CNN Investigates Obama Ties to Ayers

Glenn Beck: CNN report on Ayers

October 7, 2008 - 12:53 ET

GLENN: I want to play a piece from CNN. This is not Fox. This is CNN. This isn't CNN Headline News. This is CNN. Believe me, I know how difficult it is to get something on the air at CNN. To get something on the air at CNN that is critical of Barack Obama, not really the easiest thing. There are not people clamoring to get that on the air. They check everything six ways to Sunday. Believe me, I know. I have to play this report from Anderson Cooper. Remember, this is not some right wing kook. This is not Fox. This is Anderson Cooper on CNN. Listen to this report on the "No connections between William Ayers and Barack Obama."

COOPER: Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn in the 1960s and Seventies were radicals, members of the Weather Underground, an anti-Vietnam War group that bombed federal buildings including the U.S. capitol and the Pentagon. On the run for years, the case against them was thrown out due to illegal wire taps and prosecutor misconduct. Ayers has never repented and has said as late as 2001 he wished he had done more to stop the war.

Barack Obama confirmed during a primary debate that he knew Ayers and, when pressed, said they served on a charitable foundation board together.

GLENN: Listen to this.

COOPER: Obama condemned Ayers support of violence. But the relationship between Obama and Ayers went much deeper, ran much longer and was much more political than Obama said.

GLENN: Stop, stop. Just stop there. But it gets worse, again. How many times have you heard people say, "Oh, it's the Clinton News Network, it's the Communist News Network." Yeah, sure. Again, the report from CNN on the connection between Ayers and Obama.

VOICE: Arguing is that somehow the fact that these people who served both educational reformers in Chicago, both of whom did have their paths cross professionally as well as neighbors occasionally, that somehow this association is a problem for Barack Obama because of Bill Ayers' past and things that happened in the 1960s when Barack Obama was 7 years old. And that's just wrong. And frankly it's quite unfair.

COOPER: One place their paths repeatedly crossed according to a CNN review of board minutes and other records was Chicago's Annenberg Challenge project where a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation matched locally funds to schools. According to participants and project records, Bill Ayers fought to bring the Annenberg grant to Chicago. Barack Obama was recruited as its chair. For seven years Bill Ayers and Obama, among many others, worked on funding for education projects including some experiments supported by Ayers.

GLENN: Listen to this.

COOPER: Stanley Kurtz, a conservative researcher for the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has been reviewing the recently --

GLENN: This is the guy that Obama has tried to silence, now on CNN.

KURTZ: Instead of giving money directly to schools, they gave money to what they called external partners and these partners were often radical community organizer groups.

COOPER: And the board gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bill Ayers' small schools project, promoting alternative education, the peace school with a curriculum centered around a United Nations theme.

GLENN: Oh.

COOPER: And another school where the focus was African-American studies.

GLENN: Oh.

VOICE: And this was directly funded by Annenberg?

KURTZ: Oh, yes, under Obama's chairmanship. Oh, yes, in a specific draw of the board of --

GLENN: Stop. This doesn't bother anyone? This, I know this bothers you. This doesn't? How do you dismiss? He was a chairman of the board that did experimental schools with a guy who says you shouldn't discipline children, that quote: Children should rise up and kill their parents. Okay? He's never corrected that. Never stood down from that. He's on the board with that man doing experimental schools, and one of them is a school based on the United Nations? And somehow or another we're just supposed to dismiss all of this. That, "It doesn't really matter, oh, he's not like that, oh, he didn't know." This guy is a full-fledged fascist in the wings. Now, that's not to say that he's going to become a fascist. This is the closest that we have ever come to having one. No, I take that back. We actually had one. His name was Woodrow Wilson. This guy actually put hundreds of thousands of people in jail for speaking out against him, the government or World War I. This guy developed a system through the Department of Justice where if you heard anyone speak out against the war, you heard anyone speak out against our country, you were to call the Department of Justice, your name would be withheld and the person you heard speaking out would go to prison! So we've had a fascist before. So if anybody tells you we can't have one again, don't listen to them. We've had one before, and this one is coming with a neon sign. This one's coming with his own little militant children following behind him. This one's coming with the Hitler youth in tow. How many times did we say in 1992, "Guys, I think this guy has a sex problem." No, no, no. Now, I was willing to dismiss it after he was on 60 Minutes and say, you know what, we all have problems. I get it, we all have problems. He admitted it, we have problems, we've worked on it in our relationship, we don't have a perfect relationship; we're working on it. Great. But then woman after woman after woman, and everybody started to deny. Everybody was like, no, come on, they're just making that up; they're just doing that. Well, we ended up having a problem on the bathroom floor of the White House. Who's going to be on the bathroom floor in the next administration? Karl Marx? Although he would look pretty hot in a tight blue cocktail dress.

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