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Barack Obama has assured his supporters that Republicans will attack him because he's black.
The AP has found an example of just that - headline: AP: Palin's Ayers Attack "Racially Tinged". Here are the first paragraphs:
WASHINGTON — By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.It's a long article - but to find the hidden racism you'll have to plow through a history of dirty campaign tactics (swiftboating, for example) and speculation that Palin is attempting to turn attention away from the lousy economy to finally reach paragraph 21 - in which we learn thatAnd though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.
Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?Let me abbreviate why the AP feels Palin's attack is racist: "Anyone who holds a different opinion ('not like us') than Barack Obama on anything is a racist."In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.
See your future?
Update: Here's a screen capture of results from a google search for the headline:
The first two returns are from the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, but the remainder feature the headlines over the story from New York Newsday, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Baltimore Sun - and all feature the "racially tinged" headline.
Follow any of those links now, however, and you'll find those headlines have been re-written: "Analysis: Palin, propping up a sagging campaign, uses words that could backfire on McCain".
The bizarre claim that associating Obama with a white terrorist is actually a super-secret racist tactic to associate Obama with darker-skinned terrorists is still intact.
More - As long as we're on the topic, this is 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta:
(Actually it's just a picture of him, sorry if anyone was frightened). Do you think it's possible that the leftists will ever abandon their ridiculous insistence that Arabs/Muslims are dark skinned? [Hint: No, because reality doesn't fit their agenda.] I'd put up a picture of the very Caucasian appearing (relative to Barack Obama, at least) Saddam Hussein here too, but I don't want to be accused of associating him with a 9/11 hijacker.
"Postcript: "Policemen's lives were lost"
It occurs to me that some folks might not be familiar with Bill Ayers. Short version: he's the founder of an "ineffective" terrorist group who only wanted to mostly blow up institutions but also killed a few cops but who escaped prosecution because the pigs did an illegal wiretap on him, man:
Mr Ayers, now 63 and a respectable professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, helped to found the Weather Underground in 1969. During the Days of Rage, at the height of the Vietnam War, it launched ineffectual bombing attacks on the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Most were against institutions rather than people, but policemen's lives were lost.Mr Ayers went on the run, but all charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretapping by the FBI. His [September, 2001] memoir, Fugitive Days, opens with a quote from the author: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."
The above passage is from a recent article. But back before they chose Barack Obama as the next president the media wasn't afraid to write about Bill Ayers:
He walked out of jail and into his first teaching job, at a daycare center in Ann Arbor. Soon he was the 21-year-old director of the place. It was there he met Diana Oughton, a beautiful and accomplished young woman. They fell in love and attended SDS conventions together. As the war dragged on and U.S. politics became more polarized, some of the war resisters—including Ayers, Oughton, and Dohrn—turned more militant. They started a group called the Weatherman, a name inspired by the Bob Dylan song lyric "You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows."But he bounced back:
<...>
In 1970, a bomb that was apparently being built in a Greenwich Village townhouse, occupied by at least five members of the Weatherman, accidentally exploded—killing three of the group, including Ayers's beloved Diana Oughton. In Fugitive Days, Ayers tries to imagine what happened. Maybe Diana tried to stop the others from their path? Maybe they all drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes?Maybe Diana saw that this bomb, packed with nails and screws, would have exacted a heavy human toll if it had ever reached its destination—a New Jersey military base. Could she have, in a gesture of sacrifice, crossed the wires herself? "I'll never know what happened," he says. "That's the price I have to pay."
One of the Weatherman leaders was Bernardine Dohrn, a smart, magnetic figure who, in part because of her penchant for miniskirts and knee-high boots, was dubbed "La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left" by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. After a bomb exploded accidentally and killed three of their colleagues, Ayers and Dohrn "hooked up," in the parlance of the day, and, since 1982, they have been married. This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers insists he has no regrets.Oh, by the way...
Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:Yeah - you don't pack a bomb with nails because you want to drive nails into an "institution".That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."
And here's a first-hand account from one of those other "targeted institutions":
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.And I think this is a good question:
Here is the thing that eats at me. What did Ayers see in him [Obama]? How did such a young man come into Ayers circle and why was he embraced? Dorhn, Ayers, Wright all saw something in Obama that made them want to be with him and promote him? These are not people who like promoting pro-America candidates.But the only answer we'll get is that Ayers is a "respectable" teacher of your children now, and Barack Obama has nothing to do with him. At least, nothing you need to worry about, racist.What do they know about Obama that we don’t?
Her reference was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were "pals" or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.Daniel K. Douglass, the AP "analyst" who came up with this Palin is a racist theory, asks (as support for his racism claims)"is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists"? Since it's not actually false (for instance, the event Douglass describes as "Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career" was actually the launch thereof) I'd answer "Yes - so that we can judge him on the content of his character".Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers' radical views and actions.
But maybe that makes me a racist, too.
Late Update: CNN brings the story forward. It's not about how young Barack Obama was when Ayers was building nail bombs - it's about now:
"Improving schools"? Why is Barack Obama so afraid to tout the "improvements" these guys teamed up to bring to Chicago schools?
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