Open Letter to Ben Smith

Re: Sitting on it

Got two sources, Ben?

I say you do.

Two of 'em. Count 'em. One... two.

Waiting for three? Four? How many? Give me a ballpark number. How many sources does it take for a negative story about Obama? I know the accepted number is two, but two isn't enough for The One.

Oh, I know, I know... you're probably pretending the two sources count together as something like one and a half. Okay.

So you just need one more? Again, clarify.

If you don't have two sources, well then! I can hook you up with someone who does. Assuming you have at least one, that must be a different one, and together you'll have three.

If you don't have at least one, well, I guess Hillbuzz was wrong and you really don't have much of a story.

Your fake-pretend internet friend,

Ace

Foreign Press Showing More Interest in Ayers than Our Own Foreign Press: Yeah, not a misprint. We have the overseas foreign press and the mainland foreign press. I prefer the overseas foreign press.

Michelle Obama and possibly also Barack Obama worked at the same law firm at the same time as Dohrn in 1984-88, while in 1995 Ayers co-founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge using a $US50 million grant and selected Barack Obama to be the first chairman of the board of the project, a position that Obama held for eight years. Obama and Ayers also served together on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund for three years after Obama joined the board in 1999. Obama also served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund with Ayers's father and brother.

These facts cast doubt on the recent claims by Obama's campaign manager that Obama knew Ayers only slightly and only because they lived in the same neighbourhood and their children went to the same school. Apart from the above connections, Ayers's children are much older than Obama's.

Equally unlikely is the claim that Obama knew nothing of Ayers and Dohrn's terrorist past. As Corsi remarks, people familiar with Chicago politics "wonder how Obama can think we are so gullible as to believe Obama was the only person in Chicago who did not know Ayers's bomb-throwing terrorist fame".

But even if there was a long-term association between Obama and Ayers and Dohrn, is that necessarily a bad thing?

The answer requires a brief review of the turbulent time of the 1960s when Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen and signatories of the ultra-radical manifesto You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, released at the national convention of the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society in June 1969.

This 20,000-word manifesto called for a communist revolution in the US; the victory of communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War; and the creation of "two, three, many Vietnams" designed to consume all of America's military resources. It denounced all police as "pigs" and detailed strategies to defeat them; and advocated a vanguard role for black people, supported by university students and young people, in the revolutionary overthrow of American society.

The Weathermen advocated urban guerilla warfare and terrorism and undertook an intense campaign of bombings, violent demonstrations, riots and jail breaks from 1969 into the early '70s, beginning with the Days of Rage, held in October 1969, to correspond to the trial of the Chicago Eight. In 1970, the group issued their Declaration of a State of War against the government of what they dismissed as AmeriKKKa.

Ayers participated in 30 bombings in this period, including attacks on the New York Police Department headquarters in 1970, the US Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Ayers had gone underground as a terrorist following a lethal mistake in a Greenwich Village townhouse, in which three members of the Weathermen were killed (including Ayers's then girlfriend) when a nail bomb being constructed as an anti-personnel device exploded.

In 1970, Ayers (whose father was a wealthy chief executive of a large telecommunications company and later obtained his son's freedom from prison) described the Weathermen's message: "Kill all rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Similarly with Dohrn. After the Charles Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, Dohrn enthused: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Curtis.

Another Ayers Vid...

posted by Ace at 12:36 AM

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