Nagourney Recites NYT Talking Points on Obama's "Sporadic Encounters" with Terrorist Ayers

Plus: Apparently only Times reporter Adam Nagourney is allowed to use Barack Obama's middle name "Hussein."

Tuesday's front-page story by chief political reporter Adam Nagourney, "Campaigns Shift To Attack Mode On Eve Of Debate," dealt with John McCain's increased focus on Barack Obama's relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Nagourney, along with the rest of the Times, does not approve.



Nagourney took his talking points from the Times' Saturday whitewash of the Ayers connection, something contradicted by a Monday night report on, of all places, CNN.


Ms. Palin again invoked Mr. Obama's sporadic encounters with William Ayers, a founder of a 1960s radical group - amplifying a message the McCain campaign was pushing in a steady stream of e-mail messages to reporters and supporters - and suggested again that Mr. Obama was "not one of us."


At a rally in Estero, Fla., for Ms. Palin, one of the introductory speakers, Mike Scott, the sheriff of Lee County, referred to the Democratic candidate as "Barack Hussein Obama."


"Sporadic" has seemingly become the official media line when describing the Ayers-Obama relationship.



And it's hard to tell what Nagourney's complaint is regarding the use of Barack Obama's full name, since "Barack Hussein Obama" were the first words in his ownAugust 28 lead story, after Obama earned the Democratic Party's nomination for president.



Nagourney continued:


Ms. Palin has several times cited a New York Times article published Saturday in raising Mr. Obama's association with Mr. Ayers, but she has sidestepped its conclusion that the two men did not appear to be close and that Mr. Obama had never expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.


That's overstating things. No one's saying that Obama supports planting bombs in the Pentagon. But he can and should be judged by the company he keeps and the milieu from which his politics emerged. Obama's political career was launched in 1995 at the home of Ayers and his wife and fellow Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn.