The Ghosts in Grant Park: Obama plans a party where his radical friends once ran wild

Tuesday night, Barack Obama holds what he hopes will be his victory celebration in his adopted hometown’s Grant Park. The Associated Press explains: “Grant Park is the place Chicagoans have long gathered to party, protest, and pray,” noting visits by Franklin Roosevelt, the Queen of England, and Pope John Paul II. If the park is a natural place for a party celebrating Chicago’s favorite son, it’s also an unwelcome reminder of two of the Windy City’s black sheep, who nearly derailed his presidential ambitions.

Should Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, by now the most infamous Chicago Friends of Obama, attend the Grant Park victory celebration, their lives will have come full circle. In October 1969, Grant Park served as a rallying point for several events during the radical leftist group Weatherman’s “Days of Rage”—four days of planned chaos in the Windy City. Born into wealth and privilege, Ayers and Dohrn marginalized themselves by voicing insane rhetoric exalting parricide and Charles Manson, committing acts of terrorism against the police, banks, and government, and remaining fugitives from the law throughout the 1970s. Now, 28 years after emerging from hiding, Ayers and Dohrn amazingly have a friend and political ally poised to win the presidency—one who hails from the same Chicago they once terrorized.

The Days of Rage scheme was 1969’s unimaginative sequel to 1968’s protests at the Democratic National Convention. It used the same set (the streets of Chicago), featured the same villain (Mayor Richard J. Daley), and recycled the same script (youth rising up against the Man). Like most sequels, it didn’t receive the favorable reviews that the original did. Bit players at the Democratic National Convention—where Ayers flung slingshot marbles at police—won leading roles in the Days of Rage. The stars of the 1968 installment, the Chicago Eight, largely balked at a repeat performance. Tom Hayden, who gave a pep talk at the opening night of the Days of Rage, was an exception. But even Hayden later cringed at what he had witnessed. “They looked exactly like the people we were accused of being: helmeted, with heavy jackets, clubs, NLF flags, circled around a fire of park benches exactly like a primitive, neophyte army.” Fred Hampton, a Chicago Black Panther leader later shot to death by police, famously ridiculed the rioting Weathermen as “anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic”—the most apt description of the Days of Rage anyone ever offered.

Bill Ayers, in his Fugitive Days memoir, recalls his cohorts loading up with “steel pipes and slingshots, chains, clubs, mace, and rolls of pennies to add weight to a punch.” But the opposition carried guns. After Dohrn had led Weatherwomen on a topless raid of a high school and Ayers and the Weathermen had bizarrely started fistfights in working-class neighborhoods to enhance the group’s street credibility, Weatherman leaders insisted that thousands of revolutionary youth would descend upon Chicago as a result of their agitprop. They didn’t. A mere 300 materialized the first night in Lincoln Park. “We weren’t only outnumbered and outgunned, we might just be out of our minds,” Ayers remembers thinking. “My stomach sank. Where were all the revolutionary youth?” Armed with clubs and protected by motorcycle helmets, Weathermen stormed into Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood trashing cars, smashing windows, and terrorizing residents. Ayers gleefully recalls attacking a police car with its occupants still inside: “We swarmed over and around that car, smashing windows, slashing tires, trashing lights and fenders—it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. I leapt from the trunk to the roof to the cheers of friends, jumped up and down several times until it caved in slightly, and then slid off easily and kept moving, glancing back to see a broken shell with two cops hunkered down in the front seat.”

“We are born in 1969 in America behind enemy lines,” Dohrn explained to a crowd of 70 Weatherwomen in Grant Park the following day. “We are here to teach the people the lesson of what it means to be a ‘good German.’” Telling the crowd that she was in Chicago to “bring the war home,” Dohrn led a charge of women into police lines. One of her followers bit a policeman’s hand; another spat in a cop’s face. The police confiscated metal pipes and chains from the crudely armed women. Dohrn, the unquestioned leader, was arrested in Grant Park for battery, mob action, and resisting arrest.

Dohrn’s arrest catalyzed her decision to go underground. Her last public hurrah came a few months after the Days of Rage, at Weatherman’s “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, where she offered an embarrassing hosanna to the Manson Family: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” Thereafter, Dohrn’s extremism would be delivered via audiotape rather than in person.

The nihilistic violence of the Days of Rage led to shootings of rioters, hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, several hundred arrests, and the crippling of Richard Elrod, an aide to Mayor Daley. “Elrod is now paralyzed—hopefully for life,” Weatherman’s New Left Notes gloated. “He won’t be so quick to play pig next time.” “We had injured hundreds of pigs,” bragged Susan Stern. “Greatest of all, one of Richard Daley’s chief counsels . . . was paralyzed from the waist down.” So proud of crippling the Daley aide was Weatherman that it published a sadistic parody of Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” called “Lay, Elrod, Lay”: “Lay Elrod lay / Lay in the street for a while / Stay Elrod stay / Stay in your bed for a while. . . . Play Elrod play / Play with your toes for a while.” Lamely unimaginative, the song nevertheless reveals Weatherman’s hateful contempt for workaday Americans.

The coda of Days of Rage played itself out in Grant Park, where Weatherman appropriately faced its mirror image. As a remnant of radicals attempted to gather, the American Nazi Party taunted them from across the park. What started with blazes, bangs, and crashes ended in a whimper. Weatherman went home and then went into hiding. A spree of Days of Rage indictments transformed Weatherman into Weather Underground.

During the Days of Rage, besieged Weathermen retreated to the friendly confines of Chicago-area campuses as respite from police clashes. Ayers, who in the mid-sixties had become involved with an experimental school in Ann Arbor where, as writer Thomas Powers observed, “no one ever learned to read,” had attained office in Students for a Democratic Society after boasting of not having read a book in a year. By the 1980s, he and Dohrn, finding the political climate no more welcoming than Mayor Daley’s police, again found sanctuary on campuses. Ayers became an education professor at the University of Illinois–Chicago, while Dohrn, even more strangely, became a law professor at Northwestern despite having led a group that bombed police stations, jails, and a judge’s home. “Kill all the rich people,” Ayers counseled young people in the sixties. “Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” But in the eighties and nineties, Ayers—whose father had chaired Illinois’ Commonwealth Edison and had provided his wayward son with an allowance, even during his radical days—used his rich father’s good name to help resurrect his own bad one.

The long, strange trip of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn that started in Chicago during the Days of Rage ends Tuesday night at the Grant Park coronation ceremony of their friend, Barack Obama. Ayers and Dohrn were present at the beginning of Obama’s political career, hosting a 1995 fundraiser for Obama’s state senate candidacy from their home. Obama and Ayers spoke at the same events (one organized by Michelle Obama), served on the same Woods Fund charitable board, and promoted one another’s work—with Obama even singling out an Ayers book for acclaim in the Chicago Tribune: “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system,” he appraised, “and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” Significantly, after Ayers secured a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation in 1995, Obama served on the board, including as chairman, of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and dispensed large sums of money to Ayers-affiliated projects.

As if to put an exclamation point on the couples’ transformation from pariahs into paragons, even Richard M. Daley—son of Richard J. Daley, devil figure for Weatherman four decades ago—embraced Ayers and funneled city education projects his way. “He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Daley said of Ayers to the New York Times. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.” Daley describes the former Weatherman merely as an “educator,” but it’s worth recalling that Ayers applies the “educator” label not just to his work as a professor, but also to his earlier attempts at explosive instruction: “Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.”

If the projected 1 million people in Grant Park Tuesday night optimistically look to a future of change they can believe in, two attendees may be thinking of their Grant Park past. Haunted during this entire campaign by the living ghosts of has-been bombers, Barack Obama can’t escape the specter of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, even at his victory party.

Barack Obama’s Career Path Toward an American Presidency
A narrative of facts many have not heard, documented with Web links
Barack Obama, by his own book, plus the testimony of relatives and friends, was raised in quite a family. While in high school, his mother developed an affinity with a Marxist teacher and become an agnostic or atheist. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a college Russian language class. Yes, a Russian language class, circa 1960.
With no father in his home in Hawaii, he was mentored throughout his teens by Frank Marshall Davis, a man famous in communist circles, with numerous FBI files. Davis also wrote an autobiography, “Sex Rebel” (explicit references) which demonstrates numerous of his perversions, including pedophilia. Nothing new there, “sexual revolution” was a part of the Russia’s Marxist revolution: sex is divorced from reproduction, marriage, and child rearing; abortion becomes sublime. Sexual involvement is “liberated” into mutual use.
According to a former intelligence officer who had read the FBI files, Davis laid out a generic communist plan “to take over America from within, by installing educators at all levels of our educational system, gaining control of the media, getting Liberal judges appointed, recruiting, training and backing people to be elected to public office.”
From Hawaii, Barack was on to New York and Columbia University (Bill Ayers was a neighbor there, too) then Chicago (where Ayers returned). Obama writes of attending socialist conferences and reading Marxist books around this time. He was trained in and taught the insurgent methods of “Rules for Radicals” drafted by cynical, “transformational Marxist,” Saul Alinsky. Thesis: lie, cheat, steal, etc., while making those with American principles live up to impossibly high standards of institutional altruism, so that we and our liberal government fail in ridicule. Preach “change” and gradually build an activist army of the proletariat, motivated by (short sighted) self interest, for a crescendoing revolt. All, to pave the way for the “egalitarian state.” And funny thing, Alinsky’s book tosses an acknowledgment to Lucifer, “the very first radical,” a refreshing lapse into candor.
In Chicago, Obama met his wife Michelle at the Sidley & Austin law firm, where terrorist Ayers’ terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn worked, too. And in Chicago, they joined Jeremiah Wright’s church, investing two decades and significant indoctrination of their daughters there. That is, until Wright turned his criticism from merely “God damn America,” toward the one, Obama. This congregation espouses Black Liberation Theology, an institutionalization of ethnocentric bitterness and a variant of Liberation Theology, which had been conceived in South America as an attempt to sell Marxism to Christians through the clergy, misapplying portions of the Bible. Concurrently, Obama has repeatedly exhorted, “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.” While that would have been less than Good News to Christ’s Apostles, Marx may have found it catchy.
Obama also shared an office for apparently three years with Ayers and fellow SDS member Michael Klonsky (a self-described Maoist communist) while taking Annenberg millions and devoting much of it to ACORN and other insurgent “community organizations.” The goal? “Raise political consciousness,” chiefly among black school kids. (Historically, an SDS and Weathermen objective has been to piggyback on any black revolt in America, for their Marxist ends.) What “political consciousness?” One attractive to Ayers, a self-proclaimed anarchistic Marxist. Ayers secured the purse, thus presumably played a responsible role in setting up young Mr. Obama as chairman. They apparently formed a small circle of Chicago’s education radicals.
In an overlapping circle, Obama became a member of the Marxist “New Party“ in the 1990’s while maintaining membership in the Democratic Party. Soviet apologist, Alice Palmer hand picked Obama to succeed her as Illinois State Senator. He also gained an odd circle of radical Muslim, anti-Israel friends, including Khalid al Mansour, Rasheid Khalidi, and Ali Abunimah. He has connected with the radical Muslim Brotherhood, and Louis Farrakhan credits Obama with a key role in organizing his 1995 “Million Man March.”
And what has Obama been doing as Senator besides running for President? Well, in 2006 he campaigned in Kenya for Raila Odinga, a communist Kenyan out of prison for a coup attempt, who allied himself with radical Islamists and their establishment of brutally oppressive Sharia law in that nation. Odinga lost and led the kind of protest that killed 1,000 to 1,500 Kenyans, mostly Christians, mostly by Muslims. Rape, too. Churches were burned. The thuggery worked and Obama’s man was named Prime Minister, a “change” for which Obama allegedly raised $1M.
Many Americans are hearing about Obama’s redistributionist tax and welfare/workfare plans, but do not know he wants to build (draft?) a massive, undefined “civilian national security force” as powerful and funded as our military. And, he has pledged to plan his presidential agenda in meetings with ACORN. He is also committed to the “Freedom of Choice Act,” which would nullify all laws against partial birth abortion and those for parental notification, and any other restriction of abortion. So much for “Life, Liberty, and Property.” This is one page’s worth of the many elements in an apparently Marxist career development, of the one poised to become, of all things, United States President.
http://investigatingobama.blogspot.com/2008/10/baracks-career-path-toward-american.html - by Arlen Williams

Today, October 31st, he urged a crowd to help him make a “fundamental change” in our country. I do NOT like the sound of that.

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