Bill Ayers

Not So Breitbart: Pathetic Vetting Of Obama’s BBQ With Bill Ayers

Posted by on June 4, 2012 at 1:12 pm. 11 Comments :

The “vetting” of Barack Obama continues at Breitbart News and, true to form, serves only to embarrass the juvenile efforts of Breitbrat Joel Pollak and his childish pals who suffer an acute case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. Today’s banner headline at the Breitbrats sandbox blares: “Exclusive – The Vetting – Senator Barack Obama Attended Bill Ayers Barbecue, July 4, 2005.”

Breitbart News

OMG! Barack Obama has been caught at a clandestine socialist assembly of treasonous celebrants of America’s independence. These subversives were observed igniting fires (in BBQ grills) and launching explosives (fireworks). They may even have been imbibing beer and other alcoholic intoxicants.

Breitbrat Joel is clearly proud of the shocking revelation he has uncovered that puts Obama in the backyard of his neighbor, Bill Ayres, for an ostensibly patriotic party. The “proof” that so excites Pollak is an ancient blog post by another neighbor of Ayers that describes a third-hand witness to Obama sharing a picnic table at a Fourth of July gathering. The author said…

“Guess what? I spent the 4th of July evening with star Democrat Barack Obama! Actually, that’s a lie. Obama was at a barbecue at the house next door (given by a law professor who is a former member of the Weather Underground) and we saw him over the fence at our barbecue. Well, the others did. It had started raining and he had gone inside be the time I got there. Nevertheless.”

Well then, that settles it. The author of the post never saw the then-senator, but some unnamed person claims to have seen him. And there couldn’t be any possibility of this mysterious party guest making a mistake, could there? The post goes on to note that despite keeping a watch out for a confirmation siting, there were no other Obama spottings. The only corroboration was “another source” quoted by Pollak who was also not identified.

Even if true, Pollak’s unrestrained glee over this “discovery” means nothing. It stems from his false contention that Obama’s socializing with Ayers contradicts a statement his campaign issued in 2008. However, the quote that Pollak himself posted says…

“Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.”

Of course, there is nothing in that statement that conflicts with an account of Obama encountering Ayers at a neighborhood party. In fact, it explicitly affirms that Obama had such contacts “in the neighborhood.” Where’s the controversy?

Pollak is plainly obsessed with smearing Obama for having had a relationship with a neighbor who was also a respected university professor and education consultant. But Pollak’s pea-brain can only contain information about Ayers that portrays him as the “radical, domestic terrorist” of his youth some forty years ago. Pollak cannot see past his hostility toward Obama, and the result is hysterical conspiracy tantrums like this. It’s the same sort of dementia that produces absurd postings on Fox Nation like today’s article that proposes that Obama had an “unpresidential” past:

Fox Nation

The past to which the Fox Nationalists refer is his adolescence when he did unpresidential things like play basketball and wear hats. Seriously? This is the best they can do?

BIRTHERS GONE WILD: New Obama Conspiracy Theory Tests The Limits Of Idiocy

Posted by on March 20, 2012 at 1:42 pm. 89 Comments :

If you thought that the psychotic lunacy of those who still believe that President Obama is not an American citizen had reached its peak, you have obviously underestimated just how severely demented this crowd is. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, these acutely fixated cretins cling to their fables and even expand on them ad absurdum.

Jerome CorsiThe latest addendum to the Birther Chronicles comes from (where else) Jerome Corsi of WorldNetDaily. Corsi is the loser whose book “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” was published just days after the White House released the long-form copy of his birth certificate for which the looney right had been clamoring. Corsi begins his WND article by asking…

“Did the parents of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education? Did Ayers’ mother believe Obama was a foreign student? And was the young Obama convinced at the time – long before he even entered politics – that he was going to become president of the United States?”

All three of those questions were answered in the affirmative by a retired mail carrier that Corsi interviewed. Allen Hulton, claims to have had the route that serviced the home of Tom and Mary Ayers, the parents of former Weatherman, Bill Ayers. Hulton told Corsi…

“One day, Mary came to the door when I came up to the house with the mail,” he remembers. “After a greeting, she started enthusiastically talking to me about this young black student they were helping out, and she referred to him as a foreign student.”

Hulton went on to say that he recalled Mary telling him the name of the foreign student, which he later forgot, but said that it sounded African. So that pretty much settles it. A mail carrier remembers a customer on his route thirty years ago talking about a student with an African sounding name. If that isn’t conclusive evidence of Obama being supported by the parents of a domestic terrorist, what is?

Setting aside for the moment that none of this can be proven because Mary Ayers is deceased, it also makes little sense from even the most conspiratorial perspective. The implication is that there was some connection between Obama and Bill Ayers’ parents, and that the whole family was part of some anti-American cabal. However, Thomas Ayers, Bill’s father, was not exactly the model of a revolutionary extremist. In fact, he was CEO and chairman of Commonwealth Edison, the largest electric utility in Illinois. Ayers also served on the board of directors of Sears, G.D. Searle, Chicago Pacific Corp., Zenith Corp., Northwest Industries, General Dynamics Corp. of St. Louis, First National Bank of Chicago, the Chicago Cubs, and the Tribune Co. A socialist subversive if there ever was one. Hulton even described him as having “a Marxist viewpoint.” Of course, just like all the other board members of giant, capitalist corporations.

But this conspiracy theory is just getting started. Corsi continued his tale with an allegation that Obama had confessed to being complicit in a plot to usurp the presidency. When Hulton asked the student about his plans for the future, he was taken aback by the response:

“He looked right at me and told me he was going to be president of the United States,” Hulton says. “There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it – he sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way,” Hulton says. “It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already pre-arranged.”

Indeed. Who could dispute that account straight from the horse’s mouth? And it surely is not suspicious that Hulton is claiming that Obama casually disclosed the treasonous scheme of which he was an integral part. It is perfectly reasonable that Obama would spill the details of this conspiracy to a complete stranger. All of the attempts to overthrow the American government that I have clandestinely participated in always encouraged us to tell people we had never met before exactly what we were planning. (Oops. I may have said too much).

The Birther conspiracy has always been an exercise in idiocy. Despite having never had any basis in fact, it required its adherents to believe that the whole thing began as a plot to usurp the presidency of the United States. And now the Manchurian part of the scheme has been articulated out loud. They really do believe that Obama was created in a Kenyan petri dish, grown to adulthood in a communist laboratory funded by George Soros, handed a fictional resume and a pre-programmed Teleprompter, and escorted to the White House by some alien power that had the ability to hypnotize a majority of the American voters.

Seriously, these numbskulls are certifiable. I suppose the First Amendment protects their right to say astonishingly stupid things, but out of concern for public safety, they should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery, drive cars, or otherwise engage in activities that could bring harm to themselves and others. If they can’t be committed, I hope at least that they get the medical and pharmaceutical treatment they so desperately need.

[Update:] A follow up at WND, with no byline, was posted alleging that there is now a “full-blown media cover-up” of this ludicrous story. As evidence they cite this article, so get ready for some incoherent rightist rhetoric in the comments (they’ve already begun).

WND chief, Joseph Farah writes that this story was “deliberately spiked” by the mainstream media and even that “Big time talk-radio was tipped off on the story, as well – in advance. They didn’t bite, either.” Gee, I wonder why. Could it be because it’s insane? Farah, however, consoles himself with the fantasy that…

“…millions got the first-person, eyewitness evidence that Barack Obama was helped through Harvard by the family of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers back in the late 1980s.”

Farah obviously has a very low threshold for what constitutes evidence. In this case it’s a thirty year old memory of a brief and trivial conversation that is uncorroborated and didn’t even affirm what the source alleges. But that’s enough for the dimwits that read WND.

Andrew Breitbart At CPAC: I Have Videos Of Obama In College

Posted by on February 11, 2012 at 4:11 pm. 7 Comments :

Andrew BreitbartAs if Andrew Breitbart’s performance before some Occupy protesters wasn’t pathetic enough, the terminally choleric pundit delivered an incoherent rant from the CPAC podium. He spent much of the time rambling in sentence fragments, struggling to make sense. But one portion of his speech teased what may be his next video crusade. And, no, I’m not talking about the hilariously twisted “Hating Breitbart” documentary that was announced at the conference. I’m referring to Breitbart’s tantalizing claim to have unearthed videos of President Obama in college.

“I have videos. This election we’re going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernadine Dohrn, who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted.”

OMG! Obama in college plotting with Ayers to become president. That’s blockbuster material. I can just picture it: A twenty year old Obama meeting with the middle-aged Ayers, drafting a scheme that would see Obama elected to the presidency thirty years later. What foresight and commitment they must have had. Especially since they never met until long after Obama graduated from Harvard Law and eventually moved to Chicago where Ayers lived.

It is also interesting that Breitbart would characterize his comrades on the right as sleeping through the eighties. You know, the eighties when Ronald Reagan was president and conservatism was at its peak. That would explain a lot, like how Reagan got elected president in the first place. Little did they know that liberals were holed up conspiring to take over the free world – thirty years in the future – by electing a black man with no birth certificate to the presidency. A brilliant plan that couldn’t possibly fail. It makes you wonder if there might not be a young, undocumented, Mexican atheist currently putting together a plan with billionaire drug lords to occupy the White House in 2040.

For Breitbart to make these allegations involving Bill Ayers is curious since he just attended a dinner party thrown by Ayers a few days ago. Breitbart was invited to the party by Tucker Carlson who paid $2,500 in a charity auction to have dinner with Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. Breitbart, ever the gracious guest, told Eric Bolling on the Fox Business Network (whose show was just canceled) that Ayers was a great conversationalist, an incredible chef, and a sociopath.

Another guest for dinner, Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, posted his recollections of the affair with a distinct and buoyant whine about not having had enough time to harangue his hosts. He ate their food (personally prepared by Ayers), drank their wine, and enjoyed a scrumptious desert of apple pie topped with Ben & Jerry’s AmeriCone Dream (the flavor inspired by Stephen Colbert). But apparently two hours and a free gourmet meal is not deserving of appreciation. How rude of the Ayers’ not to take a seat in the dunking booth and allow their rightist guests to harass them for another hour or two about things they did forty years ago.

Which brings us back to the videos that Breitbart claims to have in his possession. If they are anything like the videos he has released in the past, we can be assured that they will utterly lack any truthful representation of events. Like the ACORN videos that were deliberately edited to create false and negative impressions of people who were unselfishly helping low income citizens to vote and find housing for their families. Like the Shirley Sherrod video that was cut to make her look like a racist when the the whole, unedited video proved just the opposite. Breitbart’s history with video exposes is a cavalcade of conscious deceit.

I have doubts that any videos of Obama’s college years will ever actually be released, but if they are it seems unlikely that they will have any relevance this many years later. Breitbart once famously declared that he would “take down the institutional left” in three weeks. That was two years ago. He’s a radioactive bundle of bluster and petulant anger. And even though he has threatened his liberal enemies saying that “We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns”, I’m not losing any sleep over it.