Obama Denies Knowledge of William Ayers’ Terrorist Activities
Perhaps The Chosen One really does think we puny little mortals are all idiots.
by Bill Levinson
Barack Obama’s new motto should be that of Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes: “”I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!” This is Obama’s standard answer whenever he is confronted with an unsavory incident in his past.
- When Obama was confronted with a questionnaire he filled out for his 1996 State Senate run, in which he advocated a total ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns, he blamed a subordinate for filling in the wrong answer even though his handwriting appears on the questionnaire.
- Obama dismissed SIX bad votes in the Illinois State Senate with the excuse that he pressed the wrong button. Is this someone we want near the nuclear trigger?
- Barry would presumably have us believe that he heard none of Jeremiah Wright’s racist or anti-American tirades, and that he saw none of the anti-Israel hate speech in his church’s official bulletins.
- Now, the New York Post reports that Barack Obama had no knowledge of Bill Ayers’ terrorist past when he got involved with him.
Perhaps we can help Barry out with his excuses. He should start by denying that it happened. If someone proves it happened, his next step is to deny that he was there. If someone proves he was there, he can end the argument by proclaiming that he was only following orders. Anything else is above his pay grade, as opposed to John McCain’s position in the Navy where the captain is responsible for everything that happens in his organization.
As reported by Geoff Earle in the New York Post,
- Barack Obama’s top political adviser said today Obama “didn’t know the history” of unrepentant bomber William Ayers’ activities in the violent Weather Underground movement when the candidate attended a political event at Ayers’ home in 1995.
“When he went he certainly didn’t know the history,” chief Obama strategist David Axelrod told CNN - arguing for the first time since the story surfaced early this year that Obama was unaware of Ayers’ past.
Or, to quote Sergeant Schultz, “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!”
He has more skeletons in his closet than Jeffrey Dahmer.
Comment by Michael Ejercito — October 7, 2008 @ 1:05 am
I am really becoming pessimistic about this election. It doesn’t seem to matter what comes out about this guy, the Obama juggernaut appears unstoppable, its as if people are under mass hypnosis. And with the risk of sounding like some whacko conspiracy theorist, I believe Arab investors are behind this current drop on Wall Street because they want Obama elected. The timing is way too convenient for Obama.
Comment by Laura — October 7, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term Bradley effect, less commonly called[1] the Wilder effect, refers to a frequently observed discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in American political campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.[2][3][4] Named for Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in voter polls, the Bradley effect refers to a tendency on the part of voters — black as well as white — to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a Black candidate, and yet, on election day, vote for his/her white opponent.[5]
One theory for the Bradley effect is that some white voters give inaccurate polling responses for fear that, by stating their true preference, they will open themselves to criticism of racial motivation. This effect is similar to people refusing to discuss voting choice at all. If you state you are undecided, you can avoid being forced into a political discussion with someone highly partisan. The reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well. The race of the pollster conducting the interview may be a factor into voters’ answers. Some pollsters believe that they do not receive deliberately false answers from white voters. The Bradley effect, these pollsters believe, is caused by pollsters’ failure to account for general political leanings among voters who are undecided between Democrats and Republicans.
The causes of the polling errors are debated, but pollsters generally believe that perceived societal pressures have led some white voters to be less than forthcoming in their poll responses. These voters supposedly have harbored a concern that declaring their support for a white candidate over a non-white candidate will create a perception that the voter is racially prejudiced.[28][35] During the 1988 Jackson presidential campaign, Murray Edelman, a veteran election poll analyst for news organizations and a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, found the race of the pollster conducting the interview to be a factor in the discrepancy.
Edelman’s research showed white voters to be more likely to indicate support for Jackson when asked by a black interviewer than when asked by a white interviewer.[4] Andrew Kohut, who was the president of the Gallup Organization during the 1989 Dinkins/Giulianai race and later president of the Pew Research Center, which conducted research into the phenomenon, has suggested that the discrepancies may arise, not from white participants giving false answers, but rather from white voters who have negative opinions of blacks being less likely to participate in polling at all than white voters who do not share such negative sentiments with regard to blacks.[36] [37]
While there is widespread belief in a racial component as at least a partial explanation for the polling inaccuracies in the elections in question, it is not universally accepted that this is the primary factor. Peter Brodnitz, a pollster and contributor to the The Polling Report newsletter, worked on the 2006 campaign of black U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr., and Brodnitz indicated that he did not find the race of the interviewer to be a factor in voter responses in pre-election polls. Brodnitz suggested that late-deciding voters tend to have moderate-to-conservative political opinions and that this may account in part for last-minute decision-makers breaking largely away from black candidates, who have generally been more liberal than their white opponents in the elections in question.[4] Additionally, with regard to the 1982 contest between Bradley and Deukmejian, Mark DiCamillo, Director of the The Field Poll, which was among those that had shown Bradley with a strong lead, said that the organization’s own internal examination after that election identified other possible factors that may have contributed to their error.[38] California Progress Report
While the 1982 California gubernatorial contest is not the only race where the race of the candidate has been thought to be a factor in polling gone awry, there are a number of other reasons why the Field Poll may not have been accurate. I spoke with Mark DiCamillo, Director of the Field Poll—whose phone has been ringing off the hook about this today. He told me that there was a memo done by the polling organization shortly after the election to try to understand what had occurred (not available online as it predated the internet) that identified four possible factors: 1. A late shift in voter preference after the poll, which could have reflected bias. 2. A well organized GOP absentee ballot program (Bradley won the day of election results). 3. The presence of a handgun initiative on the same ballot that brought out a skewed electorate different from the model used to predict likely voters. 4. Lower turnout by minorities because Bradley did not turn out the base of black voters.
One prominent skeptic is Gary Langer, who serves as the director of polling for ABC News. Langer has described the Bradley effect as “a theory in search of data.” He has argued that inconsistency of its appearance, particularly in more recent elections, casts doubt upon its validity as a theory.[30][39] However, other analysts cast doubt on that hypothesis, saying that the polls underestimated Clinton rather than overestimated Obama.[40] Still other sources point out that Obama’s performance in precincts using hand-count vote tabulation was precisely in line with exit polling data, and that the dissonance occurred only in districts using easily-compromised Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) optical scanners, suggesting that fraud rather than any voter bias might be at fault. [41]
After the Super Tuesday elections of February 5, political science researchers from the University of Washington found trends suggesting the possibility that with regard to Obama, the effect’s presence or absence may be dependent on the percentage of the electorate that is black. The researchers noted that to that point in the election season, opinion polls taken just prior to an election tended to overestimate Obama in states with a black population below eight percent, to track him within the polls’ margins of error in states with a black population between ten and twenty percent, and to underestimate him in states with a black population exceeding twenty-five percent. The first finding suggested the possibility of the Bradley effect, while the last finding suggested the possibility of a “reverse” Bradley effect in which black voters might have been reluctant to declare to pollsters their support for Obama or are underpolled. For example, many general election polls in North Carolina and Virginia assume that blacks will be 15% to 20% of each state’s electorate; blacks were around a quarter of each state’s electorate in 2004.[42][43] This high support effect has been attributed to high black voter turnout in the primaries in those states. Blacks supported Obama by margins often exceeding 97%. By comparison, with only one exception, in each state with inaccurate opinion polls for the Democratic contest involving Obama, those same polls accurately predicted the outcome of that state’s Republican contest, featuring only white candidates.[44]
While their cause continues to be debated—for example, many polls underpoll African-Americans and young voters—the pollsters’ errors have raised expectations that as the presidential primary season progresses, Obama’s polling numbers will be widely scrutinized as analysts try to definitively determine whether the Bradley effect has become a significant factor in the race.[45] An inspection of the discrepancy between pre-election polls and Obama’s ultimate support [2]
reveals significant bivariate support for the hypothesized “reverse Bradley effect.” On average, Obama received three percentage points more support in the actual primaries and caucuses than he did during polling; however, he also had a strong ground campaign, and many polls do not question voters with cellphones, who are predominantly young.[46]
Comment by yamit82 — October 7, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
If Obama wins, the victors will gleefully toss the phrase overboard, and if McCain wins, the losers will glumly rename it the Obama effect.
Comment by yamit82 — October 7, 2008 @ 4:17 pm
Monkey see nothing, monkey do nothing.
It’s like the movie: THE NEVERENDING STORY
“HERE COMES THE NOTHING!”
Comment by Michael Sunstar — October 7, 2008 @ 5:33 pm
Yamit,Sunstar: Forget Bradley, forget Experience.
When America suffers a calamity such as the current economic collapse, they don’t usually reelect the rascals that in the main were responsible for the event. A NEW BROOM SWEEPS CLEAN.
Comment by h peskin — October 7, 2008 @ 9:36 pm