Jennifer Rubin, quoting Sol Stern regarding Bill Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge agenda:
Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.
So even if Obama is never queried on whether he was the only adult in Chicago unaware of Ayers’s Weather Underground background, shouldn’t someone ask why he was working for and helping to fund an organization which supported this type of curriculum? Again, perhaps he wasn’t paying attention, or they never mentioned all this in his presence, or Obama figured out it was all a bunch of bunk, but it seems it is an area worth exploring. After all, the media spent weeks puzzling over whether Palin wanted to teach creationism in schools. (For the umpteenth time, she doesn’t.) Don’t we get to know if Obama wanted to teach Marxism?
Seems like a fair enough question to me. Hat tip: Instapundit
More here, with an apt comment from Megan McArdle:
The problem Obama’s critics have is not that he once spent some time talking to Bill Ayers; it’s that he refuses to apologize for it now. That refusal to apologize is why the charge has proven hard to counter. You can argue that it isn’t a big deal, but you can’t argue it isn’t true, and unfortunately for Obama, some voters think it is a really big deal.
Still more, from Victor Davis Hanson:
Why in the world was Barack Obama still communicating on the phone or via email with Bill Ayers up until 2005 — when in 2001 Ayers gave widely publicized interviews claiming he had no regrets about the bombing, indeed regretted that he had not done enough, and did not necessarily have any remorse either about his Weathermen career?
Ponder that: the possible next President of the United States, well after 9/11 and in the climate of hourly worry over terrorism here at home, was still friendly and communicating with an associate that had to abandon his book tour due to popular outcry, and was widely quoted as absolutely unrepentant about his terrorism. That is a damning indictment of his judgement — among other things — and it is no “smear” to raise the issue.
John Leo at MindingTheCampus.com:
Many of us are unfamiliar with the postmodern debating style on college campuses, but here’s how it works. A topic is picked. The skilled postmodern debater ignores the topic and instead talks about race, gender and personal feelings.
(hat tip: Ann Althouse, c/o Instapundit)
Thomas Sowell at RealClearPolitics::
Barack Obama’s own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, “I chose my friends carefully,” he said in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”
These friends included “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets” — in Obama’s own words — as well as the “more politically active black students.” He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.
Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college — members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.
Read the rest — it’s a short piece, and well worth it.
Update:
Christopher Hitchens offers some incisive comments on the topic at Slate:
It’s been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it’s at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. “If Barack gets past the primary,” said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, “he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.” Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he’d one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago “base” in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.
You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily.
and later:
Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been — and were — applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. … But is it “inflammatory” to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it “controversial.” It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.
Hitchens does make a number of excellent points. As with Sowell’s article, I suggest reading the whole piece.
Just in time for Halloween… Scary tales of ideological indoctrination at the University of Delaware (hat tip: Instapundit, with more here).
Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for “treatment” of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing that students and professors have been making “made in North Korea” jokes about the plan. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for the program to be dismantled.
Residential assistants charged with imposing the “treatments” have undergone intensive training from the university. The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists – at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a “racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality.”
My response, which in hindsight summed up my immediate thoughts on the issue pretty well:
Chilling. And I thought the level of attempted indoctrination was bad when I went to college in the mid-90s. Clearly the situation has worsened since then.
Perhaps saddest of all is that such ideological, thought-police badgering is deeply counterproductive to the ostensibly noble causes of humanity’s advancement that these people claim to champion. Evidently the self-congratulatory thrill of claiming the mantle of moral superiority, and the timeless passion for power over others (I’m thinking here of Lord Acton’s renowned observation), takes precedence for these frauds over the actual achievement of real good or elevation of the human mind and spirit. As a case in point, I consider myself a supporter on classical liberal/libertarian principles of legally allowing homosexual marriage (or civil unions, as may prove a more practical compromise), very much despite the similarly-minded pedantic, sanctimonious cries of “homophobia” that seem to befall most anyone who doesn’t toe the P.C. thought-and-speeh-correctness line to the precise letter these days. (I often wonder how much necessary traction the Civil Rights movement would have gained among mainstream America had the public discourse been dominated by similar scolding cries of “negrophobia” or the like.) The “oppressed” that the academic ideologues who peddle this stuff claim to speak for are done no good whatsoever by such disgraceful, self-serving conduct. They are pushing their extreme agenda farther and farther, and have, I certainly hope, finally reached the point where they’ll begin to be met with a substantial and well-deserved backlash of public opinion and consequential deprivation of funding.
…but, hey, what do I know? I’m just a white heterosexual male-of-European-descent member of the bourgeois-subjectivist-individualist-captilast exploiter class (and probably sexist and racist by default too). Please disregard the foregoing as irrelevant. ;-)
Boo hiss, University of Delaware. Hurrah for FIRE’s steadfast defesne of real, meaningful intellectual liberty. And thank you for publicizing this important issue.
I don’t have any children myself yet, but I can’t help but worry what the state of affairs will be like when my future kids go off to college. I’m glad for the good work that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has been doing to help counteract the apparently substantial thought-diversity problem that exists on many U.S. college campuses.
