Posted on 11/09/2008 12:14:55 PM PST by Son House
Barack Obama’s critics appropriately have spotlighted the Democratic nominee’s ties to William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the remorseless co-founders and leaders of the terrorist Weather Underground. However, Obama’s detractors largely overlook Ayers’ campaign contribution to Obama.
On April 2, 2001, Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s Illinois State Senate re-election campaign. Though not a jackpot, this represents Ayers’ only recorded political contribution. Here is how the Illinois State Board of Elections discloses this contribution on its website (which you can find by searching here):
Multiple searches of this state-level database show that Ayers donated to no other candidate — neither incumbent nor challenger. Similar searches of the websites of the Federal Elections Commission, The Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org), and NewsMeat.com indicate that Ayers has made no disclosed contribution to any federal campaign.
Ayers may have made small donations below Springfield’s $150 and Washington, D.C.’s $200 reporting thresholds. Be that as it may, Ayers’ $200 gift to Obama is his only recorded donation.
Why is this important?
First, recall Ayers’ actions. As a leader of the Weathermen, Ayers inspired, instructed, and directed a domestic-terrorist network that bombed no fewer than 18 locations. Among them: the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, National Guard headquarters, the Presidio Army Base, plus New York’s Queens County Courthouse, the 103rd Precinct, and the headquarters of ITT and the NYPD. A bomb prematurely detonated on Greenwich Village’s West 11th Street on March 7, 1970, killing three Weathermen. The nail-filled device was supposed to blast an Officers’ Club dance at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army Base. It would have maimed and likely killed scores of GIs and their dates and spouses.
Had it exploded on schedule, Ayers said it would have torn “through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”
Ayers and Dohrn co-wrote a book in 1974 called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. As Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes reported Thursday night, Ayers and Dohrn dedicated their book “to all political prisoners in the US,” among them Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
The Weather Underground’s October 20, 1981, robbery of $1.6 million from a Brink’s armored car triggered a shootout in Nyack, New York, that killed guard Peter Paige and Nyack policemen Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady.
Ayers laments nothing. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he said in 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Second, despite all this, Obama associated with Ayers, on the boards of Chicago’s Woods Fund and the $160 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge, to which Ayers helped appoint Obama chairman of the board. Obama praised Ayers’ book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, in the December 21, 1997 Chicago Tribune. He described it as: “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” Ayers and Dohrn — his radical, violent, and equally unrepentant wife — welcomed Obama to their Chicago home for a 1995 reception that launched his first Illinois State Senate bid.
Obama has struggled to explain why he stood in the living room of an unapologetic bomb thrower.
“This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama stated dismissively on April 16. Campaign strategist David Axelrod told CNN on October 6 that Obama “certainly didn’t know the history” of Ayers. On October 9, Obama pivoted afresh and told radio host Michael Smerconish: “Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that [Ayers] had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time, and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated.”
The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier greeted this argument rather acidly when he wrote on October 26, “the fact that Obama was eight years old at the time of the Weather Underground is no more pertinent to his moral and historical awareness than the fact that he was six years old at the time of the King assassination.”
Obama obviously did not know Ayers at age eight. But why was Obama feted in Ayers and Dohrn’s home at age 34? Why did Obama administer Ayers’ grant money at age 36? Why did Obama co-supervise the Woods Fund with Ayers at age 41?
Obama expects Americans to believe that throughout all of this adult contact with Ayers — and while also knowing their mutual acquaintances on these boards and within Chicago’s leftist circles — Obama never learned about Ayers’ crimes, or somehow believed that Ayers apologized, which he has not. Ayers’ own words shatter Obama’s evolving alibi.
“I’m very open about what I think and nobody here is surprised about what I think,” Ayers said in an April 12, 2002 interview with radio station KUCI.
Third, and most important, the ambitious Obama obviously benefited by associating with the prominent, albeit extremist, Ayers. But why was Ayers so supportive, hospitable, and generous toward Obama?
Ayers could have underwritten such stalwart congressional left-wingers as Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders or Democrats like Michigan’s John Conyers, Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich, Illinois’ former Black Panther Bobby Rush, New York’s Jose Serrano, and California’s Maxine Waters or Barbara Boxer. As the record shows, they have not enjoyed a dime of Ayers’ money — nor has anyone else, except Obama, who cashed Ayers’ $200 check.
“I am as much an anarchist as I am a Marxist,” Ayers told KUCI in April 2002. He also has said: “I’m a radical, leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”
Whatever Obama saw (or missed) in Ayers, voters should wonder what Ayers saw in the man who became America’s furthest-left senator, Barack Obama.
National Review should lift itself above the level of The New York Times and stop using misleading quotes. Sad when we have to be watchdogs of conservative publications and defend scum like Ayers if we want to be honest.
IMO, Ayers dropped an assortment of $100 bills into the cash jar donations that appear at every rally.
Future thesis or dissertation topics:
The influence of Saul Alinsky's and Bill Ayers' thinking on Obama's domestic policy.
The influence of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara on Obama's foreign policy.
I suspect one day, the media will tell us how stupid we are for letting them cover-up for the candidate, the day they finally can’t cover-up bad judgment
Every time I see those pictures of Ayers stomping on Old Glory, I get sick and I’m not even American.
Obama’s success is an indication of a deep malaise. A victory of Hillary Clinton would have been sad, the victory of Obama is tragic. It’s as if a thick slice of prosciutto (ham) had descended from the heavens and covered millions and millions of normally seeing eyes.
The proverbial American horse sense (in shunning the real kooks) is no more, or rather is no longer victorious. No amount of bush-hating, McCain Reviling (especially now that he lost)can explain it.
Certain cultural forces - long at work and unAmerican to the core - have been victorious.
This picture which really disturbs me is the emblem of this election. It - along with the hateful rants of Wright - are what people just blithely ignored, allowing someone who truly despises America to reach the presidency.
Feel free to cite the entire quote and make your argument.
and even had you, the picture of Ayers standing on a flag says it all
My point exactly.
Why distort and present misleading info, when there are quite real examples of his actual disgusting beliefs?
You could be right about the exact quote, I apologize for doubting your word, but would require accurate account, as Gretta also had trouble getting a full copy from Ayer’s friend;
Why Support a Domestic Terrorist? Ayers Friend Goes ‘On the Record’
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443713,00.html
VAN SUSTEREN: You say that he is a responsible citizen of the year. A lot of people cringe to hear you say that, because as recently as 2001, he said, “I do not regret setting bombs. I feel we did not do enough.”
So it is hard for me to think—if he had said at that time, “I was so young and it was so wrong and I am so sorry.” But he is not saying that. So it is hard for me to think of him as citizen of the year.
SINGER: Greta, two different ideas are collapsed in that quote, and they are collapsed incorrectly. He did say he didn’t regret setting the bombs. I disagreed with him and the Weather Underground 40 years ago. I was an antiwar activist. I did not participate. I thought they were wrong. I disagree with that now.
But when he says we did not do enough, many activists who opposed the war felt we did not do enough to stop the war. It went on for over 10 years. And American foreign policy today has engaged us in two wars that have been responsible for the death of over 4,000 American soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqis. So a lot of us feel that we haven’t done enough.
VAN SUSTEREN: Are you saying you agree with this. “I feel we did not do enough.” You agree with that?
SINGER: We did not do enough to change American foreign policy.
VAN SUSTEREN: Where do you get to the rest of that quote, because I don’t have that in the quote? Is that what you are reading into it, because that’s not what I have? Maybe I have an incomplete one.
SINGER: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: And I have gone after CNN for getting it wrong. So tell me, do you have more of a quote? Did I copy that wrong?
SINGER: The quote was from “The New York Times.” Bill Ayers had published a book. He was promoting the book.
Again, he said some things I don’t agree with, but the thrust of his idea was that activists were unsuccessful in ending the war and changing American foreign policy.
VAN SUSTEREN: You agree that is not what it said.
SINGER: That is not what it says in “The Times,” but that’s not what he said as far as I can tell.
bump
ping
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