Say Anything Blog

National Review’s Stanley Kurtz notes some problems he’s had with digging into Obama’s past associations with Weather Underground terrorist Bill “I Wish I’d Set More Bombs” Ayers.

In the process of tracing down the Obama-Ayers connection, I located a large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. These documents are the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a small foundation, founded and inspired by Bill Ayers, for which Obama served as board chairman (almost surely at Ayers’s behest). Although the library initially promised me access to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, top library officials mysteriously intervened at the last minute to bar access. There followed a struggle between myself and library officials over my right to examine the documents. Although I cannot know for certain, there is reason to believe that Bill Ayers himself may have been consulted, behind the scenes, as the conflict grew.

I think the voters have a right to know what’s in those files, and how extensive Obama’s associations with Ayers were.  And Obama, in particular, should be open to this given how he was elected to the US Senate.  Kurtz’s National Review colleague Amy Holmes explains:

I would like to remind readers that Senator Obama owes his job in large part to the successful effort to make Jack Ryan’s embarrassing divorce papers public.  I met the Los Angeles lawyer a few months ago who made that happen.  She argued to me that the public has the right to have access to public documents.  She was of course an Obama supporter who also hoped at the time that the records would help defeat the Republican candidate and elect Obama.  So, will the media apply the same standard to the library records?  Turn about is only fair play.

Obama was for exposing skeletons in closets before he was against it.