COMMENTS

We welcome your feedback. Comments may not exceed 700 characters.

Privacy Policy

Your information will not be shared or sold without your consent. Get all the details.

Terms of Service

JewishJournal.com has rules for its commenting community.Get all the details.

CALIFORNIAMARTY SAYS THAT: BILL AYERS IS ANYTHING BUT WASHED UP. He still feels the same hatred for this country that he had when he was a terrorist. He stands on American Flags to let the world know it. He funds children’s programs to spread his radical propaganda and Obama was part of it.

Comment by CALIFORNIAMARTY on 10/20/08 at 2:03 pm

“Turn on the TV news when John McCain is picking up undecided voters by invoking Barack Obama’s relationship with unrepentant American terrorist William Ayers and, invariably, some liberal talking head will sniff in disgust and say Ayers is no big deal where Obama comes from.

Unfortunately, that’s true. Ayers is a terrorist. But this is Chicago.

Obama and Ayers are neighbors and they worked together on school issues with the same foundation. Obama’s political coming-out party was held in Ayers’ living room when Obama was running for his first political office.

And the boss of Chicago is Mayor Richard Daley. Mayor Shortshanks has thrown his protective embrace around both men. These are facts.

John Kass
Bio | E-mail | Recent columns
Related links
Bill Ayers revisited Photos
UIC was asked not to show Ayers papers
Rush on to get files linking Obama to 1960s radical
Democrat debate is a slugfest
The calm after the storm
Bill Ayers’ turbulent past contrasts with quiet academic life
Family ties proved Ayers’ point

But the reason Ayers is not a big deal in Chicago has to do with the Chicago Way, and the left fork of that road that has been bought and paid for by the Daley machine, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for public relations contracts from City Hall.

The new Daley machine is much more sophisticated than his father’s. And the stereotype of knuckle-draggers and wiseguys—they’re still around, and there are jobs on the city payroll for those who work the precincts.

Yet what’s often ignored is that their university-educated cousins get city contracts to spin the news and shape the symbolism and tell out-of-town reporters that Ayers is no big deal. They won’t bite the hand that feeds them. For an examination of the Daley spin machine—and its cost to taxpayers—please see Tribune reporter Dan Mihalopoulos’ story in the Sunday editions.

One friend of Obama and Ayers is former ‘60s radical Marilyn Katz, now an Obama fundraiser, strategist and public relations maven. She’s often a go-to quote for reporters to knock down the Ayers-Obama story.

“What Bill Ayers and [former Black Panther, now U.S. Rep.] Bobby Rush . . . did 40 years ago has nothing to do with [the presidential campaign],” Katz was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun-Times in April. “[Ayers] has a national reputation. He lectures at Harvard [University] and Vassar [College].”

What that story and many other pro-Obama articles gloss over is that during the violent protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention here, Katz was the security chief for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. She once advocated throwing studded nails in front of police cars, back in the SDS days when the group was alleged to have thrown cellophane bags full of human excrement at cops and cans of urine and golf balls impaled with nails.

How things change.

Under this Daley, her firm, MK Communications, has many city deals, and one involves public relations for the Chicago Police Department’s community policing program. From nails to contracts, the Chicago Way. Apparently, irony was not a ‘60s thing.

Now, as Daley prepares to lay off more than 1,000 city workers, he’s given Katz and other public relations firms five-year contracts that could pay them as much as $5 million each for consulting, advertising and promotion.

Getting in good with Daley hasn’t been bad for business. She also lists as her clients Daley’s Chicago Housing Authority, Daley’s City Colleges, Daley’s city Law Department, and Daley’s Departments of Aviation, Environment, Housing, Human Services, Planning and Development, Public Health, Public Works, Streets and Sanitation, Intergovernmental Affairs, Special Events—the list goes on.

Clearly, if she wasn’t a good soldier for Shortshanks her list of clients would be quite small. Katz is often aggravating, but she’s also funny and smart, so I called her to submit my theory: That by buying off the political left—through PR contracts to Katz, through his own support for Ayers—Daley maintains control over message and symbolism.

“I don’t see it that way,” said Katz. “As kids, our issues were schools, the environment, housing—and these things are the same things that the mayor cares about. So we have this in common. The agendas that drove us pulled us together. It’s about respect for each other’s point of view, not what we did when we were 19.”

On Ayers and Obama, Katz still insists it isn’t a story.

“Bill and I were in different parts of SDS. We disagreed on tactics. Bill has spent his entire life contributing to the betterment of society. That’s all I can say about Bill,” she said.

Happily, I beg to differ. Ayers is a terrorist—the narcissistic son of privilege and clout—whose father, Thomas, was the boss of Commonwealth Edison and a friend of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. As a leader of the ultraviolent Weather Underground, Ayers admitted to helping bomb the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon in the 1970s. He should have been sent to prison. Instead, Chicago political clout allowed him and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, to magically join the payrolls of universities here.

Obama says he was 8 years old when the bombs went off. But he was a grown man when he sought Ayers’ political blessing, and when they worked on the same education projects.

“They’re friends. So what?” Mayor Daley said in August.

He’s the boss and the master spinner. So it must not be a story.”

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Comment by CALIFORNIAMARTY on 10/20/08 at 2:05 pm

I suppose this is a reason why Colin Powell never entered politics when the idea was floated. He said it himself at the time. Everyone knows him as a serious and accomplished person who also speaks Yiddish (I am not making this up), but in the world of politics and statecraft he prominently nosedived, not that that might be a source of bitterness or sour grapes, hehehe. And if politics isn’t his thing, maybe his opinion is not that meaningful.

Nothing Powell said really supports his endorsement:
- If McCain would make a ‘good President’, than why is the Obama campaign portraying him as an unstable goofy out-of-touch old man? In other words, unqualified. Negative, right? Narrow, right? Not nice, right?
- If Palin is not ready, why not, especially in relation to Obama?
- More to the point, is Joe Beidner or whatever ready to be President? Is the old warrior ready to don the flak jacket and follow Binder to the gates of Hell itself? I missed that part of the article.
- If Obama is ready, how so, especially after saying Palin isn’t? That would be a useful contrast. At least to be Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the Solar System? Let’s go, General, say something military. OK, say anything at all. Right, ‘generational change’, or in a word, Palin.
- Why is it over the top to talk about Bill Ayres? Not saying he’s not a nice guy with a high IQ, but emotionally ill enough to be one of the silliest premeditated murderers ever to dance out of court on a technicality. But let’s just say Ayres is not a factor. would it be over the top to ask about any of the following (hat tip to blogger Siren). Any of these are Google-able.

Obama and Ayers
Obama and ACORN
Obama and Frank Marshall Davis
Obama and Khalid al-Mansour
Obama and Raila Odinga
Obama and Donald Warden
Obama and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo
Obama and Rezko
Obama and Saul Alinski
Obama and Wright
Obama and Khalidi
Obama and Malcolm X
Obama and Alwaleed bin Talal
Obama and Farrakhan
Obama and Woods Fund
Obama and The Black Panthers
Obama and Cloward-Piven Strategy
Obama and his own half-brother George from Kenya (living in a mud hut, yet Obama is for the poor)
Obama and Capital gains and Business taxes
Obama and Public Allies
Obama vs. Berg (still refusing to provide a birth certificate)
Obama and Infanticide (did you know that more than 300 babies were left to die along suffocating, suffering a slow painful death?

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/20/08 at 3:22 pm

Post a Comment

Name:
Email:

Type the word you see below:

Comment:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

About this Blog

Blog Home
About the Blogger(s)
Contact

Blog Archive

• By Month
• Categories

• By Month
• Categories