Thread: Keith Olbermann Special Comment on Sarah Palin

The McCain campaign turning negative may be a bad thing to do now when you have a closet full of skeletons.

John McCain linked to private group in Iran-Contra case

Keating Five

Keith Olbermann, about the only honest and straight forward gut on tv. This guy feels the exact same way as I do about this maladroit WE have in the white house.

And the repubs. want to follow with the McSame-Palin ticket. OMFG!!!

If there was video like this on Obama, it would probably be over for him!

How interesting Palin is focusing and using the term "terrorist" over an incident that is 40 years old.

Uhm.....the economy is more important at the moment, and Bill Ayers is a professor of Education at a University.

Priorities?

Originally Posted by Big Smoothy

How interesting Palin is focusing and using the term "terrorist" over an incident that is 40 years old.

Uhm.....the economy is more important at the moment, and Bill Ayers is a professor of Education at a University.

Priorities?

you might want to read his admission statements about his bombings before you dismiss him as "just a prof"

Originally Posted by Big Smoothy

How interesting Palin is focusing and using the term "terrorist" over an incident that is 40 years old.

Uhm.....the economy is more important at the moment, and Bill Ayers is a professor of Education at a University.

Priorities?

Ayers was handed a job in academia, a safe harbor for extreme liberals, in one of the most liberal states in the Country. As was his wife, she was handed a job in a cushy law firm and then handed a position as law professor despite the fact that she cannot be admitted to practice law because of her violent criminal history.

Don't minimize William Ayers or his wife's violent terrorist history. Minimize their connection to Obama if you want, but don't talk about Ayers like he is some friendly pipe smoking, blazer wearing professor. This is a guy who twice bombed a monument to fallen police officers. Who the fuck destroys a monument to police officers killed in the line of duty? Ayers wife served serious time for her involvement in the theft of $1.6 million from an armored truck that resulted in the murder of three police officers. The plain fact of the matter is that the very first fundraiser of Obama's career was held in the home of Ayers and his wife, Obama attended, and this was in 1995. As late as 1994 Ayers' wife is on the record saying their terrorist actions in detonating explosives at targets in the US were "highly appropriate."

The keating 5 was a financial scandal 20 years ago, in which McCain was cleared of wrong doing but admitted to being mistaken. Hardly comparable. Moreover, it was extensively covered by the media as it unraveled, 20 years ago. Obama's affiliation with Ayers has been all but ignored the liberal media.

Fight the Smears: The Truth about Barack Obama and William Ayers

Smear groups and now a desperate McCain campaign are trying to connect Barack to William Ayers using age-old guilt by association techniques. Here’s the truth: the smear associating Barack to Ayers is “phony,” “tenuous,” – even “exaggerated at best if not outright false.”

William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990’s. According to the Associated Press, they are not close: “No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago …”

Smear groups and the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago – when Barack was just eight years old. Here’s what the New York Times reported on the connection:

But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”


Barack has publicly denounced Ayers’ radical actions from the 1960’s:

Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.

Keith Olbermann is a long-winded, self righteous hack that practices his facial expressions in the mirror. He calls Ayers a "rehabilitated formed domestic radical from the 60's."

It doesn't seem to me that "radical" is the appropriate word for someone who strategically bombed multiple targets within the US over several years, whose girlfriend at the time was killed while contructing an anti-personelle bomb, i.e. one with nails and other shrapnel added in an effort to murder Americans.

Moreover, someone who comitted such acts hardly seems "reformed" when he is still doing photo ops demonstrating hatred for America.

CANDIDATE WATCH
Obama's 'Weatherman' Connection

Chicago Police photos of William Ayers in 1968

"William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama's Willie Horton."
--Former counterterrorism official Larry C. Johnson, The Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2008.
There has been a sudden spate of blog items and newspaper articles, mainly in the British press, linking Barack Obama to a former member of the radical Weather Underground Organization that claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974. The former Weatherman, William Ayers, now holds the position of distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Although never convicted of any crime, he told the New York Times in September 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs...I feel we didn't do enough."

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, as reported here. They lived within a few blocks of each other in the trendy Hyde Park section of Chicago, and moved in the same liberal-progressive circles.

Is there anything here that raises questions about Obama's judgment or is this just another example of guilt by association?

The Facts

The first article in the mainstream press linking Obama to Ayers appeared in the London Daily Mail on February 2. It was written by Peter Hitchens, the right-wing brother of the left-wing firebrand turned Iraq war supporter, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens cited the Ayers connection to bolster his argument that Obama is "far more radical than he would like us to know."

The Hitchens piece was followed by a Bloomberg article last week pointing to the Ayers connection as support for Hillary Clinton's contention that Obama might not be able to withstand the "Republican attack machine." Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA and the State Department, predicted that the Republicans would seize on the Ayers case, and other Chicago relationships, to "bludgeon Obama's presidential aspirations into the dust."

The London Sunday Times joined the chorus this weekend by reporting that Republicans were "out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger with dubious support".

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. Ayers did not respond to e-mails and telephone calls requesting clarification of the relationship. Obama spokesman Bill Burton noted in a statement that Ayers was a professor of education at the University of Illinois and a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and continued:

Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
In the short term, the person who has most to gain by speculation about Obama's acquaintance with a former terrorist is Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady likes to present herself as "tested and vetted" after years of exposure to Republican attacks, in contrast to Obama, a relative newcomer to hardscrabble presidential politics. Such arguments resonate with Johnson, the counterterrorism expert, who told me that he is a Clinton supporter, although not involved with the campaign.

But the Obama-Ayers link is a tenuous one. As Newsday pointed out, Clinton has her own, also tenuous, Weatherman connection. Her husband commuted the sentences of a couple of convicted Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, shortly before leaving office in January 2001. Which is worse: pardoning a convicted terrorist or accepting a campaign contribution from a former Weatherman who was never convicted?

Whatever his past, Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia, and still a member of the Woods Fund Board. The president of the Woods Fund, Deborah Harrington, said he had been selected for the board because of his solid academic credentials and "passion for social justice."

"This whole connection is a stretch," Harrington told me. "Barack was very well known in Chicago, and a highly respected legislator. It would be difficult to find people round here who never volunteered or contributed money to one of his campaigns."

Originally Posted by clemson357

It doesn't seem to me that "radical" is the appropriate word for someone who strategically bombed multiple targets within the US over several years, whose girlfriend at the time was killed while contructing an anti-personelle bomb, i.e. one with nails and other shrapnel added in an effort to murder Americans.

I searched and couldn't find anything on him doing time.....if he didn't do any time that would be a crime.

I actually thought he was a black guy.




Yep, wearing the old Cuban shirt.

Originally Posted by min0 lee

I searched and couldn't find anything on him doing time.....if he didn't do any time that would be a crime.

There was misconduct by the prosecutor or investigator (I forgot which), so the evidence was thrown out.

Originally Posted by brogers

There was misconduct by the prosecutor or investigator (I forgot which), so the evidence was thrown out.

Unreal, I imagine he doesn't even deny his crimes.

What's wrong with this system?