House of Eratosthenes

Via Rick, we learn of more tales of hopey changey Savior/Messiah don’t-you-dare-call-it-censorship as cobbled together in one convenient place by Confederate Yankee:

Obama’s campaign has previously threatened broadcasters who would carry an ad linking Obama to Ayers, and has also asked the Department of Justice to shut down the group that made the ad.

The intense campaign to silence dissenting voice has also included a recent campaign email asking Obama supporters to deluge Chicago-based broadcaster WGN with complaints to pressure the radio station to cancel an appearance by Stanley Kurtz, a writer with National Review who is researching the documents of the Chicago Annenburg Challenge.

The e-mail sent by the Obama campaign is awfully thick on instructions to call in and participate in a populist protest, and remarkably thin on facts & details. It reads like this:

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse.

Call into the “Extension 720” show with Milt Rosenberg at (312) 591-7200

(Show airs from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. tonight)

Then report back on your call at http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards

Kurtz has been using his absurd TV appearances in an awkward and dishonest attempt to play the terrorism card. His current ploy is to embellish the relationship between Barack and Ayers.

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack’s connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.

Only half a dozen paragraphs in, we finally get to a point of disagreement…or something that looks like that, anyway. Wonderful! Researching that, I came across a post which I think Obama would also like to remove from public view. Maybe some hoard of liberal bloggers would like to angrily e-mail the author and then report back to the Obama campaign on their progress.

Some history of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

Having secured Annenberg funding for Chicago, the working group would soon evolve into a more formal organization, albeit with strong ties to the groups that wrote the grant proposal. Initially run out of shared space in the offices of the Cross-City Campaign and administered through an existing philanthropic organization called the Donors Forum, the Chicago Challenge soon became its own new foundation with status as an independent fiscal agent. By late 1995, Ken Rolling had been named executive director, a board of directors had been established, and the first round of grants had been awarded. Rolling lacked experience in education but came from the foundation world and was well-versed in community organizing. The board, which was intended to set policy, raise matching funds, and hire an executive director, included prominent educators and business leaders. A second entity, the newly-created Chicago School Reform Collaborative, was also established. Its twenty-plus members were elected from the group of educators and advocates who had helped shape the grant proposal. Initially, at least, this offshoot of the working group functioned as the operations arm of the Chicago Challenge. However, this situation created procedural and ethical concerns and in time the Collaborative was transformed into an advisory body.

Ayers was one of the three original leaders of the working group and eventually co-chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (see his resume). His early involvement:

When three of Chicago’s most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago “didn’t go down the drain,” said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

The point is that Ayers led the way in securing the Annenberg grant, then co-chaired the Collaborative, which was instrumental in the operation of the Chicago Challenge. It is not likely Barack Obama, as chair of the Board of Directors of the Challenge, was not working closely with the co-chair of the collaborative. At any rate, it is not at all plausible that he could have been unaware of Ayers’ role and later forgotten it.

I see trouble in paradise as “Hope and change” morphs to “Hope we can change the subject.”

Well, I’m sure Obama’s pitchfork and torch bearing mob is researching all this information before they make the informed and educated choice to call Milt Rosenberg.

This all underscores the major problem with Candidate Obama, apart from the fact that he’s woefully underprepared for the office of President of the United States. He is, and I don’t think even his most ardent supporters would have the big brass ones to contest this — a populist candidate. Populism is, ultimately, a form of “might makes right”; the might is some product of the number of people who support a movement, multiplied by the average level of enthusiasm they have for it. It all sounds wonderful until you take into account that according to the underpinnings of populism, this is supposed to trump other things. That’s what populism is. It will take no back seat to equal protection under the law, whatever you might feel like calling “civil liberties” today, your right to raise your children as you see fit, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness…

Populism is a doctrine that all of these things, and more, can be subordinated to the whim of the mob. That is what Barack Obama truly represents.

In this case, today’s victim is the right to debate issues like this out in the open. The mob won’t have it. They’ll call in and stop it. Tomorrow, something else that’s supposedly sacred, will slide under the spikey wheels of the populism juggernaut. The day after that, something else.

Just to make this a little more spooky, let’s take a quote from C.S. Lewis that seems to apply quite handily to the situation at hand:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

I hate to say it — but these questions about whether Obama has the experience to at least know what in the hell he’s doing from one minute to the next…what they represent, is almost a non-issue. This man is an omnipotent moral busybody who will torment us without end, for he does so with the approval of his own conscience.

HOPENCHANGE!!!

Update: Fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm has put together a very decent round-up of other bloggers who have noticed what we’ve noticed…namely, that in the pantheon of written admonitions to designated persons that they should separate truth from falsehood, the memorandum from the Obama camp stands alone as noteworthy for its breezy and casual (read: nonexistent) concern with matters of fact.

What struck everyone on the Right who has blogged about the Obamaniac’s attack is how free of substance it was. [Guy] Benson has this to say:

One female caller, when pressed about what precisely she objected to, simply replied, “We just want it to stop!” Another angry caller was asked what “lies” Kurtz had told in any of his reporting on Barack Obama. The thoughtful response? “Everything he said is dishonest.” The same caller later refused to get into “specifics.” Another gentleman called Kurtz “the most un-American person” he’d ever heard. Several of the callers did not even know Stanley’s name, most had obviously never read a sentence of his meticulous research, and more than simply read verbatim from the Obama talking points.

One of Michelle Malkin’s readers, who heard the show as it was being aired, noted exactly the same information vacuum when it came to the attack against the radio show and against Kurtz:

The callers claimed that everything Kurtz is stating is fabricated, so Kurtz then read verbatim from the documents!

And lefty-loosies ritually, chronically and reliably spew their venom at the tighty-righties, with terms out of George Orwell’s novel — with straight faces. They show not one scintilla of evidence that they comprehend the irony. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

Truth is fiction, fiction is truth.

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Don’t Talk About William AyersFriday, August 29th, 2008

Don’t Talk About William Ayers
Friday, August 29th, 2008