Obama’s friend, Ayers in his own Words: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country”
The Bomber as School Reformer
The press—and debate moderators—shouldn’t let Bill Ayers and Barack Obama off the hook.
6 October 2008
Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted. Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday’s front-page story in the New York Times.
The article explored the putative relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama during the time they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a five-year philanthropic venture that, starting in 1995, distributed over $160 million in school-improvement grants to the Windy City’s public schools. Ayers wrote the grant proposal that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm of the project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. Not only did the Times exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of having anything like a “close” relationship with Ayers—their paths merely “crossed” while working on the Challenge, the paper said—but it also bestowed the honorific of “school reformer” on the ex-bomber. “Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform,” the article maintained. On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . .
Read more at City-Journal.com
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As a former Chicagoan (suburbs) if you are not from there you cannot understand the institutional corruption/Chicago/Cook County. The are actually proud of the corruption there, it is a great big joke and pervasive as hell. Attempts have been made from time to time to clean up the corruption but it always comes back in different guises. Look up Operation Greylord. It deals with the corruption in the Judicial System. One year later one of the FBI lawyers came back and could not believe it only took one year and the game was back on. I dare anyone who intends to vote for Obama to go to the South Side of Chicago and see the fruits of Obama’s labor-that he brags so
much about as a community organizer. Can anyone estimate how may of the peoples dollars went into that area? Bombed out Berlin looked better. Are the people who live there voters or victims? I think God love them they are just pawns or means to an end. I’m sorry but I still see them as ppeople. A Hillary CLINTON Democrat