How to refute the Ayers talking points.

[joeprogressive]

1. McCain was actually involved in the Keating 5 scandal, unlike Obama who did not have anything to do w/ the Weathermen.

2. If you want to say Obama is associating with someone that committed crimes 40 years ago you better be prepared to go after Jesus too, because I heard he cavorted with whores and thieves.

3. The Weathermen are most likely responsible for ending a losing effort in Vietnam early thus saving thousands of soldiers lives. The Keating 5 cost taxpayers billions.

4. Ayers is remorseful today and has asked for forgiveness. He is a productive member of society as a distinguished university professor. Ayers has been associated with several philanthropic organizations and is instrumental in instituting school reform projects in Chicago. Meanwhile, Keating is un-remorseful and blames the S&L scandal on too much regulation. The type of regulation that has caused the current economic meltdown.

5. Internal reviews by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine, The Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic "have said that their reporting doesn't support the idea that Obama and Ayers had a close relationship. (taken from wikipedia)"

On the other hand, McCain and Keating were buddies and the McCains flew on Keating's jet to barbados. (this seems to have been removed from wikipedia within the last 5 minutes). Cindy McCain was in business with Keating.

6. Ayers was never held personally responsible for the injury or deaths of anyone. Keating was responsible for 21,000 people losing their life savings.



Go ahead republicans, keep talking about Ayers and we will continue to draw comparisons with Charles Keating and let the American people decide who was more dangerous to the American people.

[ikojo]

1. Considering Barack Obama was

EIGHT years old at the time Ayers was involved with the Weather Underground.

[joeprogressive]

3. You mean,you weren't involved with an anti-war militant group

when you were 8?

[graywarrior]

6. I was an anti-nun militiant when I was 8

I refused to do my homework and I questioned Jesus' motives.

[stillcool]

16. LOL...

ooh jeez..that cracked me up..The imagery is fantastic!

[graywarrior]

17. *snort*

[volstork]

5. I've heard

he was their main operative! :sarcasm:

[grannylib]

2. The first point is one I've been hammering to any yahoo trying to tell

me that Obama is 'palling around' with terrorists.
McAnus was DIRECTLY INVOLVED in Keating Five.

[rosesaylavee]

4. And of course, like William Ayers, Charles Keating, Abramoff, and the

various mob figures that McCain pals around with are ALL remorseful for their past efforts to steal us all blind.

[polichick]

7. And there's always this...

[BrklynLiberal]

10. and this is what Ayers looked like then..

and today..

[polichick]

13. Thanks - I hadn't seen pics of Ayers. Somehow I don't see him...

...hangin' out with little Barack!

[BrklynLiberal]

8. But it is so useless trying to reason with anyone who would even consider this

Ayers stuff as relevant.
They never let the truth or facts interfere with what they believe..

[renie408]

9. The Ayers stuff is a distraction that only works on people who aren't voting Obama anyway.

if anybody says they won't vote Obama because of his connection to Ayers, they were never going to vote for him anyway.

[ecstatic]

11. Any rebuttal must be short, sweet, and zingy nt

[TheKentuckian]

12. I suggest a huge yawn and a nice stretch

and what was it you weren't clear on from when this went around a few months ago. Another beg yawn, roll eyes, sigh.

Ask "how was it again that you think an eight year old in Hawaii was connected with this professor guy in Chicago?"

[Johonny]

14. I WAS 8 YEARS OLD

really says it all. Make Palin look stupid. End story.

[AZ Criminal JD]

15. Nice talking points but several are wrong.

#3 is absurd. The Weatherman were a lunatic fringe group that had nothing to do with shaping U.S. policy.
#4 is flat out wrong. Ayers has never had a word of remorse and even said in 2001 that "we didn't set enough bombs". See New York Times Sept. 11, 2001.
#6 Ayers' group killed a grad student in a bombing at the U of Wisconsin. Ayers was in the leadership of the group that sanctioned the bombing.

[stillcool]

19. I can't find the Sept 11th one, but I did find this one...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEED61238F935A2575AC0A9679C8B63

The Way We Live Now: 9-16-01: Questions for Bill Ayers; Forever Rad

By HOPE REEVES
Published: September 16, 2001


So if things are as bad as ever, was it worth it, all the struggling?

Without a doubt. And the reason is that we really did play a role in destroying the old system of segregation and in destroying the conquest of Indochina by the Americans.

My parents were also Weathermen. Whenever they refer to their ''revolution,'' I can't help rolling my eyes. I mean, isn't there something a little absurd about thinking you would overthrow the United States government?

It's a funny word, and people use it for a million different reasons. Mainly, these days, to sell products -- a ''revolutionary'' deodorant. We used the word to mean that we should create a society more equal, more fair, more just, more loving than the society that we have. It was a huge kind of hope. And it does seem, looking back, naïve and absurd. But if we are guilty of a kind of grandiose innocence, what we should not fall into in reaction is a kind of arch cynicism.

Yes, my parents have often accused me of being in what you would call ''a deep American sleep.'' Is there something wrong with my generation for not being obsessed with world injustice?

Well, I'm going to disagree with you. There are all kinds of signs now of a wonderful activism going on internationally -- Seattle and Genoa, young people objecting to global capitalism getting to make all the decisions about everybody's life without any consultation or any democratic process at all, let alone any sharing of the wealth. People are demanding that the world come to its senses about things like global warming and environmental degradation and the pollution of water and air. It's not all quiet.

[Emit]

22. Here's Ayers' own comments on the matter, from his own blog

This poster is using the black and white talking points of the right wing in this matter with regard to the "we didn't do enough" comment - so much is taken out of context:

Posted previously
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=7332332&mesg_id=7332332


edit to correct link

[stillcool]

23. Yeah...I've noticed that poster...

tends to use certain talking points, and is all about black and white. Edit to add..thank you for that link. Interesting man, interesting writer.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

26. Can someone verify this?

RNC Talking Point: Obama got his political start because Ayers through a fundraiser for him.

What I've Heard: The fundraiser was for Alice Palmer (old friend of Ayers) and Obama attended because Palmer was running for Congress, and Obama was running for Palmer's old seat in the Illinois Senate. Obama came with Palmer because she thought it would be good for him to meet these people.

True?

[Emit]

35. Hannity repeats it daily, but this is the closest I can find to the original source

Wonder who Maria Warren is?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8630_Page2.html

~snip~

“That’s too long ago — that’s ancient history,” Palmer said, when asked of the meeting.

Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.

“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” Warren wrote on her blog in 2005. “They were launching him — introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

Contacted by e-mail, Warren declined to describe the meeting further and later blogged of her concern that Republicans would use accounts of the event for “left-baiting.”

Young described the gathering as a matter of “due diligence” for Palmer to introduce her chosen successor to constituents. “Many of us knew him already,” he said.

~snip~

[stillcool]

36. I don't recall reading..

the name of who was having the cocktail party they were both present at. I can't believe I deleted all my articles concerning this after the primaries.
Here's some articles from Obama's site...

the Washington Post:

Both Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 1999 and 2002. In addition, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001.

“…The only hard facts that have come out so far are the $200 contribution by Ayers to the Obama re-election fund, and their joint membership of the eight-person Woods Fund Board.


http://fightthesmears.com/articles/22/AyersSmear

The New York Times:

he men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered one another occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. … They have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mails since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.

[Emit]

21. I thought the New Year's Eve Gang was responsible for the U of Wisconsin

bombing.


In fact, I have read that, other than "the premature detonation of a bomb in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion which killed three of Weatherman's own members, no one was ever harmed in the extensive bombing campaign, as WUO issued warnings in advance to ensure a safe evacuation of the area prior to detonation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)

Do you have adequate links to back your claims/comments?

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

25. Nope

Ayers has repeatedly apologized for the violence that he condoned in his youth. Here's the full quote that you took out of context: "The one thing I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being.... When I say, 'We didn't do enough,' a lot of people rush to think, 'That must mean, "We didn't bomb enough shit."' But that's not the point at all. It's not a tactical statement, it's an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, 'we' means 'everyone.'

And the group that bombed UW were locals, not affiliated with the Weathermen. Just the idea that a group of quasi-anarchists are "sanctioning" anything is pretty amusing. The only people ever killed in a Weatherman bombing were three Weathermen themselves. While some conspiracy charges were brought against Ayers during his years underground, they were dropped before he and his wife resurfaced in 1980.

[joeprogressive]

28. No, you are wrong. Maybe you should read a little deeper:

#3 While absurd to you, many historians credit the Weathermen and the movement that it sparked for ending the Vietnam War early

#4 Chicago Magazine reported that "just before the September 11th attacks," Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the Weathermen's Chicago "Days of Rage," received an apology from Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. "hey were remorseful," Elrod says. "They said, 'We're sorry that things turned out this way.'"<18> In the months before Ayers' memoir was published on September 10, 2001, the author gave numerous interviews with newspaper and magazine writers in which he defended his overall history of radical words and actions. Some of the resulting articles were written just before the September 11 terrorist attacks and appeared immediately after, including one often-noted article in The New York Times, and another in the Chicago Tribune. Numerous observations were made in the media comparing the statements Ayers was making about his own past just as a dramatic new terrorist incident shocked the public.

Much of the controversy about Ayers during the decade since the year 2000 stems from an interview he gave to The New York Times on the occasion of the memoir's publication.<19> The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."<14> Ayers has not denied the quotes, but he protested the interviewer's characterizations in a Letter to the Editor published September 15, 2001: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion."<20>

So I ask you, why would Elrod lie?

#6 Didn't I say personally responsible? Link please?

I'm not saying Ayers was/is a saint. I was pointing out the contrast between Ayers and Keating and who really did do more damage and that Ayers isn't really linked to Obama. Why don't you look that up in your infallible New York Times. Sorry you missed the point.

[yardwork]

32. #3 is a matter of opinion. The others are matters of fact and you've got them wrong.

#4 - You are wrong. Ayers has expressed regret for the violence, not for protesting the war. He also turned himself into authorities. They decided not to press charges.
#6 - This is a really a stretch. The Weathermen was a decentralized group of people. Ayers was not involved in anything that killed or injured anyone. Several of the Weathermen killed themselves by accident.

I'm not in favor of violent protests. I agree with Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Jesus. So does Barack Obama. He has never had anything to do with the Weathermen or their successor group, the Weather Underground, or any other violent group.

Give it a rest.

[AZ Criminal JD]

39. You give it a rest

Your are wrong. Besides Madison he was in the leadership of a group which attempted to bomb a dance at Ft. Dix and the library with students present at Columbia. Just because he is an incompetent does not mean he is not a killer.

[Festivito]

18. I'd like to believe you, but no link and questionable points.

I don't need this kind of falsity messing up my chances of winning voters.

There seems to be something about the remorselessness after 2001 that remains unclear to me. I never kept abreast of this guy nor the group.

[stillcool]

20. I just found the letter he wrote...

to the Times after that article was printed..

September 15, 2001

To The Editors—

In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960’s about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.

Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.

Smith writes of me: “Even today, he ‘finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This fragment seems to support her “love affair with bombs” thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote:

We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government’s love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.

Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. 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. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.

Bill Ayers Chicago, IL

[Festivito]

27. I do think the RW is playing its spin game.

He wishes he could have done more. This gets spun by the RW as more bombing. I see that he sees it as meaning more... to have stopped the war.

It's not that long. It's not that hard to understand.

[joeprogressive]

30. Links missing maybe but doesn't mean it is false.

There are plenty of links posted now. Spend some time reading before claiming something is false. It just makes you look lazy.

[Festivito]

38. Which is why I said it was.. missing a link, instead of false.

Trying to spin me into meaning the statement was false might make you look stupid. Trying to spin me as too lazy to bother to find links on my own after you don't bother to see the later response I made might remove doubt.

The wiki entry is under Bill Ayres. There are plenty of links from there.

[noel711]

24. Joe, may I suggest you amend talking point #2...

I posted this earlier today:

Jesus not only consorted with thieves, murders and prostitutes,
He called a terrorist to be one of his disciples:
Simon the Zealot; the Zealots were a party opposed to the
roman occupation and Jewish collaboration.
The Zealots practiced an early form of guerrila warfare.

And if Jesus thought one of them was redeemable,
then I guess Jesus is one the McCain shit list too.

I preached this fact yesterday, and felt all the air
sucked out of the church.
Perhaps tomorrow my pink slip will be on my desk,
but it's the truth.

[AtomicKitten]

29. It's a re-hash. I don't feel inclined to entertain tired material other than calling BS on it.

[chalky]

31. And there's also this...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=7337386&mesg_id=7337386

I especially like Psst_Im_Not_Here's suggestion in post #10.

[Honeycombe8]

33. I thought Ayers is not remorseful. ????? nt

[joeprogressive]

34. There are several posts here that demonstrate that he was. n/t

[rucky]

37. 1 & 5 oughta cover it.

:thumbsup: