RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites. What has happened here involving William Ayers and the association he has had with Barack Obama is quite stunning. Ayers, and this is key, is an unrepentant terrorist. Even at his current age, he drapes himself in the American flag for a photo in a disrespectful manner. He has not apologized for trying to blow up the Pentagon, he is unrepentant about any of his anti-American activities. Was a mentor of Barack Obama's. Obama has tried to say, "Eh, he just lives in the neighborhood. He's one of these guys I met growing up." He did fundraisers for Obama. He has been one of the many people who has filled Obama's head with various thoughts on America, as his professors at Harvard have, as Reverend Wright has and Tony Rezko and a number of these other people. They're basically the Chicago machine. So a 527 group, the American Issues Project, ran an ad. Here's the audio from the ad.
ANNOUNCER: Consider this: United 93 never hit the Capitol on 9/11. But the Capitol was bombed thirty years before By an American terrorist group called Weather Underground that declared "war" on the US Targeting the Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations and more. One of the group's leaders, William Ayers, admits to the bombings, proudly saying later: "[W]e didn't do enough." Some members of the group Ayers founded even went on to kill police. But Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, "respectable" and "mainstream." Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' home. And the two served together on a left-wing board. 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? American Issues Project is responsible for the content of this ad.
RUSH: That was not a John McCain ad. That was a group called the American Issues Project. Now, Obama responded to this. Here's the audio of his ad.
OBAMA: I'm Barack Obama, and I approved this message.
ANNOUNCER: With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the 60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers? McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old. Let's talk about standing up for America today. John McCain wants to spend ten billion a month in Iraq, tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, selling out American workers. John McCain: Just more of the same.
RUSH: Pretty lame. Pretty lame. Barack Obama was only 8 years old? Okay, John McCain was in Hanoi Hilton when Joe Biden first got to the Senate. Big whoop! It doesn't matter how old Obama was when Ayers was doing what he did. It's that Obama knew and knows what Ayers did and has still chosen to befriend him, and Ayers is unrepentant. The response -- the "rapid response" from Obama -- had two options here: Ignore this, let it go. It was a local buy. It was not national. It was running in select cities, select markets but it was not a national ad. The Obama campaign has proven the old axiom: "When critics get it right, then you reply," and when you reply to something they've gotten right, it's evidence that the critic has gotten to you. This defense...
See, one of the things that Obama has been able to do... The reason he was elected to the Illinois Senate, he was able to disqualify one of his own opponents, one of them a long-standing black woman who had great reputation of love and devotion from the district that she represented. Obama found a way to disqualify her on something, a bunch of his opponents, but you can't disqualify McCain. He's running for president of the United States, and they cannot go through an entire campaign ignoring the associations that Barack Obama has had because Barack Obama is saying things both in Berlin and in the United States that make people question his knowledge of America, his respect for the country, and his -- well, people question whether he thinks we're a great country or not. He apparently does not.
He sees the country negatively. So does his wife, which why her speech last night was just Stepford. It was repackaged. As the caller said earlier: It sounded like a Republican speech. Michael Barone has written about this. Let me give you a pull quote from a piece he has posted at Real Clear Politics. "Obama was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance." That's the key on this as it goes forward, is to always characterize Ayers as "unrepentant." He has not apologized. He has no regret and no remorse for what he did. I wonder, if somewhere down the road they have to get Ayers out to say, "Look, this is being way overblown. I am sorry for that. I have reformed. I'm now a college professor. I teach education." That's going to open up a whole new can of worms if they do that because what kind of education is he indoctrinating these students with? And it ain't good.
We know what he's teaching, and that's part of what he and Obama worked on at this foundation. But if he came out and apologized to the American people, they'd say, "Oh, okay. No, it's not a big deal anymore." We tend to forgive people who apologize. But this guy bragged about the bombing of the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and Obama thinks he's fit to run around with and associate with. And it was Ayers, by the way, who helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics, the community agitation. We don't know how much, but clearly they were more than just passing acquaintances. Most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a guy like Ayers with his past and his beliefs, but Obama did. He actively chose to go into business with the guy, quote, unquote. And so people might reasonably want to take that into account and try to figure out why, when it's coupled with Jeremiah Wright and the anger that has come out of Michelle's mouth during the campaign; and the comments, unflattering, about America that have come out of Obama's mouth during the campaign.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: On this William Ayers thing, this is another one of these things, folks, where the Drive-Bys are going to not touch this, they're going to leave it alone, they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into this, and when they finally do get there, the question, "Why are we even having to talk about this? This is so long ago, Barack Obama, he was only 8 years old when Ayers tried to blow up the Pentagon and so forth." Maybe so, but he was 34 years old when he attended his first Ayers fundraiser. Obama was born in 1961. Their first fundraiser was held in 1995. He has known Ayers for at least 13 years. Doesn't matter that he was only 8 years old when Ayers did his terrorism. Obama was not eight years old when Ayers reaffirmed that he was glad to have bombed the Pentagon and only wished that he had done more. Ayers did that in 2001, six years after the first fundraiser that Obama and Ayers held together, and that was when Obama was 40 years old. He had served for years with Ayers at the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and was planning a run for federal office.
So this ad, folks, the fact that he's come up with this ad and that that's his response is an amateurish response. It is a response of somebody who's guilty and immediately trying to change the subject back to McCain and these tired, worn-out Democrat cliches about health care and Iraq. This ad has hit home. It has hit home so much that the Obama campaign is trying to get it taken off the air. As I said, it was not run nationally. Both CNN and Fox News declined to air it, but by yesterday afternoon about 150 times it had aired in local markets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan according to Evan Tracey, head of the TNS Media Intelligence Campaign Media Analysis Group, which is an ad tracking firm. "Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous," and they are trying to get it pulled. They want the Justice Department, the FCC, wherever they're going, they want the ad pulled.
Now, you don't do that unless this ad's going to hurt you. And if the ad can't hurt you because it's false, if you've got a response to it that blows the ad out of the water, then you let the ad run and you let the ad make a fool of the people that are running the ad and you let it embarrass McCain, but the embarrassed figure is Obama. That business, "I was only 8 years old when Ayers did that stuff," doesn't wash. It doesn't wash at all because Obama became an adult and knew full well what Ayers had done, and when Ayers reaffirmed that he had done it in 2001, said he wasn't apologizing for it, he said wished it had been more successful, Obama had already been an associate of his, an intimate associate for six years, not a casual acquaintance. This is a big one, and it has hit home, it has struck a nerve. Christian Pinkston of the American Issues Project, which ran the ad, 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." And you know something, folks, that is a concise way of describing the entire Obama campaign.
Obama cannot run the campaign on the merits because there aren't any. He doesn't have any real achievements. He doesn't have a resume that would even get him hired someplace, in a lot of ways. Yeah, he comes in and speaks well. Yeah, he's got this great education. Yeah, he's charismatic, but then you look at the resume, and you don't see anything. You don't see anything that says, "Yeah, this guy's done a job before," other than 140 days in the Senate. So they can't run a campaign on the merits; they have to run a campaign on packaging and repackaging. This packaging and repackaging is oriented toward making people think that the Obamas are just like every other American family, when they're not.
