Coordinated Dem/MSM Spin: You Can't Even Mention Ayers, Because It's 1) "Ugly" and 2) a "Dangerous Incitement" to Do Harm to Obama

I apologize for the rather alarming headline. That's Joe Biden's claim, though. Not mine. Ann Curry, "journalist." "Ugly" tactic. Joe Biden: "Dangerous incitement."

Joe, for eight years your party has called Bush a fascist murderer who would likely cancel the 2008 elections, end the American experiment with democracy, and establish a presidency for life.

A leftist contingent sympathetic to the Democratic Party -- New Party types, actually -- has blared for five years that George Bush actually knowingly murdered 3000 Americans on 9/11 to get the nation into a war fever so he could build a trans-Caspian pipe. Was that not incitement? Or did you just not mind if someone took a shot at President Bush?

All that crap about Bush was fringe fantasia, political pornography. Which the Democrats encouraged by silence when they weren't expressly encouraging it by words. And now you're claiming that it's too dangerous to point out Obama's true long-time association with a terrorist because it's "dangerous'? Isn't that convenient for you.

PS: When Hillary Clinton raised the Ayers issue, was that also a "dangerous incitement"? Or are only rightwing Republicans -- such as Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Squeaky Frome, the Weather Underground, etc. -- potential assassins?

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A Question About McCarthyite Guilt by Association

If Barack Obama can link John McCain to George Bush every day-- as well as the oil companies, Wall Street fat cats, etc. -- why is it an impermissible "distraction" to link Barack Obama to his political patron William Ayers and his intellectual mentor Frank Marshall Davis and his former party the socialist/Marxist New Party?

Isn't the point of all these linkages the same -- to suggest that one's associates and allies substantially define one's thinking, and suggest that one's stated positions are actually dishonest to a large degree, whereas these associations reveal one's true, unexpressed positions?

Just curious if the Obama campaign or the MSM (but I repeat myself) will ever explain the distinction.

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Obama's stealth radical past

Another piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama has been revealed, greatly strengthening the picture of a man groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the land.

The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within. The party only lasted until 1998, when its strategy of "fusion" failed to withstand a Supreme Court ruling. But dissolving the party didn't stop the membership, including Barack Obama, from continuing to move the Democrats leftward with spectacular success.....

This is a story that has been percolating through the conservative blogs today. Doug Ross has more details on the association that has not previously been discussed by the mainstream media that falsely accused Gov. Palin of being a member of the Alaska Independence Party.

It would be interesting to get Sen. Obama on the record about his views on socialism and why he was part of such an organization. It will be interesting to see if any of the mainstream media pick up the story. The most likely candidates will be the two Chicago papers which have been more aggressive than others at looking at Obama's background and associations.

I have seen nothing in the NY Times or the Washington Post so far, but they may have reporters working the story. It is a story that deserves some attention. One these papers go with the story the networks usually follow.

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Finally, CBS Criticizes Obama

Of course, it's just for having a smelly airplane, being disorganized, and -- sin of sins! -- treating reporters disrespectfully. Scott Pelley notes the contrast with the McCain campaign:

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

Well, it's easy to figure. Why should the Obama campaign bother? Who can blame them for feeling some measure of contempt for a press corps that is so servile? It's not like the mistreatment is going to result in --gasp -- less favorable coverage for the Obamessiah or anything.

In fact, given the kind of slanted coverage we've seen, it makes the McCain campaign's friendly and professional treatment of journalists seem all the more classy.

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Obama's Truth Deficit

When John Murtagh was 9 years old, Bill Ayers' friends tried to kill him. "I remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside," wrote Murtagh in the April 2008 issue of the City Journal.

It wasn't personal. John's dad was a judge presiding over a trial of the Black Panthers. The next morning, after the bombs exploded, John still remembers the red graffiti on the sidewalk: "FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS."

To the best of John's recollection, Bernardine Dohrn, who is now Bill Ayers' wife, first claimed credit for bombing John's home -- along with other targets -- in November of 1970.

Today John Murtagh is a lawyer and Yonkers' city councilman who is running for the New York state Senate on the GOP ticket this November. I reached him this week through his state Senate campaign. It wasn't hard. Has Barack Obama ever tried?

Barack Obama was only 8 years old when Murtagh's house was bombed. Obama has nothing to do with the terror and the trauma John Murtagh and his family went through. "It's a sensitive issue for us. My mom is still alive -- she's 83. She literally had to snatch her children out of the house in the middle of the night because her house was on fire," John told me.

But Barack Obama was not a child -- he was a grown man -- when he decided his personal path to power and influence lay through Bill Ayers' connections. In the Chicago establishment, which unfortunately embraced former domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and his wife, Barack Obama was encouraged to look beyond the obvious -- John Murtagh, his family, their terror, the lawlessness, the attacks on policemen, judges, army outposts -- to embrace larger goals.

What were these goals? How does Barack Obama come to continue to associate with a man who cannot bring himself to say to John Murtagh or to John's mother or any other kin of the attacked: "I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was a terrible thing to do."

Obama's campaign is busy fudging. That's a polite word for "lying." Barack Obama's top political adviser is claiming Obama simply didn't know Ayers' history when they first met. Bomber? What bomber? Right. "If that's true, Obama has to be the dumbest man who ever graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School," snorts Murtagh. "I don't buy that at all."

Murtagh believes the relationships between Barack, his wife, Michelle, Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine, goes back 30 years, to Michelle's time at Sidley Austin, the famous Washington, D.C., law firm that also employed Bernardine Dohrn.

Murtagh doesn't blame Obama for what Bill Ayers and his friends did and supported. He blames Obama for picking a man like Ayers as a friend and mentor -- and then covering up the friendship. In politics things get complicated. Truth becomes hard to find. But when you are about to elect someone commander in chief, it would be good to know he can lay his hands on some of the stuff, in case he ever needs it.

"The night they attacked our home, they also firebombed an army recruiting station out in Brooklyn and police patrol cars outside of Greenwich Village," notes Murtagh. "Three weeks later they accidentally blew themselves up. They intended to attack the officer's club at Fort Dix."

Lay your cards on the table, Murtagh wants to tell the man who would be president. "Obama's free to associate with Dohrn and Ayers; that's his right," he tells me. "But don't hide the relationship, and be forthcoming and let people decide the significance of it for themselves."

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Will Obama Kill Science?

By John Derbyshire

The science news this past few weeks has concentrated on the Large Hadron Collider, which officially began operations on September 10. So far not much of anything has actually been collided, but the physicists whose eight billion dollar toy this is are working their way up in baby steps to the big, glamorous experiments.

Still, anyone of a gambling inclination who wanted to bet on what the really sensational science headlines of the next few years will be, would not be looking to the LHC. As I commented in National Review three years ago:

[W]e are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.

The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other "hot" disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin'.

Whether it will go on jumpin' may depend on the result of November's election. There is a widespread feeling in the human sciences - particularly in genetics, population genetics, evolutionary biology, and neurophysiology - that the next five to ten years will see some sensational discoveries. Unfortunately those discoveries will have metaphysical implications more disturbing than were those of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg, Schr”dinger, Pauli, and Dirac may have seriously upset our ideas about matter and energy, but at least they left our psyches and our political principles intact.

Those items may not remain intact much longer. The conceptual revolution among human-sciences researchers has in fact already taken place. This is not widely understood because (a) news outlets are very reluctant to report it, (b) powerful political forces have an interest in suppressing it, and (c) researchers prefer getting on quietly with their work to having their windows broken by mobs of angry protestors.

Most people still think of human-science controversies in terms of nature/nurture. As a matter of real scientific dispute, that is all long gone. Nature/nurture arguments were at the heart of the sociobiology wars that roiled the human sciences through the last third of the 20th century. (The 2000 book Defenders of Truth, by the Finnish sociologist of science Ullica Segerstr†le gives a full - and so far as I can judge, very fair - account.) The dust of battle has pretty much settled now, in science departments if not in the popular press, and nature is the clear victor. Name any universal characteristic of human nature, including cognitive and personality characteristics. Of all the observed variation in that characteristic, about half is caused by genetic differences. You may say that is only a half victory; but it is a complete shattering of the nurturist absolutism that ruled in the human sciences 40 years ago, and that is still the approved dogma in polite society, including polite political society, today.

While those sociobiology wars were going on - while E.O. Wilson was having a jug of ice water dumped over his head at an AAAS symposium by people shouting "Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" (1978); while Art Jensen looked set fair to be kicked out of the AAAS altogether following agitation by Margaret Mead et al. because of his 1969 paper on group differences in I.Q.; while Stephen Jay Gould was assuring his readers that "Human equality is a contingent fact of history" (1985) and Richard Lewontin was celebrating "the funeral of reductionism" (1983); while Charles Murray was being profiled in the New York Times Magazine as "America's most dangerous conservative" (1994) - while all that was happening, research results were steadily trickling in, building up the water pressure behind the nurturist dam.

That dam now has more cracks than the surface of Europa and water is spraying out all over. The only thing that could stop a complete collapse would be the power of government....

... Which might be forthcoming in the event of an Obama victory. The younger generation of human-sciences enthusiasts trend conservative/libertarian, and Obama has them worried. For a glimpse of the kind of discussions that their fears generate, read through the recent thread on Gene Expression here. Samples:

[Sarah] Palin is the most libertarian candidate to run since the Reagan administration . we're fighting to hold territory, not to take it. We just need to hold off the left till genomics can come through. We're going to be knocking off sacred cow after sacred cow in the next decade or so .

The Democrats do not want the genetic discoveries to lead to widespread knowledge about the truth about human differences. The Democrats are really more anti-Darwinian than the fundamentalist Christians who deny the origin of species .

We need to step very carefully as we as going up against the official state religion, namely PC, and until we reach critical mass we'll be convicted in the media and go straight to the gulag rather than be afforded the benefit of a [S]copes trial. [J]ust think of how many fedguv bureaucrats and NGOs owe their livelihoods to the axiom of equality . an Obama administration will passionately go after the heretics.

The Left's restraints on science do not get publicized. Where's the big research for IQ genes? Where's the funding for that? Where's the big research program for psychometrics? The Left strangled that very thoroughly.

About 45 percent of the way down that thread are two gems. First, population geneticist Henry Harpending posts a creepy invitation he got from the National Human Genome Research Institute (yes, that's a ".gov" you see there in their web address .), who are "planning a workshop to explore the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) raised by research on natural selection in humans." The impetus for this meeting, they say, is "a growing need for more thoughtful deliberation by genomic researchers, ELSI researchers, science writers and science editors regarding the societal issues raised by natural selection research." Get the picture? The blogger Godless Capitalist notes:

The fact is that it is incredibly difficult even today to do this research. Genomics has been an area of "regulatory oversight" in that the Hapmap and related high throughput SNP

They are now beginning to do so. I cannot disclose more but I am familiar with many of the principals and Harpending's post is the tip of the iceberg. research started getting published so quickly that the bureaucrats haven't had time to crack down on the area.

(Godless is a researcher in genomics. In fact he is the one who paid me a visit here.)

A couple of items further on, science blogger Jason Malloy posts the transcript of an NPR discussion about The Bell Curve from October 1994, featuring "civil rights lawyer and writer" Barack Obama, who "lives in Chicago." What did our young civil-rights lawyer and writer (?) think of Herrnstein and Murray's pop-psychometrics masterpiece? He no like.

Mr. Murray isn't interested in prevention. He's interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it's artfully packaged

Some of us, mulling over these things, have found consolation in the thought that even if the U.S. authorities shut down human-sciences research, it will go on in other countries where these issues are less fraught, and the results will come out anyway. As someone notes on that thread, though, this may not happen, or it may happen very, very slowly. The U.S.A. is a giant in all kinds of research, and the rest of the world trails far behind. An acquaintance of mine at Cold Spring Harbor lab, a Chinese citizen, grumbled to me about the political and cultural obstacles to investigating human nature. Well, I suggested, why not go back to China to do the research? The Chinese have none of the hang-ups about human differences that we have here. "True," he sighed, "but there's no money for research over there." For all China's economic success in recent years, it remains a poor country (GDP per capita $5,300 versus $45,800 for the U.S.A.) with only the beginnings of a pure-science research infrastructure. Cold Spring Harbor Lab opened in 1890, when the last Chinese Imperial dynasty still had 21 years to run.

Thus if human-sciences research is shut down in the U.S.A., our understanding will cease to advance, or will advance much more slowly. A mass exodus of researchers to some more hospitable nation, in the manner of Jewish scientists fleeing the Nazis, is not likely. U.S. academic life is very cozy, and nobody is threatened with concentration camps. Researchers are just being told, in the soft-totalitarian tones of that memo Henry Harpending displays, that there are project areas towards which the federal government takes a stance of strong disapproval, with effects including, but not limited to, zero funding.

Barack Obama was raised in an atmosphere of "cultural Marxism." His mind was set that way, and he retained the essential precepts of the creed into adult life, as his close association with somewhat-more-than-cultural Marxist Bill Ayers illustrates (as of course do Obama's remarks quoted above). Obama would fill his administration with cultural Marxists like himself, whose attitude to human-sciences research is the one spelled out by Edward O. Wilson in his book On Human Nature.

Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous.

And in case you think it should be difficult to stifle open enquiry in a free country, check out this report from Canada.

Academics fear speaking freely in Canada

Political scientists worried about `legal jeopardy'

A group of U. S. professors launched a campaign this week protesting plans by a prominent political science organization to hold its annual conference in Toronto next year, claiming that Canada's restrictions on certain forms of speech puts controversial academics at risk of being prosecuted . Bradley Watson, professor of American and Western political thought at Pennsylvania's St. Vincent College, said he will present a petition calling for the American Political Science Association (APSA) to re-evaluate its selection of Toronto for its 2009 conference at this year's annual meeting .

His protest has garnered support from dozens of professors across the United States, including prominent scholars such as Princeton University legal philosopher Robert P. George and Harvard University's Harvey Mansfield . [P]rofessors signing the petition are concerned that recent human rights commission investigations into Maclean's and Western Standard magazines over articles concerning Islam, and the conviction of pastor Stephen Boisson, who was ordered by Alberta's human rights tribunal in May to cease publicizing criticisms of homosexuality, suggest that professors risk being chilled from discussing important academic subjects, or ending up in legal trouble

We are about to find out whether our traditional devotion to free speech and free enquiry can survive real, incontrovertible results from the human sciences; and in particular, in the event of an Obama victory, whether that devotion can survive under a left-liberal administration headed by a cultural Marxist - an administration much more interested in shoring up the soft totalitarianism of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" than in permitting the discovery of true facts about human nature.

Source. KBJ has some good comments on the above

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