Posts Tagged Bill Ayers

Historic Hannity smackdown

October 9, 2008 at 4:15 pm · Filed under Politics, media ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Ok, maybe that title is a little sensationalist.  But Sean Hannity does have a reputation for bullying the guests he disagrees with.  He’s brutal.  I’ve never seen anyone win an interview with him (except Sarah Palin).  Makes you wonder if any guest has ever beat Sean Hannity at his own game?  Roberts Gibbs, Obama campaign spokesman, did just that last night.  And it was good (clip to follow).

Hannity was lecturing Gibbs on Obama’s willingness to sit in a room with Bill Ayers, and then all the sudden, Gibbs took over:

Gibbs: “Are you anti-Semitic?”

Hannity: Not at all.

Gibbs: On your show on Sunday, the show that’s named after you, right? The center piece of that show was a guy named Andy Martin.

Hannity: I know you’re reading your talking points. When I interviewed Al Sharpton, when I interviewed all these controversial figures, you see on FOX we actually interview people of all points of view whether we agree or disagree.

Gibbs: Andy Martin called a judge a crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to….Martin when on to write that he understood better why the Holocaust took place given that Jew survivors are acting like a wolf pack…

Hannity:I find those comments despicable…

Gibbs: You put him on your show. It’s the Hannity Show…Why am I not to believe that your’e anti-Semitic, why am I not to believe that everybody that works for the network is anti-Semitic cause Sean Hannity gives somebody a platform that thinks Jews are slimy?

Hannity: I’m a journalist that gives…

Gibbs: You put your whole show around him…

Gibbs:I don’t think your Jewish viewers are going to take it very well that you had somebody like that on your show.

There’s more, but you get the picture.  But do watch the video (below), to see Hannity struggling to regain his usual upper hand.  The clip, aired by Keith Olbermann of course, is followed by Rachel Maddow’s particularly astute analysis on what it takes to beat Sean Hannity at his own game.

According to Maddow:

[Gibbs] did it by showing instead of telling.  The way you would have told that, is by saying, “Well the analogy here is that you had a bad guy on your show, and you having a bad guy on your show is something that could make me accuse you of all sort of exasperating things you don’t believe in, and that’s just like what you’ve done to Barack Obama.”

He didn’t explain it. He just did it.  He showed Hannity how exasperating he could become by making those accusations based on what Hannity’s guests had done.  And the more Hannity responded the more exasperated, and frustrated and unfair he thought it all was, the more he proved Robert Gibbs’ point.  It  was poetry.

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Michelle comes out classy, Cindy and Sarah stoop low

October 9, 2008 at 3:25 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Remember back in June, when Cindy McCain said we would see no negative campaigning at all from their side?

Gosh, seems like eons ago, doesn’t it?  At rallies from Florida to Pennsylvania, the McCain campaign is pulling out all the stops to attack that other side, including this from Cindy McCain:

“The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you,’’ Mrs. McCain said, in an introduction before Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin delivered speeches at Lehigh. “I would suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day.’’ Mrs. McCain was referring to a vote against troop financing that Mr. Obama cast in 2007 because the legislation did not include a timetable for withdrawal; Mr. Obama has voted for all other war-spending bills since he entered the Senate in 2005.

It’s worth mentioning as well, that John McCain voted against funding the troops when the bill contained a timetable to bring them home.  Cindy McCain knows full well that no troops would go without their flak jackets because of that vote; it was simply about forcing the president to adopt a timetable (or as the president later acquiesed to in negotiations with Iraq back in June, what you might call a “time horizon“).  Cindy McCain’s comments were a demeaning exploitation of her son’s service.  And Cindy McCain thinks Barack Obama is the one waging the “dirtiest campaign in American history?”

That’s rich.  How quickly she forgot the bruising 2000 Republican primary, in which Bush aides now working for McCain suggested that Bridget McCain, a bangladeshi child Cindy McCain brought back from an orphanage in India, was John McCain’s illegitimate black child.

And then there’s this campaign.  I’m sure Cindy McCain was so very proud of Mike Scott, the uniformed sheriff who warmed the crowd up in Bethlehem, PA yesterday, warning of “Barack Hussein Obama” becoming president.  (He’s now under investigation for politicking on the job)  And let’s not leave out Sarah Palin’s relentless attempt to associate Senator Obama with a 1960’s radical turned Chicago professor, Bill Ayers.  Palin’s baiting has famously riled supporters up this week, one of whom yelled “Kill him!” after she accused Obama of being best buds with a former terrorist.  Angry supporters booed the press corps covering a Florida rally– one taunting an African American among them, “Sit down, boy.”  Yes, I’m quite sure the McCain camapign will go down as the cleanest campaign on the record books.

Obama has not engaged the Bill Ayers stories, instead dispatching aides to shut them down (Robert Gibbs ably knocked Sean Hannity off his high horse yesterday).  Joe Biden’s been the only campaign principal to really hit back on the stump this week, calling McCain, “an angry man, lurching from one position to another.”

Last night, Michelle Obama, who has kept largely out of the limelight since her reintroduction at the Democratic Convention, reappeared.  But, the campaign is not bringing Michelle out to defend her husband.  They’ve brought her out to make Cindy McCain look ungraceful, and to underscore that the Obamas keep a steady hand.

Not for lacking of trying, Larry King and John Stewart were unable to draw out the wrath of Michelle Obama.  Instead, Michelle had this to say about Sarah Palin:

“You know, I’m a mother with kids and I’ve had a career and I’ve had to juggle,” Mrs. Obama said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

“She’s doing publicly what so many women are doing on their own privately,” she added. “What we’re fighting for is to make sure that all women have the choices that Sarah Palin and I have.”

And, declining to hit the Republican ticket for the barrage of negative attacks against her husband, she had only this for Cindy and John McCain:

“You can’t tear up the game so much so that, you know, you don’t leave people something to come back to,” she said. “You know, we’re going to need John McCain, we’re going to need Cindy McCain, we’re going to need independents and Republicans working hard to fix this crisis.”

You can’t get more gracious or classy than that, which is exactly what the Obama campaign was looking for.

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Swiftboat season begins

October 5, 2008 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Get ready for four straight weeks of the grimiest trench warfare you’ve yet to see in this campaign.  The numbers don’t look good for McCain-Palin, and word is, the gloves are coming off.  

“We’re going to get a little tougher,” a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. “We’ve got to question this guy’s associations. Very soon. There’s no question that we have to change the subject here,” said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity . . . 

McCain’s only positive commercial, called “Original Mavericks,” has largely been taken off the air, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ads . . .

McCain hinted Thursday that a change is imminent, perhaps as soon as next week’s debate. Asked at a Colorado town hall, “When are you going to take the gloves off?” the candidate grinned and replied, “How about Tuesday night?”

If  you hadn’t already read up on a Chicago professor named Bill Ayers, you might want to start this week.  Ayers, now a professor in Chicago, was once a member of the radical anti-Vietnam war group “Weather Underground.”  Here’s some background:

In an article that by chance was published on Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times wrote about Mr. Ayers and his just-published memoir, “Fugitive Days,” opening with a quotation from the author: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Three days after the Qaeda attacks, Mr. Ayers wrote a reply posted on his Web site to clarify his quoted remarks, saying the meaning had been distorted.

“My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy,” he wrote. But he added that the Weathermen had “showed remarkable restraint” given the nature of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam that they were trying to stop.

Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.

So, where does Barack Obama come into this story?  A quarter of a century later, according to a front page New York Times story published Saturday.  Barack Obama first met Bill Ayers, by then a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, in 1995.  Starting in 1995, they served together on a board in charge of the Chicago Annenberg Project, which oversaw a citywide school reform project funded by philanthropist Walter Annenberg.  According to the report, they each attended six board meetings until Obama left the board in 2001.

While the New York Times report concludes that Ayers and Obama have not been close friends, nor does Ayers advise Obama in any way, it found that the Obama campaign has sought to downplay their contacts.  The most damaging of their contacts was the year they first met, and when Obama first made a run for the Illinois state senate.

It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.

In 1997, the Chicago Tribune asked Obama, then a freshman state senator, what books he was reading.  He cited one by Mr. Ayers, “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court,” which Obama called “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system.”  

Sarah Palin, who proudly read her copy of New York Times on Saturday, is now hitting Obama for “palling around with terrorists.”  McCain won’t be far behind her; it’s only a question of whether he wants to gamble on such a low blow in Tuesday’s townhall debate format.  

Guilt by professional association with Ayers is a tactic the Obama campaign should not be too complacent to tear down.  This is the Obama campaign’s swift boat moment.  It may not be enough to simply stay above the fray.

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