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

[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.