Conservatives are all rushing forward with their dollies, showing where Big Gummint gave them bad touch. Among my favorites is Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz says he knew all along that Obama was evil, but no one would listen to him. (Can't think why not.)
"Obama’s first presidential campaign launched a series of novel and troubling assaults on its critics," Kurtz tells us; "the first incident to spur warnings" was the Obama campaign’s efforts to get an opposition campaign ad off the air. "Rather than simply answering the ad," says Kurtz, "the Obama campaign threatened economic boycotts, federal investigations of the group’s officers and anonymous donors, and criminal prosecutions."
Which is to say that the Obama people pointed out to the DOJ that the group sponsoring the attack ad, the American Issues Project, was electioneering while claiming 501(c)(4) status. In other words, it's the same terrible abuse of powers the brethren have been bitching about in the IRS "scandal" -- except Obama wasn't President yet, merely a citizen exercising his right as such to complain about tax fraud, and exercising it good and hard. The Obama people also filed a complaint with the FEC, and reminded stations that might run the ad of FCC regulations of which they might run afoul. It was hardball, but no foul, not in the big leagues Obama was playing in.
Although the ad ran locally, Fox News and CNN were apparently discouraged by these threats from accepting the ad.
Apparently! Later, Kurtz tells us how the assassins came after him: "The Obama campaign pressured WGN Radio in Chicago to bar my scheduled appearance on the Milt Rosenberg show..." Kurtz still appeared, but the call-in show received some impertinent calls -- excuse me, was "deluged with calls from Obama supporters acting on instructions from his campaign" who "demanded that I be kept off the air" (a little late for that, I should think).
And what was the game-changing truthbomb that Kurtz and other were prevented from bringing before the public with this ad and Kurtz's other media appearances, about which he and his comrades have been bitching for over four years?
It boils down the Obama-Ayers relationship to this:
First, Ayers was in the Weather Underground. In 1971, the militant anti-government group set off a bomb in a restroom of the U-S Capitol. Ayers has never apologized.
Second, Obama and Ayers know each other from Chicago. They served together on two charity boards in the 1990s.
The punch line from the ad is this: "Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?"
Yes, the Bill Ayers schtick, which has made a laughingstock of everyone who has touched it. It was bandied about through the 2008 campaign by internet crackpots, some of whom claimed that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama's Dreams From My Father. (They became quite hot about it, giving Ayers himself several opportunities to fuck with their heads.) The American Issues Project, Wikipedia informs me, "spent close to $3 million for the Ayers ads... provided by Harold Simmons, who previously gave $3 million to fund Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which will give you some idea why Obama thought he ought to hit back fast and hard before the bullshit could coalesce as it did with John Kerry.
In the days since 2008, Obama the alleged terrorist pal of Ayers has, as President, droned the shit out of America's enemies to an extent that even liberals such as myself find unseemly, killed Bin Laden, kept Gitmo open, and in general behaved as about the opposite of a 60's comsymp radical the Ayers smear was meant to paint him as. But why would that matter to Kurtz? He is unreachable by any evidence that wasn't cooked up in the meth labs of the right. When Obama signed a conservative spending bill in 2011, Kurtz explained that Obama was still a socialist, but one who "moves incrementally toward radical left goals, but never owns up to his ideology." Obama could come out for a flat tax -- about the only capitulation to Republicanism he hasn't made, come to think of it -- and Kurtz would still be telling us he's a commie.
In short, Kurtz and all these people are full of shit -- so full that I expect they've all been fitted with relief valves to keep it from shooting out their noses. So let the Serious People who have been tut-tutting about the various scamdals and how bad they sound and how we must be fair-minded and explore all the evidence, etc., treat their charges seriously; apparently they have time to waste. I don't especially trust Obama, but as for these guys, I've caught their act and I don't want an encore.