. Ayers was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a domestic terror organization that bombed the Pentagon, police departments and the homes of government officials. In a 2001 New York Times interview, Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Not only did Ayers host the house party that launched Obama's political career, but he and Obama served on a nonprofit board together for three years.

The point isn't that Ayers did a fundraiser for Barack, or that they were on the board of the Woods Foundation together. The point is to ask - how did these things come to pass? Did Ayers hold the Obama fundraiser because he had seen Barack in the neighborhood? Did they work on the Woods board by accident? These events are significant in that they indicate a pre-existing relationship between the two men, one that runs deeper than Barack's brush-offs own up to. News organizations that are doing their jobs would smell the rat, and pursue it, right off the bat.

Imagine if John McCain's career had been launched at the home of a right-wing terrorist such as Timothy McVeigh. Do you think the media would be shrugging their shoulders?

Imagine if John McCain were closely associated with a right-wing group (like ACORN) that state officials say was actively committing widespread voter fraud running up to this election. Would the media ignore it?

Some bloggers (such as Gateway Pundit, and The World According to Chester) are doing the legwork that journalists in the mainstream media aren't interested in doing, placing Barack at Columbia while Bill Ayers was also living in New York City, and providing a possible link through professor Edward Said.

Barack and Michelle Obama attended several events in the Arab community with anti-Israel speakers including this event in May 1998 where Professor Edward Said gave the keynote speech. (Bill Baar's West Side)

Well, wouldn't you know... Pro-Palestinian Edward Said and Bill Ayers were also very close friends. In fact they were so close that Said wrote a forward to one of Ayer's anti-American books.

It was Barack's modus operandi when in New York to hang around with radicals.

Barack Obama admitted in his first book that he would "carefully" seek out radical and Marxist friends while at Columbia University:

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

It seems obvious that the inexperienced and unqualified Obama would not have been hired for an important education activist position, where he would have the power to dole out millions of dollars in grants to activist groups, if Ayers didn't have the specific goal of helping him launch a political career. Perhaps he had an arrangement with Ayers similar to the one he would make later with his leader in the state senate.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

Jones started handing legislation in progress to Barack - bills where much of the work had already been done - so that he could take credit for them when they passed.

O'REILLY: So how does Jones help Obama?

FREDDOSO: Jones helped Obama — of course, the relationship between the two, according to "Dreams From My Father," goes back even farther. They had run into each other when Obama was a community organizer. But Jones was able to help Obama become a senator. The way he put it himself in The New York Times was that Obama was a smart enough guy, but he needed somebody to give him credibility. And that's what Jones was able to give him. He was the Senate Democratic leader when Obama started and became the Senate president when Democrats took over the Illinois Senate in 2003. He made Obama the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, which put him in charge of issues affecting the Service Employees International Union, which had over 110,000 members in Illinois at the time, and that helped Obama to win the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

O'REILLY: All right. So he basically — he basically handed Barack Obama, and I mean handed him, a tremendous amount of power for a young state senator.

FREDDOSO: He also gave him — right, he gave him popular bills that, in many cases, Obama hadn't written, but he gave them to Obama to carry on the floor. The great example was the 1998 ethics bill that Obama — I think often exaggerates his role in — but that was a bill that Jones designed specifically.

O'REILLY: OK. So Jones put him front and center, allowed Barack Obama to build up his credibility and resume...

FREDDOSO: Yes.

Perhaps mainstream media folk, who are paid to contemplate and investigate such things, might look into whether Barack had formed a similar partnership with Bill Ayers. There are enough Ayers Deniers out there already.