Someone doesn't like people asking questions about Ayers

It's been stated before, but it's kind of odd that the Obama camp is putting a lot more effort to decry someone digging around the Ayers thing than they did in denouncing Ayers himself.

But some of their tactics are just scummy and creepy.

As I arrived at the downtown Chicago studios a few hours before show time, the phones began ringing off the hook with irate callers demanding Kurtz be axed from the program. It didn't take long to discover that the Obama campaign—which had declined invitations to join the show for its duration to offer rebuttals to Kurtz's points—had sent an "Obama Action Wire" e-mail to its supporters, encouraging them to deluge the station with complaints.

...

As Rosenberg repeatedly pointed out that Team Obama had been offered the opporunity to take part in the conversation, the agitated masses adopted their argument to suggest it was outrageous to request an interview from the Obama campaign in the thick of the DNC. Delivering the line of the night, Rosenberg countered, "The Obama national headquarters is just down the street from here. They obviously have the time to send out these angry emails, but they can't walk a few blocks to our studios?"

Throughout the open line segments, Rosenberg and Kurtz wore incredulous expressions. The hostile callers were so bereft of any legitimate argument, there was little to do but sit back and marvel at what was going on.

The experience was surreal, amusing, and chilling. In a matter of hours, a major national campaign had called on its legions to bully a radio show out of airing an interview with a legitimate scholar asking legitimate political questions. Coupled with the Obama campaign's recent attempts to sic the DOJ on the creators of a truthful political advertisement —which also happened to feature Obama's
relationship with an unrepentant terrorist— last night's call to action represents an emerging pattern. Any criticism of Obama's unknown past is to be immediately denounced as a "smear," and the messenger is to be shut down at all costs.

That's right, instead of addressing and refuting the points, the Obama camp felt it was better to get supporters to irrately call into the show denouncing and demanding Kurtz be pulled. When dealing with someone saying something they did not like, they choose to try to suppresse that person, instead of refuting them.

New politics indeed.

A recording of the interview can be found here . Give it a listen.

Here's an article Stanley Kurtz wrote on the subject.

More about it.

Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a "smear" and smacks of "guilt by association." A presidential candidate's choice to associate himself with an unrepentant terrorist would be highly relevant in any event — does anyone think the Obamedia would keep mum if John McCain had a long-standing relationship with David Duke or an abortion-clinic bomber?

The question answers itself.

But wait, it gets worse.

But we are talking about more than a mere "association."
Bluntly, Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for "reforms" of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers' 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)."

"The station, WGN, has made a stream of the broadcast available online, here, and it has to be heard to be believed. Obama's robotic legions dutifully jammed the station's phone lines and inundated the program with emails, attacking Kurtz personally. Pressed by Rosenberg to specify what inaccuracies Kurtz was guilty of, caller after caller demurred, mulishly railing that "we just want it to stop," and that criticism of Obama was "just not what we want to hear as Americans." Remarkably, as Obama sympathizers raced through their script, they echoed the campaign's insistence that it was Rosenberg who was "lowering the standards of political discourse" by having Kurtz on, rather than the campaign by shouting him down.
Kurtz has obviously hit a nerve. It is the same nerve hit by the American Issues Project, whose television ad calling for examination of the Obama/Ayers relationship has prompted the Obama campaign to demand that the Justice Department begin a criminal investigation. Obama fancies himself as "post-partisan." He is that only in the sense that he apparently brooks no criticism. This episode could be an alarming preview of what life will be like for the media should the party of the Fairness Doctrine gain unified control of the federal government next year.

Such out and out attempts at suppression for a man that wants to be president should be quite worrying.

If he's doing things like this now, what would he do with the Executive Branch?

And here's a sad irony.

Did you know that "forty years ago today, William Ayers was arrested at the Democratic convention. And now someone whose political career he helped launched is about to accept the Democratic nomination"?