Posted on 04/12/2008 2:59:21 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A PAST association with a former terrorist has returned to haunt Barack Obama as the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination nears its end game.
Republicans are turning on Obama for his connection with William Ayers, once a member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s.
Ayers was loosely involved in Obama’s election as an Illinois state senator in the late 1990s, when he was introduced to local activists at a meeting in his house. He also donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2001.
Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic foundation, for three years and shared a platform with him at two academic conferences.
Republicans believe they have found new evidence that Obama lacks judgment and patriotism just as the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, who said, “God damn America”, is dying down.
The Weathermen, a small band of extreme leftists who got their name from lines in a Bob Dylan song � “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” � conducted a bombing campaign against targets such as police headquarters, prisons and courthouses for three years to “bring the [Viet-nam] war home”.
Two police officers were killed in 1981, when members of the Weathermen and Black Liberation Army stole $1m from an armoured car. It was their last action.
Ayers, 63, turned himself in to police that year, when charges against him were dropped because of mishandled FBI surveillance. He is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is admired in progressive political and educational circles.
He wisely remained silent as stories about his connection with the 46-year-old presidential candidate began to circulate � until he was goaded into the open last week by repeated taunts from Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News tele-vision host, who described him as an “unrepentant terrorist”.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, joined in the controversy on Hannity’s show. “It’s part of a general pattern in which Senator Obama is very comfortable with the hard left and the people who are in many ways fundamentally antiAmerican and certainly anti-American-government,” he said.
Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s former election guru, said the connection with Ayers was troubling. “There’s been talk in the past about friendship,” he said. “They made speeches together. He was a supporter of him in his race for the state senate. It would be interesting to know how close the links are.”
John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, was asked what he thought about Ayers and declined to offer an opinion. It was Hannity’s questioning of McCain, though, that provoked Ayers to respond.
In a lecture to college students in North Dakota last week, Ayers said: “I was trying to go to sleep, flipping through the channels real quick, and Hannity said, ‘Stay tuned. John McCain and I will talk about William Ayers.’ And I said, damn, I will have to stay tuned for an hour.”
Ayers went on to tell the students: “People ask, ‘Do you regret anything you did against the government in those days?’ And my answer is: no, I don’t.”
In an interview in The New York Times on the day of the September 11 attacks, when he was promoting Fugitive Days, his book on the Weathermen, Ayers said: “I don’t regret setting bombs,” and added: “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
He defended the comments on his blog www.billayers.org last week by claiming: “I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet-nam and I say: no, I don’t regret anything I did to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.
“Sometimes I add: I don’t think I did enough. This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.”
The Obama campaign believes a very slender connection with Ayers is being used to smear their candidate.
Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, said: “Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of criminal violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect him with events of almost 40 years ago is patently ridiculous.”
Sam Ackerman, a Chicago political activist and neighbour of Ayers, said: “The whole thing is preposterous. I held the first fundraiser for Obama, when he ran for the state senate, in my house. A lot of people held little coffee meetings. It wasn’t a big deal.”
He added: “In the past 20 years Bill Ayers has become a nationally renowned educator and is a highly respected professor at the University of Illinois. I think Barack Obama should tell people, ‘I’m not in the renouncing business’.”
The controversy comes at a sensitive time for Obama. Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine, described patriotism as “sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now” and advised him to be “corny” about America.
Obama has just finished a four-day swing through Indiana, a conservative-leaning state, which will hold its primary on May 6. Prayers and the pledge of allegiance were said. As the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, Obama has emphasised: “I owe what I can to this country, this country that I love, and I will never forget it.”
Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA said: “They’re going to kill him with this. The guy is an unrepentant terrorist, so please, Barack Obama, explain why you aligned yourself with him. It is a fundamental question of judgment. By the time he [Obama] was hanging around with Ayers, his position was well known. He [Ayers] was not a freedom fighter; he belonged to a violent terrorist group.”
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, said earlier this year that the two were “friendly” but in the sense that “their kids attend the same school”, but Ayers' children left long ago. A campaign aide later clarified that the connection was with Berna-dine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, who was still involved with the school.
Dohrn is another former leader of the Weather Underground, who also went on the run in the 1970s and served just under a year in jail.
B.Hussein O. is so dirty that no amount of scrubbing and spinning can get him clean. He’s a Chicago politician don’t ‘cha know?
“He is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago...”
Professor=terrorist. You’d think that the leadership at the University of Illinois would have a little more sense than to hire this guy, but then it took Colorado a couple of years to fire Ward Churchill.
The amazing thing about all these disclosures is how cheap they are for the Clinton campaign to publicize. The free media is covering them, so she doesn’t have to expend campaign cash to spread them in political ads.
“...the Weather Underground”
I hadn’t thought of that gang for at least 30 years, maybe longer. Wow!
My father always said to keep your powder dry. He was so right.
“Obama has just finished a four-day swing through Indiana, a conservative-leaning state, which will hold its primary on May 6. Prayers and the pledge of allegiance were said. As the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, Obama has emphasised: “I owe what I can to this country, this country that I love, and I will never forget it.”
Did he salute the flag? I’ve never heard why he was not saluting prior to his presidential bid; most likely some liberal conscious drivel. So now he’s showing respect? I don’t believe he cares at all about this country. He’s lived with his America hating wife and been associated with his America hating pastor for too long to be believed.
Please, Please, PLEASE read Patriot Post 08-15 (keyword Patriot Post)
This is the Democrat Party of today. The movers and shakers of this party are terrorists, Marxists, and America Haters of the first order. Their two potiential Presidental nominees reflect their goals and visions for America. If we elect either of them, we will have put a sworn enemy of the nation in the White House, and they will surround themselves with men and women who are even worse.
Although I don’t agree with everything Sean Hannity does, he does have this issue pegged.
The singular question is: how can the voting public support a man for president that admits to being friendly with a self-confessed terrorist?
Everything beyond that question is simply meaningless..IMO.
____________________________________________
Yet he ignores the far more troubling Kenya activity...one wonders why.
Ayers’s early days of political protest took place at the University of Michigan, where he earned his liberal arts degree. It was there that Ayers, along with 26 others, was arrested for staging a sit-in at the Ann Arbor draft board. Ayers was influenced by SDS leaders such as Tom Hayden and Al Haber (Chepesiuk 92).
Billy Ayers offered the finest explanation of the existence of the Weather Underground. “We had a grand idea that we thought was important, and we were willing to spend a very important part of our lives reaching for it. We didn’t reach our goal, but I think it has made me a better person. The final chapter has yet to be written” (Chepesiuk 92).
******
Remembering a Sixties Terrorist
By Donna Ron
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 04, 2006
I read occasionally of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both now not only accepted, despite their bombing campaign against America in the 1960s and 70s, but successful , establishment educators whose opinions on social issues are taken seriously. Every time I see Ayers’ name I shudder with fear and rage and realize that I will never be able to erase the mark he left on my life one evening 40 years ago.
we heard a huge explosion. Soon after we discovered that it was a bomb that went off in the brown stone on 10th street which killed three buddies of Bill Ayers, who was now one of the leaders of the WeatherUnderground, a terrorist cult. One of the victims was Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time. I had known her: a kind soul who had worked at the Fresh Air Camp for troubled kids before she got mixed up with ever so persuasive Bill and the other Weatherman terrorists. When I found out she had been blown up, I thought how like him to send his girlfriend to make the bomb rather than do it himself.
Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, members of the Weathermen high command — once known as the Weatherbureau — who led the group through its most violent period in the 1970’s, have served no significant jail time. Both of them teach at name-brand universities and are headed for cozy retirements like those of the bourgeois parents they so despised during their Weathermen days. Ayers has further cushioned his future by writing a maddeningly evasive memoir, ‘’Fugitive Days’’ — one of those books that tell by not telling.
The jacket copy is the kind of agitprop that could have been written by the young Ayers himself. In it we learn that ‘’Bill Ayers was born into privilege,’’ and we are given to understand throughout ‘’Fugitive Days’’ that privilege is a crime, if not a badge of shame. How did young Billy Ayers grow into a bomber? To hear him tell it, he saw too many war movies and played with fireworks supplied by his grandfather, who taught him the ‘’proper awe and reverence’’ for an explosion that rattled the farmhouse windows.
Ayers joins S.D.S. in the 1960’s and sets up house in a Cleveland ghetto. There young radicals sing Negro spirituals and eat chitterlings with the natives, whose intelligence and industry they find surprising. Ayers has the obligatory 60’s erotic encounter with a black woman.
Ayers reminds us often that he can’t tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. But his partial retelling reaches fraudulence when he writes, ‘’Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,’’ then backs and fills, saying that he bombed it, not literally but metaphorically, as part of the Weathermen group in charge of the operation. He says that he needed to ‘’claim’’ the explosion in order to write about it, and he adds later that he is not ashamed of any of the bombings and would not rule out planting another bomb someday; ‘’I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.’’
Where is David Horowitz on this? After what he said about Obama’s speech on Wright, we got this:
“Frontpagemag.com’
‘Posted at 12:51 PM on 3/18/2008 by David Horowitz
Obama calls black community racist. But the more likely racists are those who are defending him.
In his speech this morning, Barack Obama said that he could not disown his white-hating, Jew-hating, America-hating Pastor Jeremiah Wright because that would be the same as disowning the black community. Imagine a white politician saying he couldn’t disown David Duke because that would be disowning the white community, and you will understand how utterly Obama has unmasked himself and why he now will never be a unifying candidate that all Americans can trust. This is the end of the Obama phenomenon. It is a painfully transparent case of the racist chickens of the multicultural left coming home to roost.
Or maybe not so transparent. There are many who already are explaining Obama’s failure to repudiate his racist pastor as a matter of context. American slavery, segregation and discrimination it is argued make black racism understandable. Nonsense. These excuses are really a form of racism themselves, holding that black people cannot live up to the standards that the rest of us hold ourselves to.
There is no context that would excuse black racism. Being a slave did not make Frederick Douglass a racist; living under segregationist rule did not make Martin Luther King a racist. The Jews have been the most persecuted people on earth for 2000 years yet Jews are in the forefront of every civil rights and human rights movement of our time and one would be hard put to identify a Jewish leader who is a hater of Christians or any other group that has persecuted them. We are not as a nation going to be able to put the legacy of race behind us if we perpetuate the double standard that is at the root of racism. Either we are all equal before the moral law or we are not. Either we repudiate the racists in our midst or we do not. Jeremiah Wright is a prophet of bigotry and hate. Barack Obama is a presidential candidate who will not repudiate bigotry if it comes in a black skin. This is unacceptable. If it is not, we are in deeper trouble as a nation than we suspected. Hate breeds hate. That is a law that no context can change.”
PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE No Obamanation Part 1: Barack who?
(Part 1 of 3 on Barack Hussein Obama)
LOL. Why am I not surprised.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.