This is the sort of thing that is rapidly turning me off to the Clinton campaign:
“William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama’s Willie Horton.”
–Former counterterrorism official Larry C. Johnson, The Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2008.
Who is William Ayers? He is a former weatherman who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Both Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 1999 and 2002. In addition, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001, as reported here. They lived within a few blocks of each other in the trendy Hyde Park section of Chicago, and moved in the same liberal-progressive circles.
For those of you less than fifty years old, the Weathermen were a radical group of anti-war folks in the 60s, some of whom set off bombs.
How old was Obama when Ayers was a member of the group?
Eight.
The Washington Post’s Fact checker asks: Is this guilt by association? It sounds more like guilt without much association.
Who is Larry Johnson, who is raising this issue?
A Clinton supporter, “who is not involved in the campaign”.
This is of the piece with the “Obama is a muslim, etc.” emails that made the rounds of the internet. It reminds me of the first George Bush trying to make hay out of the fact that a young Bill Clinton had the temerity to visit the Soviet Union. Somehow, we were to infer from that fact that Clinton was a dangerous radical. It had a note of desperation about it at the time, and this does too. Effective or not, it’s despicable that Clinton surrogates are engaging in these tactics.
As an aside, if this story proves to have legs it will be a good example of the “Clinton rules” being extended to Obama, as it eventually is to all Democrats. The press has never pursued the far more relevant story of the Bush crime syndicate’s connections to Middle East terrorists, including its connections to the bin Laden family. (Illustrative link only, you can Google it yourself, or read House of Bush, House of Saud.
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