More Beck Dreck Trying To Taint Obama-Rama

I noted last night that finding posting material is getting more challenging because our corporate media has decided to write and comment on real issues more now than in previous years, and it’s harder to blow up the wingnuttery.

Fortunately, though, Glenn Beck is always around, and he communicates the following today from here…

NEW YORK (CNN) -- With a little less than a month before the election, this week started with a re-examination of Barack Obama's association with William Ayers.

Whether holding a career-launching state Senate campaign event at the home of an unrepentant terrorist should disqualify you from the presidency is up to the people to decide.

From that point on, Beck’s column turns into a rant against people who accuse voters of racism if that voter doesn’t cast his or her ballot for Obama (and as you might expect, I have heard that accusation leveled against absolutely no one).

However, I want to go back and add the following from the New York Times story by Scott Shane last Saturday (here) which should settle the question once and for all as to whether or not Obama was influenced politically by Ayres in any way (and the answer is a resounding No, though I realize that Beck often doesn’t let facts stand in the way of his argument)…

In March 1995, Mr. Obama became chairman of (a) six-member board that oversaw the distribution of grants in Chicago (from the so-called “Annenberg Project” which gave out $500 million, with $50 million going to Chicago). Some bloggers have recently speculated that Mr. Ayers had engineered that post for him.

In fact, according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment. Instead, it was suggested by Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based group whose board Mr. Obama, a young lawyer, had joined the previous year. At a lunch with two other foundation heads, Patricia A. Graham of the Spencer Foundation and Adele Simmons of the MacArthur Foundation, Ms. Leff suggested that Mr. Obama would make a good board chairman, she said in an interview. Mr. Ayers was not present and had not suggested Mr. Obama, she said.

Ms. Graham said she invited Mr. Obama to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Chicago and was impressed.

“At the end of the dinner I said, ‘I really want you to be chairman.’ He said, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll be vice chairman,’ ” Ms. Graham recalled, and she agreed.

Archives of the Chicago Annenberg project, which funneled the money to networks of schools from 1995 to 2000, show both men attended six board meetings early in the project — Mr. Obama as chairman, Mr. Ayers to brief members on school issues.

Now comes the part pertaining to the meeting Beck noted…

It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. (Bernardine) Dohrn (Ayres’ wife and another ‘60s-era radical) hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.

“If you ask my wife, we had the first coffee for Barack,” Rabbi Wolf said. He said he had known Mr. Ayers for decades but added, “Bill’s mad at me because I told a reporter he’s a toothless ex-radical.”

“It was kind of a nasty shot,” Mr. Wolf said. “But it’s true. For God’s sake, he’s a professor.”

So, in fact, the meeting was hosted by Ayres and Dohrn on behalf of Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer who introduced Obama as her protégé of sorts, which, to me, is an important distinction (hard to imagine someone in Obama’s position at the time “calling the shots” on who he’d prefer or not prefer to be seen with, especially with Ayres so thoroughly established as a professor at the University of Illinois).

And concerning Beck’s attempts to obfuscate racism in this country, that’s perfectly in character for someone who rails against the charge if it pertains to Caucasians, but has no trouble slinging it around (or related innuendo at least) when one African American in particular is concerned (here).

(And by the way, I have a request in light of this: if anyone knows of a countdown calendar to election day that you can embed like the Bush Countdown calendar, please let me know - I'll look for myself in the meantime. That way, I'll know how much longer we have to deal with the baseless, gutteral attacks of the Palin-McBush Campaign.)