The Outing of Barack Obama

If you can warp time to imagine Richard Nixon consorting with Eric Robert Rudolph for more than 20 years on public policy issues, then you can begin to understand the relationship between Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and one of the men who made him in Chicago machine politics, Bill Ayers. What you may not be able to understand is why Obama's campaign is apparently working with Ayers to suppress the extent of their relationship.

Who was Bill Ayers?

Ayers was a founder and leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that declared war upon the United States, bombed government buildings, murdered law enforcement officers during armed robberies, fire-bombed a judge's home, and had planned what could have been the largest terrorist mass murder in America prior to 9/11. That attack was only thwarted by the premature detonation of massive roofing nail-studded pipe bombs by Ayer's girlfriend and fellow terrorist, Diana Oughton, bombs destined for a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix. The blast of just some of the pipe bombs leveled a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse; four more nail-studded bombs were recovered in the rubble, along with 57 sticks of dynamite. The anti-personnel bombs created by the Weathermen were designed to kill hundreds.

That Obama and Ayers have long had a relationship has never been in doubt, but until recently, Obama attempted to minimize that relationship, describing Ayers as little more than an college professor, someone who lived in his neighborhood, with whom he'd had minimal contact. A compliant media has even tried to claim the Weathermen never killed anyone other than their own members, a transparent falsehood.

But the facade of a distant relationship the Obama campaign has constructed between the candidate and the aging terrorist is slipping. In a recent interview with Bill O'Reilly, Obama admitted a bit more about the extent of his relationship with Ayers.

Ayers and Obama had partnered together at the Woods Funds on various projects as members of the board of directors, in the legislature on striking down a crime bill that would have sentenced youth offends to an adult prison for a second violent crime, and most interestingly, on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a school reform project written by Ayers that collected $49 million from the Annenberg Foundation and was tasked with raising and distributing $98 million more.

According to the NY Times, Obama was nominated to the CAC board in 1995 and was elected chairman, despite having a paltry resume in regards to education experience, and in spite of the fact that the board had far more qualified education experts on the board for consideration, including two college presidents.

The same article notes that Bill Ayer's helped write the CAC proposal and that as soon as Obama was seated, the board was pushed to start approving enrichment program grant proposals "quickly," with little apparent regard for the quality of the proposals. A board member stated in 1998 that "the project proposals by and large were awful," and ran counter to the goals and educational strategy of the Chicago Public Schools.

As Patterico notes, the enrichment programs that the CAC doled out money to under Obama's watch seemed geared more towards indoctrination than education, as at least some of the money Ayer's helped secure was funneled to Ayer's peers, including fellow 1960s radical Mike Klonsky, who received one of the first CAC grants of $175,000 for his Small Schools Workshop (Klonsky's blog was recently removed form the Obama campaign web site when Klonsky's radical past was exposed).

What do we know about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge other than it was deemed a disastrously-run failure, and just how close were Ayers and Obama working together?

That is a question that Professor Steve Diamond of Santa Clara University Law School would like answered, but instead of getting answers, he's run into a wall of Obama supporters that he claims is a part of a secret unit of the Obama-Biden campaign similar to Richard Nixon's =""Plumbers," a group designed to prevent leaks of information that could be damaging to the campaign.

Obama's Plumblers are tasked with limiting access to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents housed at the University of Illinois Library in Chicago, and according to Diamond, were behind attempts to blunt the efforts of Stanley Kurtz of the National Review to obtain the documents, some of which may have been removed before Kurtz was afforded access.

Who are Obama's Plumbers?

If a Democratic source of Diamond's is correct, the suppression effort is being led by none other than Bill Ayers himself, and includes other members of "Progressives for Obama" that have direct access to David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager.

Another named member is former CAC executive director Ken Rolling. Rolling, as it turns out, was responsible for awarding the grant that brought Barack Obama to Chicago in his first job as a community organizer. Ayers later helped place Rolling as the CAC executive director.

It appears there is a distinct possibility that Barack Obama was brought onto the board the CAC by Bill Ayers and pushed into the chairmanship despite not being nearly as qualified as others of the board for one simple, central purpose; to help launder (for lack of a better word) grant money into the hands of Ayer's contemporaries in the far left extreme of Chicago's Marxist/Communist education community, such as the $175,000 funneled to Klonsky.

Ayers, Klonsky, and other radicals decided long ago that they cannot win with pipe bombs, and decided to continue their war against America by indoctrinating children via the application of Marxist educational theory. Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mike Klonsky, and other radicals of the 1960s never gave up their attempts to undermine America.

They just went underground, until they had a suitably pliable champion to be their figurehead, and that champion, Barack Obama, would rather that relationship remain hidden.

Update: I contacted Professor Diamond via email to follow-up, and he is disputing substantial parts of what Batchelor attributes to him in the Human Events article, and I confused something Batchelor claimed and misreported it as Diamond's statement.

First, the mis-attribution I made.

Professor Diamond states that the does not have contacts in the Democratic Party, and he's right; it was Batchelor that claimed he had party sources. Diamond emphasises that based upon what he knows, there is "no basis to conclude... that Axelrod or anyone else from the campaign is involved" if such an effort is underway, and he did not hit any sort of a wall of Obama supporters, which was my attempt to describe the role of poltical plumbers as a barrier.

He further wants to clarify that he doesn't think anyone associated with Joe Biden would have anything to do with any CAC coverup attempt that may be underway, and he does not know if Obama's plumbers exist in fact. If they do, it doesn't seem they &qout;are committed to breaking the law" if necessary, as Nixon's were.

Everything else related to the Human Events article must stand or fall based upon John Batchelor's sources and claims.

And Barack Obama and Bill Ayers have a $150 million failure to explain.

Update: A closely related story of Obama using the Woods Fund to advance his career at Pajamas Media.

Oh, what a tangled web...