Seminar in Shamelessness

The Weekly Standard ^ | May 25, 2009 | Mary Katharine Ham

[Scanian]

Baltimore Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn gave a seminar in shamelessness last week. On the road to promote their new book Race Course Against White Supremacy, the radical couple sat in armchairs on a small stage at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, conducting a "dialogue" instead of the usual book-tour speech.

Ayers wore the uniform of an aging professor whose grasp on hipness is as thin and worn as the knees of his jeans. A sport coat nods to professionalism, while his T-shirt bespeaks authenticity. Thanks to a media blitz during the presidential campaign last year highlighting Ayers's connections to his Chicago neighbor Barack Obama, Dohrn--who outranked her husband both in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in felony convictions--has been reduced to sidekick status, waiting to deliver her opening remarks after his and praising his jokes, which she's "still laughing at after all these years."

She has traded the leather boots and mini-skirts of her militant days for the blousy, granola-professor look, the small red flower in her gray hair a wry accessory for a woman who found no power in flowers during the late '60s, when she deemed the nonviolence they symbolized weak and passé.

Ayers and Dohrn, as the country was reminded during the campaign, founded the Weather Underground-- a terrorist group that splintered from the SDS in favor of fomenting violent revolution during Vietnam. In service of that goal, the group damaged hundreds of thousands of dollars in property and killed at least six people.

[wny]

"...a media blitz during the presidential campaign last year highlighting Ayers's connections to his Chicago neighbor Barack Obama..."

Really? I must have been snoozing those 2 minutes. Blitz my Clymer. Bristol Palin and Joe-the-plumber EACH received more coverage than Ayers, J-Wright and Rezko combined.

[livius]

Hawking rewritten history the way Ron Popeil sells a Showtime Rotisserie, Ayers and Dohrn marinated their militancy in self-righteousness, basted their guilt with the glistening mythology of the '60s, and set the thing to roast in the dark, warm halls of academe. They've now emerged on the lecture circuit, "respected" professors grinning ear-to-ear, with a patented recipe for rehabilitation without repentance...

Well put. It enrages me every time I think what these two have gotten away with.

[Broker]

This is no better than a Charles Manson seminar on Leadership Amidst Despair. or Son of Sam’s Casual Aquaintainces I Knew.. whada mess. Another generation being despoiled.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Why are they walking around free ?