Obama on Ayers: “I thought he was rehabilitated”

More lies bite the dust.

During an interview with Philadelphia radio talk show host Michael Smerconish, Obama had this to say about his relationship with William Ayers:

“I moved to Chicago,” Obama recalled. “I didn’t grow up in Chicago. And graduating from law school I was involved in a whole bunch of civic activities.

“The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois and that’s how I met him, was working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and former close friend of Ronald Reagan’s and I was sitting on this board along with a whole bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders and he was one of the people who was on this board. And he lives in the same neighborhood.

“Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated.

http://share.ovi.com/media/thepolitico.public/thepolitico.10082

Rehabilitated? An unrepentant 60’s radical who threw bombs against his own country to make a political point, and still doesn’t think he ‘did enough’?

‘Civic activitites’…a leftwing euphamism for socialism.

The 2001 list of Woods Fund board members doesn’t look very bi-partisan.

Staff

Ricardo A. Millett – President
Todd Dietterle – Vice President – Program Director, Community Organizing Program
Deborah Harrington – Program Director, Enabling Work and Reducing Poverty
Phillip Thomas – Program Officer
Sally E. Gonzelez – Grants and Operations Manager

Board of Directors

Howard J. Stanback – Board Chair – Manager, New Kenwood, LLC
Maria G. Valdez – Board Vice Chair – Attorney-at-Law Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
William C. Ayers – Distinguished Professor Of Education, University Of Illinois At Chicago
Cynthia M. Campbell – President, Mccormick Theological Seminary
R. Eden Martin – President, Civic Committee And The Commercial Club
Barack Obama – State Senator And University Of Chicago School Of Law
Charles N. Wheatley – President, Sahara Enterprises, Inc.
Suzanne Boyle, Board Treasurer
Kristin Patton, Board Secretary

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Woods_Fund_of_Chicago

Where are the Republicans? 

More at Nice Deb:
http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/obama-and-ayers-relationship-predates-woods-fund-board-memberships/

As it turns out, these people were not exactly well-intentioned philanthropists who wanted to improve the condition of disadvantaged people and provide money for housing. Much of the money went to promote leftwing radical groups and movements. It also went to friends, family, and political cronies.

Like Tony Rezko. And the Arab American Action network, a pro-Palestinian group. And ACORN.
And dozens of local ‘community organizations’ who in turn, donated thousands of dollars to Obama’s campaign.
Link: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-and-the-woods-fund/

A video clip from a 1998 Connie Chung interview with Ayers and Dorhn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQsYzBlXK6M&eurl=

Obama worked with Bill Ayers at the time, and had known both Ayers and Dorhn for about 10 years, and he knew damned well what their political leanings were.

His claim that he first met Ayers in 1996 is a lie:

1988, 1989
Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle Obama) in 1988 and Barack Obama in 1989 serve at prominent Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, where Ayer’s wife Bernardine Dohrn also works.

1993-2002
Obama serves on the board of The Woods Fund, which funneled money to far left causes. Ayers served on the Woods board for three years of Obama’s tenure and remained on the board after Obama departed. From 2000-2002, when Obama and Ayers served together, the board met twelve times.

1995-1999
Obama led the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was founded by Ayers, and remained on the board until 2001.

1995
Ayers held a “Meet the candidate” event for Obama in his home, at some point in 1995.

Nov. 6, 1997
Obama and Ayers served on a panel of four discussing juvenile justice.

December 1997
In 1997, Obama Reviewed Ayers’ Book, A Kind And Just Parent: The Children Of Juvenile Court, In The Chicago Tribune, Calling It “A Searing And Timely Account Of The Juvenile Court System.” (Chicago Tribune, 12/21/97

http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/obamaayers-timeline/

Oh yeah, and about Obama’s claim (LIE) that he wasn’t aware of Ayer’s past:

A former SDS member and friend of Bill Ayers, Marilyn Katz, was the woman who got Barack Obama to speak at the rally where he first spoke out against the war in Iraq in 2002.

She organized the event:

It was a cool, damp afternoon when Barack Obama arrived to speak at an antiwar rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza on October 2, 2002. The scene was ragtag. A metal tower had been festooned with strips of white cloth upon which rally attendees wrote personalized peace messages. Protesters danced to a band featuring kazoos and a marching skeleton. Jesse Jackson was to be the day’s marquee speaker. But it was Obama, wearing a war is not an option lapel pin, who stole the show. Obama’s 926-word speech denounced a “dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

……On the last weekend of September 2002, Marilyn Katz, a p.r. maven and former aide to Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, was awoken by a phone call from her old friend BettyLu Saltzman. “We have to do something about Bush’s drive to war, ” said Saltzman, a wealthy political gadfly in her seventies. Katz agreed. The two women contacted friends on the local liberal-activist circuit–
“a bunch of old sixties radicals,” says Katz–about staging a demonstration. A slew of local politicians were invited to speak. Few accepted.
One of them was Obama.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aaad0724-dd13-4ffa-810b-d5d3220ff055

A background on Katz and her own unrepentant bullshit:

From a May 2008 interview:

Katz: …..I think I probably have the longest arrest record of anyone here, since the older Daley really hated me. The longest arrest record—17 arrests in that period of time. But in the end, I think it also made me who I was. And it gave me every skill as an organizer, as an intellectual, as a writer—who left school because I believed there was a revolution. Michael recruited me as a young kid in my sophomore year.

Q: Knowing what you know now, what might you have done differently?

Katz: Nothing!

https://www.timeout.com/chicago/articles/features/29421/freedom-fighters

This is what the democrats are offering for a presidential candidate; a radical socialist ACORN pimp, with ties to unrepentant terrorists.

Just. Wonderful.