Now about those friends of Obama...

[fpb]

To me, the most curious and interesting thing about William Ayers is this: how does one parlay an adult life experience that can be summed up in twenty years hiding on a demonstrably criminal and murderous cause, then a few more getting a degree in education from a very minor New York City college - how does one parlay this into a full professorship in education at The University of Chicago - probably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League - and a permanent place among the great and the good of America's third city? I'd really like to know. Because, you know, I rather fancy an academic career, and I don't think that my CV is any worse than that of Professor Ayers when he set out on his.

Another point: how does one get away, like his consort Bernardine Dohrn did, with completely refusing to cooperate with a criminal trial into the violent death of two policemen and a guard, in spite of serious grounds for suspicion; and why should a judge then send her free even from a measly sentence for contempt of court?

These two things cannot be explained unless the Dohrn-Ayers couple had pretty serious friends somewhere in the very "Amerikkan" establishment that they as terrorists planned to destroy. And that certainly makes Obama's friends as interesting as Obama himself.

P.S.: Obama was also an admirer of the execrable Edward Said, who was a professor at Columbia at the same time as Obama was a student. There is a photograph, I gather, of the two of them together. To anyone who remembers what I think of Edward Said, this is another interesting friendshiop.

Comments

[cette-vie.livejournal.com]

I'm not even trying to defend Bill Ayers as being right in anything, but quite frequently, we regret and repent of things that we've done in the name of what we've thought was right. And change, for that matter, although others call it flip-flopping.

But what I really need to correct you on is Bill Ayers' current position. He's a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a state university, and is NOT a professor at the UofC. I think our campus would have exploded by this point were he there. And Wikipedia says so too, if that's any proof. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ayers)

But I will take that compliment about my school being the best outside of the Ivies, thank you. =)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Ayers is quite unrepentant (he was photographed as late as 2001 with his feet on an American flag), and frankly you are too young (and the wrong nationality) to remember the murderous horror of Communist terrorism in the seventies, which I for one will not forgive. I am however glad to hear that he has no direct connection with UofC. Just as I have personal reasons to loathe former seventies terrorists, so I have personal reasons to admire your institution. Your school has the School of Divinity, which has indubitably the best track record in comparative religion (one of my subjects) outside France, and is prestigious in every other way.

[cette-vie.livejournal.com]

And I want to amend my atrocious use of similes in the above post, as I just realized what that sounded like. What I really mean is that the campus would have been embroiled in controversy and anything resembling learning (we do little enough of that as it is!) would not be able to exist on a campus five minutes from Barack Obama's house and with Bill Ayers' being a professor there. So thank goodness that is not the case.

I really can't talk sometimes, sorry.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Surrre. Yeah, right. This is a charming apology that did not need to be made - I caught your meaning well enough - and you know what I think of your capabilities as a writer.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Ayers is not at the University of Chicago (my alma mater). He lives in Hyde Park, the U of C's neighborhood, but he's a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a member of the Chicago establishment, basically by inheritance. Ayers' dad Thomas was head of Commonwealth Edison and a friend of Mayor Daley (Daley pere, that is), a pillar of the Chicago elite. I haven't looked up the legal details of his and his wife's trials.

So yeah, friends in high places -- and the Chicago establishment has an order of magnitude more tolerance for criminality than the American establishment as a whole. Usually just graft and corruption rather than unrepentant terrorism, but apparently they'll let you in as long as you stop with the actual violence.

I've never seen you comment on Edward Said, but somehow I find no difficulty figuring out your thoughts about him.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Oops, should have read the comments first -- well, the stuff about his father is new, anyway. A local columnist explains the same sort of things, in a longer context, here and here.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, I've just finished Until Proven Innocent, a book about the Duke U. lacrosse team rape case, and it was appalling how many of the faculty publicly rushed to judge the accused students, in the name of political correctness and their own personal agendas. Extremist university faculty? Sad but true, unfortunately.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

In my experience, there are a lot of crazy, batshit crazy, people who are professors at universities. It's obvious that there are a sufficient number of crazy administrators who hire and protect these people, even though it's rarely to the interest of the students.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

You can't mention anything of or like what you've expressed here in a political discussion with the opposition without being branded a racist, a bigot, a muckraker, and a poor sport.

The cult of personality strikes again. To blazes with substance. Everyone just wants to feel good in the moment, no thought to any other time-frame. History does not exist, and a bright, shiny future with ice cream and cake for all has been promised.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am not important enough for the people who defend Obama to bother with me. What is more likely to happen - and has in fact happened - is for friends of mine who evidently read the newspapers or watch TV uncritically to turn around wide-eyed and go Hunh? One person reacted with genuine and heartfelt horror to the suggestion that a politician who had made his start in Chicago might have anything to do with the Dailey machine. That is the worst thing that this kind of deliberate silence is doing: it is producing a whole generation of uninformed citizens who will vote in a man of whom they have an idea that bears only the slightest similarity to any discoverable fact. When any difference arises, it will be too late.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Yep. They believe what they read in the papers and see on television, though they will tell you they think for themselves. I have a feeling Obama is going to win, and I have a feeling that desperate PR measures are going to be taken when several of his policies, if and when enacted, have the opposite effects than intended on the economy.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

People have pointed out that UIC isn't the same as U of C, but I think it should also be pointed out that Ayers's Ed.D is from Teachers College at Columbia.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, where has Obama said he was an admirer of Said? This seems to be the photograph you're talking about; every event I've been to where they have numbers on the tables like that has used them to show which table you're assigned to.

Sure, maybe Obama should have taken the opportunity to attack Said with his butter knife, but I'm willing to be generous and call that a mere venial sin... =p

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Considering that what he said at the going-away party of the former Edward Said Professor of Arabic Studies, Rashid Khalidi, is so explosive that the Los Angeles Times is willing to be collectively hung, drawn and quartered rather than release the tape, I would agree that friendship with the infamous Said is the least of it. The issue is rather why is the period of Obama's life in which he and Said moved in very similar orbits such a complete blank? He must be the only college student in the country whose friends, roommates and teachers do not have a fund of colourful stories about him that they are willing to share.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

But where did Obama say he admired Said? And is there any reason why you're not taking the LA Times' explanation—that the tape was given to them on condition that it not be released—at face value? When even Marty Peretz is annoyed, I think it's clear that there's no there there.

As for his college days, I found this after five seconds of Googling. I'm sure there's a lot more like it out there.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Fantastic. Obamamania makes one of the smartest men on my f-list into a credulous person. I'll believe the LA Times fables when chickens are born with three wings. As for Obama's years at college, I found this: http://www.zombietime.com/obama_and_the_weather_underground/

The fact that the major media are unequivocally fighting for Obama - something McCain expected and acted upon - is obvious, and if you believe anything they say about him, you are allowing uncontested and unargued propaganda into your mind. As for why they do so, I would point you to my analysis of the class of "intellectual workers" in my article on "mutant Democrats", which you might remember. Altogether, you can trust the LA Times about Obama when you trust the old Pravda about the late Leonid Brezhnev.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

*rolls eyes* I must be the only Obamamaniac who isn't voting for him!

I don't think there's any use arguing on the LA Times point: if we take your view that the media is willing to deliberately lie and go through all manner of trouble to get Obama elected, any and all evidence can be fit into the narrative. If the LA Times refuses to give up the tape, it's because they're willing to immolate themselves in the service of the cause. If they do give it up and it contains no bombshell, then it just shows how eager they were to betray their source's trust in order to exonerate their Dear Leader. (One wonders, though, why the LA Times published a piece on the event in the first place if they were so desperately in the tank for Obama. But I'm sure that can all be explained as well.)

I stopped reading the link when it became clear that the author apparently thinks it's some damning revelation that Obama was involved in the divestment movement. But let me just quote the broader passage of the excerpt from Dreams From My Father the author picked out:

They, they, they. That's the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling conventions. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

It's clear when you read the book that Obama doesn't consider that to be exactly a positive time in his life; his actions at the time as symptomatic of the struggles he was experiencing with respect to his multiracial background—a constant theme throughout the book. On the other hand, maybe you find the passage I quoted to be just as damning, I don't know.

Anyway, I really want to know: is there any actual evidence that Obama's an admirer of Edward Said? As far as I can tell, he simply took an English class with him as an undergrad. Confusing the University of Chicago with the University of Illinois at Chicago is a totally forgivable mistake for a foreigner to make—even a foreigner with an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics and culture—but asserting that Obama is an admirer of Said without any evidence, or implying that Ayers's only postgraduate qualification was from a very minor New York City college when the true information was available from a few seconds Googling suggests that better fact-checkers are needed...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You did not follow what I said. What I said was: whether or not Obama was an admirer of Said, what the LA Times is trying to conceal is the extent to which he was, only two years ago, an admirer of the Edward Said Professor of Arabic Studies - a PLO mouthpiece whose ultimate goal, to those who know such things, is the destruction of Israel. That is what that tape was supposed to show. And if the LA Times have not released it these last five days in spite of a hammering of negative publicity, it is certain that they will not release it unless compelled. And it is certain that they have good reason to do so. As for the mediatic enamourment with Obama - where have you been? Not that I hope to convince you, but if that notorious bastion of right-wing thinking, the Pew center, informs us that coverage of Obama has been consistently favourable and coverage of McCain not only consistently unfavourable but increasingly bad as the election date came closer, I suppose you will see that as evidence of flawless impartiality, too? You will not find one McCain or Hillary supporter who does not think that the media coverage of any opponent of Obama's stank to high heaven. I am surprised that you even find it odd that I should make such a point.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Actually, I believe your exact words were "Obama was also an admirer of the execrable Edward Said."

I don't think I ever denied the existence of media bias. In fact, I don't think—and I don't know anyone who does think—that the media has been some kind of impartial arbiter of the news during this election or any other. I think their coverage has, by and large, been more favorable to Obama, among many other pathologies. I think many in the media realize this, sparking among other things this very interesting apology (in both senses of the word) from Harris and VandeHei at Politico. I encourage you to give it a read. (Deborah Howell also had a piece acknowledging the existence of bias in the Washington Post.)

I think it's a far cry from that to believing that the media will deliberately lie and go through hell and high water to support Obama. Not that I hope to convince you, either.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Anyway, it is impossible to be neutral with respect to Said. If I had found myself seated at the same place with him, I'd have walked off (and registered a complaint with the organizers afterwards). With Said, you are either a follower or an opponent. Guess what it says to me, that State Senator Obama seems to have had no problem with the eminent professor's company?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As for your refusal to read the articles I linked you to, I guess this means you do not want to explain to me why Obama is apparently unknown to everyone in Columbia U, why he seems to have misrepresented some facts about his address, and why, if he did not know Ayers and Dohrn in NY when they were near neighbours and moving in very similar environments, he headed to Chicago as soon as he graduated from Harvard, rather than going home to Hawaii? Also, why he was inserted into Harvard by the gift of the notorious Prince Alwaleed - the one whose donation Mayor Giuliani rejected, remember? I have a lot of other questions, but no doubt you will dismiss them all as Republican tittle-tattle. I am not the first to notice that Obama has a number of interesting similarities with Richard Nixon. Let us hope that this does not include the ultimate result.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I also found this: http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaEducation.htm. Not being Indonesian or Muslim, I cannot verify the details about his childhood, but there is certainly a strong suggestion that he lied about his early religious experiences.