PrintOctober 10, 2008
Obama on Ayers: 'I assumed he had been rehabilitated'
Well, you have to admit it's a better lie than Ayers being "just some guy in the neighborhood:"
In an interview with the sympathetic conservative talk radio host this afternoon, Obama offered the clearest explanation yet of how an extremely careful politician allowed himself anywhere near a former '60s radical who would become a Republican target in this year's presidential campaign.Obama "had assumed" from Bill Ayers' stature in Chicago, he told the Philadelphia-based Michael Smerconish, that Ayers had been "rehabilitated" since his 1960s crimes.In the interview, which was taped this afternoon and will air tomorrow, and which you can listen to above, Obama recalled moving back to Chicago after law school, and becoming involved in civic life there."The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois," he said. "That's how i met him -- working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan's" along with "a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders.""Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated," Obama said.
Well, I don't know about you but I'm convinced. Just a few nagging questions though. When you say "ultimately" you learned about Ayers engaging in this "reprehensible act" (just one?) 40 years ago (it was less than 30 at the time) but you were "8 years old at the time (wha? Your point?) and that you "assumed he had been rehabilitated" (were you told he went to jail instead of the truth - that he beat the rap and gloated about it?) just when did this knowledge ultimately hit you? Was it before or after you ultimately realized Ayers was an unreconstructed terrorist radical with kooky ideas about how to indoctinate children in leftist ideology while politicizing the educational system?
This is a crock. Ayers was a legendary figure in Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood. Obama didn't hear about Ayers the same way he never heard Reverend Wright spew his hatred against America. By the mid 1990's, Ayers was firmly encsconced as a player in Chicago politics. And we're supposed to believe a politically savvy, ambitious young man like Obama didn't know of Ayers past?
And no one has yet asked Obama what he thought of some of Ayers more radical ideas on education that Obama was funding as Chairman of the Annenberg Schools project. Did he agree with them? Did he think it a good idea that schoolchildren should be radicalized?
Raising the issue of Ayers goes far beyond any "guilt by association" charge. And Obama's outright lies about his relationship with the terrorist only makes people wonder just what is it about that relationship that Obama is so desperate to hide?
