Fire in the Night: The Weathermen tried to kill my family

City Journal ^ | 4/30/2008 | John M. Murtagh

[mojito]

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.

[okie01]

and then after the civil rights act all those democrats you mention became republicans

You've evidently bought into the fiction -- peddled by Liberals -- that Southern Republicans are simply converted racists.

Don't know if you ever lived in the South but, for the most part, those Democrat KKKers remained Democrats (see Wallace, George) and accommodated themselves to the new reality of politics in the South. Or they dropped out of the political picture altogether.

Or they died. Today, you'll find fewer racist whites among the general population in the South than in the North.

It wasn't the civil rights act that made the Republican party in the South. Instead, as numerous studies have determined, it was a.) largely in-migration of conservatives from the north coupled with b.) conversion of ex-Democrats once their party made a hard left turn in 1972.

George McGovern had more to do with the GOP's growth than the KKK.

[rottndog]

There's a great campaign commercial right there.

My first thought exactly.

[Osage Orange]

I hear crickets..........

[mjaneangels@aolcom]

“Ayers needs to be stuck to Obama every minute of every day until November.”

Actually, Ayers needs to be in jail for the rest of his life, but I will settle for him being stuck to Obama every minute of every day.