Today in the Wall Street Journal, Stanley Kurtz has released the long-awaited next chapter in the reporting on what connection Sen. Obama has had with radical “reformer” (and domestic terrorist) Bill Ayers. You will find Kurtz’s story in the Wall Street Journal here. There is more of his commentary available at the National Review Online here.
Both are worth a read. (Incidentally, the NRO article includes the Obama’s official response to Kurtz’s original allegations.)
RedState readers are probably familiar with the basic facts…Obama’s only real “executive experience” was as the chairman of the board responsible for fundraising for an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). The CAC gave more than $100 million (all privately raised) to what Kurtz describes as “community organizers and radical education activists.”
The projects implemented by the CAC were led by Bill Ayers, who has confessed to bombing the Pentagon and other government entities as a founder of a group called the “Weather Underground” in the 1960’s. By the 1990’s, his aim was to train a new generation of activists, starting their instruction as schoolchildren. Kurtz repeats a quote of Ayers where he described himself and his work:
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice.
Why does this matter? Is painting Obama with the Ayers brush unfair?
You can choose for yourself. I believe that this collaboration is exemplary of what matters the most, and what is reported the least in the mainstream media. Obama worked to advance Ayers’s goals, which are indefensible! Their connection is not casual and passing, as Obama has alleged; it is as far from that as can be.
Did Obama help Ayers bomb buildings? No, of course not.
Did Obama help Ayers in his later work of instilling his own brand of radical activism in Chicago children? Of course he did.
Prof. Kurtz concludes his WSJ article making this point:
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
