O'Reilly Vs. Obama III: Radical Associations

I believe that not much new was accomplished on this topic. Obama, once again, denied ever hearing anything despicable come out of Reverend Wright's mouth. That's hard for his detractors to believe. His supporters think he can do no wrong, and those in the middle don't know what to think. Of course, the more we know about Reverend Wright the more he appears to be a bad person. It's hard for me to believe that Barack Obama, who said that he went to church twice a month on average, never heard anything inflammatory but since I was never in the church I just don't know. Obama tried to minimize the inflammatory statements by both Wright and Father Pflegger by pointing out that they did great things "in the community". This has always been a really weak argument in my opinion because clergy doing good work in the community is not exclusive to Father Pflegger and Reverend Wright. In fact, it is the norm not the exception. Yet, these two clergymen, that Obama has known for a long time, have a penchant for inflammatory language that is the exception not the norm for clergy.

Obama's explanation of his relationship with Bill Ayers is remarkable for its moral equivalency, a tactic he would use throughout the interview. He claimed, again, that Ayers did "despicable things 40 years ago", and that their relationship was strictly professional involving education. These "despicable things" that Obama refers to including bombing the Capitol, bank heists, and even murder. Obama tried to name drop by pointing out that Chicago's mayor, Richard M. Daley, also knows Ayers. That's true, however my fair mayor has a cozy relationship with all sorts of wily characters, and Daley's seal of approval in no way makes Ayers respectable.

O'Reilly brought up the youth crime bill which both worked on. This bill followed Ayers philosophy of rehabilitation over punishment and involved rather lax sentences for violent crimes. It is one of several pieces of controversial legislation by Obama that hasn't been explored nearly enough. O'Reilly didn't ask Obama about the time the two of them spent on the Annenberg Foundation, though Obama did say they spent time working on educational issues. Here is how Sol Stern described Ayers' contribution to education.

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turnthem into laboratories of revolutionary change.Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools.

In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.

Ayers is now and always has been a radical and if Obama worked with Ayers on either education or crime, he was working with a radical on both issues.

Obama's worst moment was when he attempted to defend his relationship with Daily Kos. Late last year, Obama joined all the Democratic nominees at their Yearly Kos convention. Now, at the time, Daily Kos was a vile site but their vile nature didn't make it to the mainstream until recently. In defending his relationship with Daily Kos, Senator Obama drew a moral equivalency between Daily Kos and O'Reilly's Fox News colleague, Sean Hannity. This continues a troubling pattern of moral equivalency on the part of Senator Obama.

At one point, Senator Obama tried to minimize his radical relationships by proclaiming that he knows thousands of people and that his opponents cherry picking a few folks that have a "tangential relationship" with him. O'Reilly correctly countered by pointing out that he also knows thousands of people and none of them are as radical as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pflegger, William Ayers, and the folks at the Daily Kos. Many of these folks don't merely know Senator Obama "tangentially", and no amount of moral equivalency will change that.

Here is is part 1 ,part 2, , and part 4