Communist friends and dirty politics

It's amazing how sleazy the McCain campaign is with outrageous and twisted info about Obama's ties to Ayers, a founder of the violent Weather Underground group blamed for several bombings during the Vietnam War era, when Obama was a child. I guess the McCain campaign wants to label every child in America that were born during these events with a terrorist tie.

Bill Ayers link from Wikipedia

Ayers worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in shaping the city's school reform program, and was one of three co-authors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2 million over five years for public school reform. Since 1999 he has served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation established as the Woods Charitable Fund in 1941. According to Ayers, his radical past occasionally affects him, as when, by his account, he was asked not to attend a progressive educators' conference in the fall of 2006 on the basis that the organizers did not want to risk an association with his past.

Connection to Barack Obama


Bill Ayers and Barack Obama have been linked during their time in the city of Chicago, where they lived three blocks apart and led charges for education reform in the state of Illinois. The two met "at a luncheon meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper." Obama was then named to the Chicago Annenberg Project board to oversee the distribution of grants in Chicago. Later in 1995, Ayers hosted "a coffee" for "Mr. Obama's first run for office." Both Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 2000 and 2002, during which time the board met twelve times. Ayers also contributed $200 to Obama's re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001." Since 2002, there has been little linking Obama and Ayers. Obama says he has not visited Ayers during the presidential campaign. The senator said in September 2008 that he hadn't "seen him in a year-and-a-half." In February 2008, Obama spokesman Bill Burton released a statement from the senator about the relationship between the two: "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous." CNN's review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the volunteer projects in which the two men were involved.

This Chicago Annenberg Project was funded by a right-wing Republican, media magnate Walter Annenberg. Do you hear any of the Republicans castigating this late Republican pillar?

Ayers was named the Citizen of the Year in Chicago in 1987 for his education work, and is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

click this link for the full story

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972), I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.

Let's not forget that Larry King was arrested for Grand Larceny when he was younger and became a very much respected individual today in the media. People do reform.

So if the McCain campaign wants to bring up alleged ties from the past; I can play that game too.

Former jailers at Hanoi Hilton endorse John McCain.

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Yet now, even the jailers who once tortured Sen. McCain are lining up to offer effusive -- if somewhat embarrassing -- endorsements for his presidential candidacy.
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Yet, despite such economic liberalization, Vietnam still remains a repressive authoritarian state whose regime draws its legitimacy from defeating the U.S. Its official narrative of the war makes no mention of excesses committed by the Communist North. And, when it comes to the treatment meted out here to Sen. McCain and other American POWs, the "Hanoi Hilton" is still presented as something resembling a vacation resort that its guests were almost reluctant to leave.
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One photograph shows Sen. McCain -- who complained of being denied critical care for his broken limbs -- being examined by a Vietnamese doctor. A large display case exhibits what is billed as his flight suit -- strangely intact, even though Sen. McCain was severely injured after ejecting from his Skyhawk dive bomber, and was bayoneted and beaten immediately after his capture in Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake in October 1967.

A crumbling concrete monument on the lake's edge, next to fancy new restaurants, still marks the spot. While not "Hanoi Hilton's" most senior POW in rank, Sen. McCain was considered by his captors as a prize catch because his father served as head of the U.S. Navy Pacific Command. Because of this particular status, Sen. McCain refused Vietnamese offers to release him from the "Hanoi Hilton" out of turn.

"He came from a very prestigious family and he acted like a prince," recalls the camp's former commander, Mr. Duyet, who is now regularly made available for interviews by the Vietnamese government. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds declined to comment for this article.

On a recent afternoon, the 75-year-old Mr. Duyet extracted a folder with faded black-and-white photographs and waxed lyrical about how "my friend John McCain" once taught him English and how the two frequently discussed "girls."

Speaking in a leafy garden where he keeps caged birds, Mr. Duyet also insisted that "prisoners liked me because I was good to them and treated them nicely." Sen. McCain had a starkly different recollection of Mr. Duyet. In an interview with the magazine U.S. News shortly after his release in 1973, Sen. McCain described Mr. Duyet -- nicknamed "Slopehead" by the American POWs -- as "a particularly idiotic individual" and "the bad guy" with a penchant for sadism.

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Ms. Hien, the Hoa Lo museum's director, says that the abuse of Sen. McCain and other American prisoners is not shown in the exhibit because no such thing occurred here. "What we display is based on historical evidence, and the evidence is that the POWs were all treated in a humanitarian way," she says. Because of growing interest in the issue, Hoa Lo plans to further expand the American POW section. She says she is also preparing a short documentary film for visitors.

Vietnam's oft-repeated official line, to be reflected in the documentary, is that American prisoners at the "Hanoi Hilton" actually enjoyed higher living standards than their captors. "The American body is different from the Vietnamese body -- the American diet is different, and so the American prisoners were receiving much bigger portions than our ordinary citizens," says Luu Dinh Mien, an official with the Vietnam War Veterans Association who served as a propaganda officer and interrogator in the camp. (Sen. McCain recalled that, on many days, the only food he received was pumpkin soup and soggy bread.)