Quotables

The debate

jason@huffingtonpost.com:

You got to give credit to the American people, who managed to get through an entire evening of debate without ever once asking a question about William Ayers. It's almost as if the public has more pressing things on their minds these days.

Erica Jong:

McCain looks old and ill to me. He seems to have no circulation under his papery white skin. He always looks like he is suppressing a fart. He has no cool at all. Even though he tried to correct his curmudgeonly reputation tonight, he was unconvincing. It seemed as if he had taken a Valium and it was wearing off. I wouldn't trust him to look into Vladimir Putin's eyes anymore than I trusted George W. Bush. He's the bomb-bomb King, no question. Erratic and rageful, condescending and insincere, he seemed to be auditioning to play Simon Legree in an antebellum bodice ripper.

On Ayers:

Chicago school reform leader and former Illinois Republican State Rep. Diana Nelson on NPR:

"It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he [Bill Ayers] had led a fugitive life years earlier ... It's ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It's nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It's so silly."

You can read the full NPR report here.

******

“From the ground up…”

Andrew McCarthy (related to Joe?) writes for the conservative National Review. McCain’s Obama/Ayers slime campaign has created a market for filth peddlers like McCarthy and he has a field day making links that somehow don’t ever link, between Obama, Bill Ayers, Columbia University, the PLO, Hugo Chavez , and world terrorism. Why he left out Stalin and Osama, I don’t know. He probably should have checked with Sol Stern first for additions, before publishing.

But I have to admit I was smitten by some of the crap he wrote about me and the Small Schools Workshop, trying to drag us together with Sen. Obama into his dark little world of Annenberg conspiracies and Manchurian Candidates.

Leaving aside for a moment all of McCarthy’s lies about me and my political leanings, the part of his diatribe that captured my imagination was when he introduced the Small Schools Workshop as an instrument for world revolution:

With Obama heading the board of directors that approved expenditures and Ayers, the mastermind running its operational arm, hundreds of thousands of CAC dollars poured into the “Small Schools Workshop” — a project begun by Ayers and run by Klonsky to spur the revolution from the ground up.

There it was, right under my nose, jumping out at me from the pages of the most pro-Ownership Society rag on the face of the Earth, the slogan for the Workshop’s new logo—MAKING THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION FROM THE GROUND UP.

Thanks Andrew. I’m on it.