Monster at The E3 Gazette::
Joe the Plumber wasn’t the first person to get Barack Obama to admit his position on wealth redistribution….
The referenced excerpt from a 2001 radio interview with Senator Obama, now on YouTube (follow the above link), is the lead story on Drudge today too.
Somehow Obama’s condescending mockery of “Joe the Plumber” seems less surprising now, though no less troubling.
Update:
Glenn Reynolds comments:
Maybe it’s just because I’m a law professor who’s followed Obama, but this is no surprise to me. Or to Jennifer Rubin. In fact, this is pretty standard stuff in large parts of legal academia.
Bill Whittle responds to the story with a short essay, “Shame Cubed”:
We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232 year history, elected a President who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.
If this does not frighten you – regardless of your political affiliation – then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, “a righteous wind at our backs.”
Comment thread for Bill’s post here.
Iowahawk responds to a critic who feels he’s neglected poor scandalized Bill Ayers in his fervor to stick up for Joe the Plumber. Hilarity ensues:
I AM BILL. I am the everyday forgotten little guy in your neighborhood, the quiet anarcho-syndicalist family man who gets up early and punches the clock at the local state university, writing the manifestos and polemics and grant proposals that keep America humming. I’m just doing my job, and all I ask in return is a little respect. And tenure. And Chicago Citizen of the Year awards. And two graduate assistants to grade exams for Practicum in Imperialist Racist Hegemony 311, because I’m teaching two sections this semester. Also, a sabbatical to Italy next summer would be nice.
Read the whole, delightful fisking.
Another great installment of Chris Muir’s reader-supported “Day by Day” cartoon. Guest-starring Joe the Plumber!
At PJM (hat tip:
Little Green Footballs):
The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
Zombie has acquired a copy of Bill Ayers’ 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire”, and posts scanned excerpts and analysis.
This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.
Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama’s past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a “Vietnam-era radical” and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs “to protest against the Vietnam War.” Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.
Read the whole, revealing thing, which makes it seem imperative that we get some much-needed clarification on the extent or limit of Senator Obama’s relationship to Ayers. Could Mr. Obama really have reviewed another of Ayers’ books in 1997, let alone served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with Ayers, without having developed any awareness of Ayers’ virulently anti-U.S. radical-revolutionary ideology?
Thanks to Monster and Little Green Footbals for pointing this out.
Update 10/23: The “Ayers’ Current Views” wrap-up to the essay is now up. It concludes with this chilling quote of undercover Weather Underground infiltrator Larry Grathwohl, regarding the group’s plans for post-revolutionary America:
I asked, well, what’s going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious.
Update 10/28: More in a Bob Owens interview with Larry Grathwohl: Eyewitness to the Ayers Revolution
A must-read, can’t-be-adequately-summarized-with-a-quote plea to the press by Orson Scott Card: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
(Thank you Instapundit!)
