Obama's America: Censoring Critics

UPDATE, September 15, 2008: WGN-AM again target of Obama campaign
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Barack Obama's friend, unrepentant terrorist William Ayers

For years, we have heard Democrats say that President Bush has shredded the Constitution and trampled on the Bill of Rights.

Our civil liberties are in danger!

What do these liberals have to say about Barack Obama and his campaign's attempts to silence critics?

What do these champions of free speech and civil liberties have to say about what Obama is doing to Stanley Kurtz, stripping him of his rights?

What do they have to say about Obama's strong-arm tactics?

DENVER -- Sen. Barack Obama's campaign organized its supporters Wednesday night to confront Tribune-owned WGN-AM in Chicago for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its air.

"WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears," Obama's campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. "He's currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers."

Kurtz, a conservative writer, recently wrote an article for the National Review that looked at Obama's ties to Ayers, a former 1960s radical who later emerged as a school reform advocate in Chicago.

The magazine had been blocked in its initial attempts to obtain records from the University of Illinois at Chicago regarding a school reform initiative called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama chaired and Ayers co-founded.

Obama critics were quick to suggest that political clout could be involved in seeking to protect Obama from embarrassment. The school later reserved its position and made the records available Tuesday.

On Wednesday evening, Obama's campaign urged supporters to call the radio station to complain.

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

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves," the note continued. "At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies."

The Editors of National Review have an excellent piece detailing Obama's relationship with William Ayers and the un-American harassment of Stanley Kurtz, "Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar." It's a must read.

On August 28, 2008, Mark Levin interviewed Stanley Kurtz about his experience with the Obama campaign's gestapo tactics.

The Obama campaign officially asked WGN to keep Kurtz off the air.

The Obama campaign put out an e-mail alert smearing Kurtz, putting out lies about him.

During Kurtz's interview on WGN, callers bombarded Milt Rosenberg's program and spewed the talking points put out by the Obama campaign.

All Kurtz did was seek access to documents about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, documents that might shed light on Barack Obama's relationship with unrepentant, confessed terrorist William Ayers.

From National Review:

The CAC was a major education reform project, proposed by Ayers, which was underwritten by a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, complemented by another $100 million in private and public funding. The project ran for about five years, beginning in 1995. As the liberal researcher Steve Diamond has recounted, Ayers ran its operational arm, the “Chicago School Reform Collaborative.” Obama, then a 33-year-old, third-year associate at a small law firm, having no executive experience, was brought in to chair the board of directors, which oversaw all “fiscal matters.”

By the time the CAC’s operations were wound down in 2001 it had doled out more than $100 million in grants but had failed to achieve any improvement in the Chicago schools. What little is known about the grants Obama oversaw is troubling. As Diamond relates, one of the first CAC awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by Ayers and was then headed by Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice” blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June after Diamond called attention to them.

The CAC records, said to comprise 70 linear feet of files, have long been maintained at the library of the UIC, the public university where Ayers teaches. This summer, Kurtz made an appointment to review them and, after being assured access, was blocked from seeing them by library administrators, who stammered about needing permission from the “donor” — whom they declined to identify. Kurtz energetically raised public awareness to the stonewalling, and the library finally relented this week. That is, as Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democrats’ nomination tonight, the records of his only significant executive experience just became available for review on Tuesday.

Kurtz began his review, and on Wednesday was invited on Milt Rosenberg’s radio program to discuss it. Rosenberg is a Chicago institution. His program, “Extension 720,” has aired for more than 30 years — a civil forum where knowledgeable guests from across the political spectrum discuss important issues in revealing two-hour interviews. What happened Wednesday night was stunning, as even the normally unflappable Rosenberg observed.

Listen to the interview.

The Obama campaign is also actively involved in an attempt to silence the American Issues Project over an ad that raises Obama's relationship with Ayers, sending two letters to the Justice Department, demanding the investigation and prosecution of the organization.

Read more here.

The intimidation employed by Barack Obama and his campaign is dramatic and chilling.

Is this Obama's America?

Allow me to quote from Obama's acceptance speech:

"WE ARE A BETTER COUNTRY THAN THIS."