RUSH: Let’s move on here for a moment to the real problem that Obama has with Bill Ayers. Now, I am convinced that this is hitting. I am convinced it’s sticking. The Obama campaign is getting nervous about it. The Drive-Bys are trying to cover for this. In fact, last night on DNCTV before the second presidential debate, Chris Matthews with the tingle up his leg when he discusses Obama was talking to David Axelrod, the chief Obama campaign strategerist. And Matthews said, ‘In the political life of your candidate, Barack Obama, what role did Bill Ayers play?’
RUSH: That is a lie. That is a full-fledged lie. The closest he got to the truth there was saying that Bill Ayers is a professor of education. But wait ’til you hear in mere moments what kind of education. Matthews then said, ‘Was he politically rehabilitated in your eyes by the time he met with your candidate?’
AXELROD: He wasn’t making a political — when he served on his boards he wasn’t making a political judgment, Chris, they were working on some school reform issues. But the fundamental point here is he doesn’t — he has nothing to do with this campaign, he doesn’t advise him, he’s not involved with him politically, he won’t be involved in the future.
RUSH: I’ll tell you, these guys are nervous. Bill Ayers was one of the formative influences in Obama’s life. Now, the editorial guys at Investor’s Business Daily have a great, great piece today entitled: ‘Obama’s Real Problem with Bill Ayers.’ We all know who he is, Weather Underground, bombed the Pentagon, was the host of Obama’s coming out political fundraiser party in 1995, gave Obama $150 million to head up education, the Annenberg Challenge, worked and introduced him to ACORN. Bill Ayers is very, very close to Michelle Obama. In fact, it may well be, folks, that Michelle Obama is as instrumental in Obama knowing Ayers as Obama himself is. ‘At an education forum in Venezuela–‘ Let’s go back here. Remember what Axelrod said, ‘Bill Ayers today is a professor of education in Chicago, he’s an aide to the mayor on school reform.’ That’s what Obama’s campaign advisor says.
‘At an education forum in Venezuela, Bill Ayers showed the real issue is not his terrorist past. It’s the socialist revolutionary agenda that he and Barack Obama want to impose on the nation’s schools. Still more evidence of how the media are in the tank for Obama was evident in Tom Brokaw’s description of Ayers on Sunday’s ‘Meet The Press.’ ‘School reformer’ is how Brokaw identified the co-founder of the Weather Underground, the radical organization that, among other activities, bombed government buildings, banks, police departments and military bases in the early 1970s,’ and private homes as well. ‘Bill Ayers is a school reformer in the same sense that Joe Stalin was an agricultural reformer. An idea of what Ayers has in mind for America’s schools was provided in his own words not 40 years ago when Obama was eight years old, but less than two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez. With Chavez at his side–‘ two years ago, Bill Ayers who is just a professor of education in Chicago, ‘–voiced his support for ‘the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. … I look forward to seeing how … all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”
‘If Ayers was just another nutty professor, we’d be lucky. But he wields great influence in academic circles and has had Obama’s ear. He’s the author or editor of 15 books. Chicago’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for Chicago’s public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Just last month, Ayers was elected vice-president for curriculum for the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association. AERA is the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. In a recent interview on Fox News’ ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ Obama upgraded Ayers’ status from ‘a guy who lives in my neighborhood’ to ‘somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.’ Actually, Obama knew him quite well, having worked together on a school ‘reform’ project called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Annenberg Challenge, securing a $50 million grant to reform the Chicago Public Schools. … Obama was given the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office. He ran the fiscal arm that distributed grants to schools and raised matching funds.’ This is at a time when Obama said, ‘I didn’t know this guy. I didn’t know who he was.’ Well, you didn’t know who he was, but he knew who you were. He’s giving you $50 million to spend.
‘Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with grant recipients. During Obama’s tenure as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers’ own education projects received substantial funding. One of Ayers’ descriptions for a course called ‘Improving Learning Environments’ says a prospective K-12 teacher needs to ‘be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and … be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.” Dawn, this sounds like that teacher your daughter had for history last year went to this seminar. ‘John McCain needs to repeatedly point out the stealth socialism of Ayers’ education agenda and Obama’s complicity in it. Otherwise, we may one day see Ayers as Obama’s secretary of education.’ But he won’t because that will be partisan. That is who William Ayers is today. He and Obama have worked on Ayers’ projects for years to overthrow the capitalist education system, replace it with a radical socialist education system bent on revolution, standing side by side to Hugo Chavez in praising the socialist dictator Chavez for his revolution curriculum. That is William Ayers, and that is Barack Obama’s friend.
Maggie Gallagher in the New York Post today: ‘When John Murtagh was 9 years old, Bill Ayers’ friends tried to kill him. ‘I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside,’ wrote Murtagh recently in City Journal. It wasn’t personal. John’s dad was a judge presiding over a trial of some Black Panthers. John still remembers the red graffiti on the sidewalk the next morning: ‘Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong Have Won; Kill the Pigs.’ As best he recalls, Bernardine Dohrn, who’s now Ayers’ wife, first claimed credit for bombing John’s home in 1970. John Murtagh is now a lawyer and Yonkers city councilman running for the state Senate on the GOP ticket. I reached him this week through his campaign. It wasn’t hard.
‘Has Barack Obama ever tried? Obama was only 8 when Murtagh’s house was bombed. He has nothing to do with the trauma the Murtagh family went through. But Obama was a grown man when he decided his path to power lay through Bill Ayers’ connections. … Obama’s campaign is busy fudging. His top political adviser claims Obama just didn’t know Ayers’ history when they first met. Bomber? What bomber? Right. ‘If that’s true, Obama has to be the dumbest man who ever graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School,’ snorts Murtagh. ‘I don’t buy that at all.’ Murtagh believes the relationship between the Obamas, Ayers and Dohrn goes back 30 years, to Michelle Obama’s time at Sidley Austin, a law firm that also employed Dohrn. Murtagh doesn’t blame Obama for what Ayers and his friends did. He blames Obama for picking a man like Ayers as a friend and mentor — and then covering up the friendship. In politics, things get complicated. Truth becomes hard to find. But not this. ‘The night they attacked our home, they also firebombed an army recruiting station out in Brooklyn and police patrol cars outside of Greenwich Village,’ notes Murtagh. ‘Three weeks later, they accidentally blew themselves up. They intended to attack the officer’s club at Fort Dix.’ Lay your cards on the table, says Murtagh. ‘Obama’s free to associate with Dohrn and Ayers; that’s his right,’ he tells me. ‘But don’t hide the relationship, and be forthcoming and let people decide the significance of it for themselves.”
I predicted in the first hour this Ayers stuff is going to stick, people are already starting to pay attention and notice it now. I think at some point Obama is going to have to come out and distance himself from this guy. He can’t just say, ‘Well, he’s somebody I knew in the neighborhood. Well, he’s somebody I worked with on education.’ He’s going to have to come out and say, ‘This is not the Bill Ayers I knew. This is not the Jeremiah Wright that I knew.’ He’s going to have to do something. It will not be Senator McCain that presses it, unless they do it in ads, but it will not happen in the upcoming debate, I doubt. I’d like to be wrong about that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
HILLARY: Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position. And, if I’m not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York — and, I would hope, to every American — because they were published on 9/11, and he said that he was just sorry they hadn’t done more. And what they did was set bombs. And in some instances, people died. So it is — I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about. [snip] I think that this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.
RUSH: Really, Mrs. Clinton? Which Republicans are going to raise it? I don’t think our nominee is going to raise it. Certainly those of us in the New Media are raising it. He did have an editorial, a commentary on 9/11, talking about the only thing he was unhappy about is they didn’t do more back in their terrorist days. I don’t have Obama’s response, if there was one, but I do know this. I knew the Drive-Bys didn’t do diddly-squat with that comment. The Drive-Bys didn’t investigate, didn’t do diddly-squat with it, and they’re not going to now. They’re going to do what they can to cover it up, like Brokaw did on Meet the Press. He’s an ‘education reformer.’ Bill Ayers is an education reformer.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have Obama’s response to Hillary’s statement about Bill Ayers. It’s interesting, too. April 16th, 2008, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We had a Democrat presidential candidate’s debate, and Hillary Clinton said this about Bill Ayers. Listen to it again.
HILLARY: Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position.
RUSH: Yeah.
HILLARY: And, if I’m not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York — and, I would hope, to every American — because they were published on 9/11, and he said that he was just sorry they hadn’t done more. And what they did was set bombs. And in some instances, people died. So it is — I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about. [snip] I think that this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.
RUSH: And here is how Obama replied.
OBAMA: By Senator Clinton’s own vetting standards, I don’t think she would make it, uh, since President Clinton, uh, pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act than me, uhhhh, serving on a board with somebody for actions that he did 40 years ago.
RUSH: Now, you see, he doesn’t deny anything she said about Bill Ayers. Forty years was not 9/11. That was 2001, sir. Weather Underground is their organization, your buddies. Clinton pardoned your buddies. But it’s not about you serving on a board with somebody for actions he did 40 years ago. You and your buddy and ACORN, you are inseparable: radical socialists attempting to overthrow the capitalist system of this country, plain and simple. Ayers is down in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez two years ago, praising the overthrow of capitalist education systems? He’s in charge of the curricula for a 25,000-teacher organization and he’s still working on it today.
Obama doesn’t know him. See, I know liberals, and I know how they work. They have to do it in stealth. Bill Ayers could no more run for president and get past the first primary than Daffy Duck. Remember way back, I speculated to you, ‘There’s gotta be somebody behind this guy Obama. Somebody had to pick him out. Somebody had to choose him. Somebody had to put him out there and decide, ‘he can be the front man’ for whoever it is that really has this agenda’? Not that he doesn’t himself. I don’t know. Soros, some of these people in Chicago, whoever it is, but make no mistake about it, he’s the front man for a huge socialist revolutionary organization. He’s the one, by getting elected, that will enable and empower them to begin working from the inside for the first time.