Posted on 04/30/2008 7:43:26 AM PDT by gridlock
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.
In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.
I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.
For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.
Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.
As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”
Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.
At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”
Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.
Bumper Sticker Idea: I (HEART) TERRORIST WORK ACCIDENTS
It’s called terrorism.
So Obama is not criticized with being friends with a guy who was a terrorist when he "was eight years old" as he says.
Ayers was a terrorist when Obama was 20.
Exactly.
He has already written his “Mein Kampf”, and “we” (the collective we, not you and I specifically) are too stupid to read it; and if “we” do get around to reading it, “we” pretend it says something different from what it clearly says.
Further evidence supporting my theory that the leftist clowns from the 60’s never left the university.
After all, universities are the only place these leftists could continue to propound their BS, and get paid for it.
They and the UnAmerican Democrat Party have much invested in his myth.
The main myth being that voting for a black guy will somehow absolve us of sin, make history, and make us “proud” of our country, finally!
The 2nd myth is blackmail. If we do not vote for him, we are racists.
(remember when Halle Barry and Denzel Washington were nominated for Oscars, they both made the rounds in interviews saying the same thing exactly....”the Academy is not ready to give an Oscar to a black woman, and especially if a black man is nominated too”. Of course they won.)
A German involved in the plot to kill Hitler may reasonably claim that he cannot be smeared with the crimes of Nazism, but a person who associated with the Nazis and gave them explicit or implicit support has no right to claim that he is innocent of Hitler’s crimes.
I don't at all.
Can you imagine Colin Powell or Judge Thomas saying something like that?
No way would it even enter their mind, unless they had something to hide.
Like anti-American radical anger, which Hussein is desperate to suppress, so much so that at times he seems almost devoid of emotion.
On a related note, one question I keep having is “What is up with the University of Chicago?” I mean, Ayers is a ‘Professor’ there? His wife as well? Michelle Obama sits on one of the hospital boards? Mr. Obama taught Constitutional Law there?
What is going on in that place?
In his biography, Obama gives "childhood mentor" credit to a gentleman named Frank Marshall Davis.
Davis was a minor poet. And a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. His poetry was given to propagandizing the struggles of the proletariat against the evil forces of capitalism.
In all liklihood, Obama does have a radicalized world view. It came from Davis -- and was reinforced by Ayers and Dohrn. One wonders how many more practicing Communists live in Obama's closet...
Let's run down the checklist...
Looks... Check!
Walks... Check!
Quacks... Check!
I think it's a duck!
Great account. Thanks for posting. Few people remember that the entire city and justice system were under attack - physical attack - by the radical white and black left in those days. I lived in a building next to that of the District Attorney at the time, Frank Hogan, and two police officers assigned to guard him at the building were shot (they survived, fortunately) in a Black Panther attempt to assassinate him. The killers were successful in killing two other cops in Harlem a few days later. One of the killers became a Muslim and is now known as Dhoruba Bin Wahad. How these things all converge!
A small snippet from: Obama’s Communist Mentor
......Trevor Loudon, the New Zealand-based blogger who has been analyzing the political forces behind Obama and specializes in studying the impact of Marxist and leftist political organizations, notes that Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's victory in the Iowa caucuses.
“Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle,” Chapman wrote. “Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary ‘mole,’ not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”
Too many people today think the Weathermen and the Panthers were cute little fuzzy radicals who never hurt a fly. They were murderous SOBs who deserved everything they got, and more.
Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. “Smash on, victory-eating Red Army,” he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries.
The “Red Army” poem goes beyond hoping for the communists to beat the Nazis in World War II and hails the Soviet revolution. It says:
“Show the marveling multitudes
Americans, British, all your allied brothers
How strong you are
How great you are
How your young tree of new unity
Planted twenty-five years ago
Bears today the golden fruit of victory!”
One Davis poem, “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” dismisses Christ as “another New White Hope” and declares:
“Remember this, you wise guys
Your tales about Jesus of Nazareth are no-go with me
I’ve got a dozen Christs in Dixie all bloody and black…”
The revelations about Davis’ poetry will add to the controversy over what kind of role Davis played in shaping Obama’s political views.
Bookmarking for later reference. Thank you.
Essentially, the Obama phenomenon has been created out of whole cloth by his "handler", David Axelrod. It's worth reviewing other candidates that Axelrod has "handled". Like John Edwards, for example. From Wikipedia...
In 2004, [Axelrod] worked for the presidential bid of John Edwards. During the campaign, he lost responsibility for making ads, but continued as the campaign's spokesman. Commenting on Edwards' failed 2004 presidential campaign, Axelrod has commented "I have a whole lot of respect for John, but at some point the candidate has to close the deal and — I can’t tell you why — that never happened with John."
It seems evident that Axelrod -- as a "molder" and "shaper" -- has a taste for candidates who are superficial phonies. They are easier to "mold" and "shape", after all.
I've been wondering if there is a connection between Axelrod and the Ayers/Dohrn radical circle. Axelrod attended the University of Chicago and is based in Chicago.
It would not surprise me at all if the Obama candidacy turned out to be merely an extension of the political conflict started by the hard left in the seventies -- just by other means.
Bookmarking
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