Obama Under The Weather

The Obama/Weathermen Underground/Bill Ayers story refuses to go away, and Tom Macguire over at Just One Minute has been pitbulling it for a while now. The AP has gotten a hold of the story and is running with it.

The University of Illinois on Tuesday refused to release records relating to Barack Obama's service to a nonprofit group linked to former 1960s radical activist William Ayers.

The university's Chicago campus said the donor of the records that document the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge has not yet turned over ownership rights to the material.

The university is "aggressively pursuing" an agreement with the donor, and as soon as an agreement is finalized, the collection will be made accessible to the public, the university said in a one-paragraph statement.

There was no indication when an agreement will be worked out. The university did not identify the donor who it said was concerned that the release not invade personal privacy.

The Obama campaign said the senator does not have control over these records or the ability to release them, adding that it has made many documents related to Obama's life available to the public and that "we are pleased the university is pursuing an agreement that would make these records publicly available."

On Monday, the National Review magazine posted an online article saying that the institution had initially declared that the records were open to inspection, but that the university subsequently reversed its position.

On Tuesday, the university said that there had been a misunderstanding about the status of the collection.

Ayers is an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who in his youth co-founded the Weatherman organization, later known as the Weather Underground Organization, which espoused violence as a necessity for political change.

In the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was awarded nearly $50 million by a foundation to help reform Chicago schools.

Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Republicans have been highlighting his ties to Ayers through the group.

I don't know if there's any "there" there, but then again the GOP is damn good at perfecting teapot-based tempest technology. The worst thing Obama can do is ignore this, because this will be used to attack his patriotism. We've already seen the McCain campaign stoop to that level before, just this week. After all, the GOP has no problem with smearing Obama using email spam.

For months, anonymous e-mail chain letters, blog posts and message board items attacking Barack Obama have been flying around the country. Obama's campaign is concerned enough about the rumor mill to devote an entire Web site to fighting them. While some of the messages are blatantly false, the most dangerous ones mix lies and out-of-context facts just well enough to sound legit, playing not too subtly on racism and ignorance to make the truths they include sound sinister. (Now a book that basically collects some of the bogus accusations by Jerome Corsi is sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.)

Two such messages, circulating by e-mail and popping up in comments on blogs for months, are reproduced below -- and annotated and debunked, point by point -- to illustrate the tactics Obama's been up against for most of the campaign. The first e-mail attacks the candidate's wife, attempting to paint Michelle Obama –- and by extension, Barack Obama -- as an America-hating black separatist radical. Democratic pollsters say many voters don't know much about Michelle Obama. This e-mail, which began circulating during the Democratic primaries, seems to be a deliberate attempt to fill in a mostly blank mental canvas with negative associations before the Obama campaign can tell her story itself.

A second, more recent e-mail, received just a few days ago, shows that the spurious but very durable belief that Obama is a Muslim continues to ricochet around the Internet.

I mean let's face it, "Obama is a Muslim, his wife's a Black Panther" is the "Gore says he invented the internet" and "Kerry was a war coward" of 2008. It won't go away, and of course the more Obama tries to deny it, the stronger the lie becomes in the minds of people who are looking for any excuse to vote against the guy and not seem to be a racist.

Remember the main thrust: The GOP is trying to absolve you of your guilt for not voting for Barack Obama, because a black man in charge of the country freaks you out. It's cool to hate Muslims, terrorists, elitists, people who are married to terrorists, traitors, elitist traitors, terrorist elitists, Muslims who can't bowl, and traitors who eat arugula.