Crossing Paths? Barack Obama and Williams Ayers

The conservative blogosphere's going to be saying, "give me a break"!

The New York Times has a big front-page story on the the intersecting lives of Barack Obama and William Ayers, the former Weatherman bomber who's now a radical professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.

Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.

Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.

In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”

More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

Of course, everyone knows the Times is in the tank for Obama. But you've got to hand it to Bill Keller for his innovative in-text ad placement for the Illinios Democrat.

The piece is a joke.

Crossed paths? It's more like comrades-in-arms. Here's Captain Ed:

How close does Obama have to be to make this connection a valid point? The two men worked together on political projects in Chicago. The issue has nothing to do with the quality of their friendship, if one exists (and there seems to be some evidence of one), but with the kind of work the two men did together. Ayers still agitates for the overthrow of the capitalist system, and his educational project was designed to create little charter schools for churning out radicals.

The American public ought to be ashamed at the distrastrous journalism it's getting from the country's "unofficial newspaper of record."

See also, "Dead Cops, Dead Marines... and Their Killers":

Barack Obama is a radical leftist whose career was launched at the home of radical leftists and who has affiliated himself with terrorists, radicals and unapologetic haters of America.

Photo Credit: New York Times