American Pravda’s big and little lies about the Obama-Ayers relationship

Palin has the AP, not just running scared, but spinning lies.  I’m careful about quoting the AP, because their stuff is proprietarial, but to the extent they have the public ear, they better damn well be honest, and the following story, which I print and fisk in relevant part, is not honest:

Sarah Palin defended her claim that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists,” saying the Democratic presidential nominee’s association with a 1960s radical is an issue that is “fair to talk about.”

[snip]

At issue is Obama’s association with Ayers. Both have served on the same Chicago charity and live near each other in Chicago. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s, the event cited by Palin.

But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they “pal around” is a stretch of any reading of the public record. [Note the careful language about “the public record” since so much of what went on between Ayers and Obama is not in the public record.  Thanks to yeoman work from Stanley Kurtz, though, we know that they had a very close relationship leading up to and including work on the Annenberg Challenge.  We therefore know that, while Obama and Ayers may not have been beer-drinking buddies, Ayers probably mentored Obama, and Obama was certainly happy to have a long professional association with a self-professed, self-confessed domestic terrorist who only regrets not doing more.  See here, here and hereJoshua Muravchick has more on that relationship, too.  It’s beyond disingenous for the AP reporter to read the phrase “pal around” so literally that it would exclude any relationship other than a weekly beer-drinking fest lasting some decades.] And it’s simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.  [Again, disingenous.  Yes, Obama was a small boy when Ayers was active.  However, Ayers has never apologized or repented.  He’s regretted only that he didn’t go far enough and would do it all again.  Ayers’ bomb-making days may have stopped, but he is the same man and he is currently, and has long been, Obama’s social and political mentor.]

At a rally in North Carolina, Obama countered that McCain and his campaign “are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance.” The Democrat described the criticism as “Swiftboat-style attacks on me,” a reference to the unsubstantiated allegations about 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s decorated military record in Vietnam.  [How much substantiation do you need aside from dozens of eye-witnesses, plus Kerry’s own verbal slip-ups?  Swift-boating has come to mean any accusation we, the Democrats, deny, regardless of the absence of evidence on our side, and the overwhelming amount of evidence on yours.]

During her stop in California, Palin was asked about an Associated Press analysis that said her charge about Ayers was unsubstantiated, a point made by other news organizations, and the criticism carried a “racially tinged subtext that McCain may come to regret.”  [To a hammer, everything is a nail.  To an MSM reporter, every criticism of Obama is racially tinged.  I, for one, am baffled about the racial connection, considering that Ayers is white.]

“The Associated Press is wrong,” Palin said. “The comments are about an association that has been known but hasn’t been talked about, and I think it’s fair to talk about where Barack Obama kicked off his political career, in the guy’s living room.”  [You go, girl! That’s precisely what needs to be said.  Sarah is calling the AP and other members of the MSM on the fact that their refusal to report a story does not constitute proof that the story does not exist.]

In fact, Obama was questioned about Ayers during a prime-time Democratic debate against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton prior to April’s Pennsylvania primary.  [He was questioned, and he lied.  AP forgets to add that he downplayed his association so much that his statements were falsehoods.  Or, as Muravchik explains in the same article I linked to, above:

The details of Obama’s association with Ayers remain somewhat shrouded because both Ayers and Dohrn have refused to discuss it, while Obama and his spokesmen have prevaricated about it. When, during one of the televised primary debates, George Stephanopoulos asked about his connection to Ayers, Obama replied:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense.

Later, Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, added: “Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school.” If this is true, Ayers’s children must be slow learners, since they are thirty-one and twenty-eight while Obama’s are nine and six. But Obama’s own reply, though less bald-faced than Axelrod’s, was thoroughly disingenuous. Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the Left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Obama and Ayers’s collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.

You can go to Kurtz’s articles, to Muravchik’s article, or to Diamond’s website (globallabor.blogspot.com) to see just how untruthful Obama was — but AP readily lets it pass.]