Replies

They’re All in This Together "Asked during the 2008 presidential campaign about his relationship with the left-wing radical Bill Ayers, Barack Obama replied that Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He implied that to even bring that questionable relationship out of the shadows was a mean-spirited, guilt-by-association political tactic. Ayers, Obama went on, had done something deplorable "forty years ago when I was six or seven years old."

Otherwise, Obama insisted, Ayers was a paragon of virtue: a respectable fixture in mainstream Chicago, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on a foundation board focused on education that included "Republicans, bankers, lawyers." Ayers had even worked for, and was a good friend of, Mayor Richard M. Daley. The Obama campaign at once launched a crusade to distance Obama from Ayers. It went so far as to actually defend the man who had implicated himself in terror bombings in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days.

In fact, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were radical Marxist revolutionaries in the Vietnam War era. They were founders of the Weather Underground, a violent terrorist arm of Students for a Democratic Society. Both were eventually indicted in federal court, and Dohrn by the State of Illinois. Rather than face a trial they jumped bail and disappeared into the underground in 1970. After they resurfaced 11 years later, both were admitted into the halls of academia. Ayers became a Distinguished Professor of Education and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Incredibly, Dohrn became a law professor at Northwestern......"