Damn the Torpedoes, Free Speech Ahead!
A conservative 501(c)4 group, American Issues Project (AIP) has run an attack ad against Barack Obama calling attention to Obama’s ties to unapologetic domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Needless to say, the ad has received some heavy fire from the campaign.
Ayers, along with his future wife Bernadine Dohrn, founded the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, and numerous other buildings in the 1970’s. Dohrn, was formerly on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list. Ayers stated their ideology was to “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”
Ayers will not discuss his relationship with Obama. It seems their association goes far beyond the “guilt by association” Obama and his apologists proclaim. Shortly before Obama’s first election, he served as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation started by Ayers. There appears to be somewhat of a coverup lately, as access to documents on the foundation are repeatedly denied.
Texas billionaire Harold Stevens has single-handedly bankrolled the ad. According to FCC documents, Stevens has contributed $2.9 million to the group. After the success of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign during the 2004 presidential elections, the Obama campaign has been attacking the ad full bore.
A lawyer for the campaign, Robert Bauer sent a letter to station managers: “Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity.”
The Obama campaign has sent not one, but two letters to the Department of Justice asking for Stevens to be prosecuted and for the officers, board of directors, and donors to be investigated. Bauer wrote that the ad is a “knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law.”
American Issues Project’s president, Ed Martin said, “Having failed in its attempts to get our legal, factual and fully-supported ad off the air, Barack Obama’s campaign now wants to put our donors in prison for exercising their right to free speech. These over-the-top bullying tactics are reminiscent of the kind of censorship one would see in a Stalinist dictatorship, with the only difference being that those guys generally had to wait until they were in power to throw people who disagreed with them into jail.”
A response ad was aired by the campaign, but none of AIP’s points were disputed. In this brief document, AIP provides full context behind each claim in the ad. There is another 167-page document available with even more documentation.
Both CNN and Fox News have declined to run the commercial. In addition, Obama supporters have flooded the stations that chose to run the ads with tens of thousands of emails. Is this a preview of what the future holds for “free” speech, Obama style – calls for investigations, pressure, threats of prosecution? Let’s hope not.
AIP spokesman Christian Pinkston said, “It seems they protest a bit too much. They’re going all of these routes—through threats, intimation—to try to thwart the First Amendment here because they don’t have an argument on merit.”
The McCain campaign has weighed in as well: McCain spokesman Brian Rogers stated,
“The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama’s judgment than any TV ad ever could.”