Tuesday, October 7, 2008

SNL

Saturday Night Live did a funny skit on the financial crisis which pretty much puts the blame on everyone, but especially congressional Democrats, bad credit risks, greedy yuppies and liberal moneybags. The skit was pulled from the SNL website, evidently because of pressure from somewhere, but it was caught by patdollard and can be viewed there. It's pretty good.

RLC

Obama and Ayers

This story by Dinitia Smith on William Ayers appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks on New York and Washington. It gives us good look at who Ayers is, and although both he and his wife try in the article to soften the ugliness of some of their earlier pronouncements, one wonders if this is out of genuine regret or if it's simply a public relations move. Here are a couple of the most salient paragraphs:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article also gives us insight into Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn:

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

Other reports recount how Ms Dohrn flashed a three finger salute to the crowd to symbolize the fork.

Ayers and his wife are past associates of Barack Obama. Among other things, they hosted him in their living room when he launched his campaign for the Illinois senate and served on several boards with him. Obama's campaign is trying to minimize the connection, while admitting that they were friendly, but the relationship seems to have been closer than they're letting on.

This is important, not because it suggests that Obama is sympathetic to terrorism, but because it reflects on his judgment, the sort of people he is drawn to, and the sort of people who might find their way into his administration.

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were learned that John McCain was supported by, and worked closely with, an unrepentant abortion clinic bomber. I feel quite certain that the media would go ballistic and insist that this association alone would disqualify him from being president of the U.S. Yet much of the media seems completely unconcerned that Obama was involved with Ayers and Dohrn who bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

UPDATE: CNN, of all people, has done a piece which pretty much shows that Obama and Ayers were pretty tight back in Chicago. I'm sure that this kind of reporting is not going to be popular with CNN's viewership, but Drew Griffen is to be commended for doing real investigative journalism. He'll probably be looking for a new job next week:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC