Finally: Admitting the Truth About Bill Ayers

Now that Obama is safely elected, the media can start telling the truth about Bill Ayers. Indeed, in this case the truth comes from the hard-left Nation.

Because, you see, while The Nation is hard left, Ayers had some severe critics on the left.

It couldn’t have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama’s best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday’s New York Times op-ed page, he announced that “it’s finally time to tell my true story.” Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , “The Real Bill Ayers” is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left.

“I never killed or injured anyone,” Ayers writes. “In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village.” Right. Those people belonged to Weatherman, as did Ayers himself and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife. Weatherman, Weather Underground, completely different! And never mind either that that “accidental explosion” was caused by the making of a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix.

Ayers writes that Weather Underground bombings were “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam War.” That no one was killed or injured was a monumental stroke of luck-- an unrelated bombing at the University of Wisconsin unintentionally killed a researcher and seriously injured four people. But if the point was to symbolize outrage, why not just spraypaint graffiti on government buildings or pour blood on military documents?

“Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war,” Ayers writes. “So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.” I’m not so sure that terrorism necessarily involves intentional attacks on people, but okay, let’s say Ayers wasn’t a terrorist. How about thuggish? Vainglorious? Egomaniacal? Staggeringly irresponsible? And illogical, don’t forget illogical: as Hilzoy points out, the idea that because “peaceful protest” hadn’t ended the war, bombs would is missing a couple of links. It’s like a doctor saying, Well, chemo didn’t cure your brain tumor, so I’ll have to amputate your leg.

I realize this is ancient history. As a friend who doesn’t see why I am raking this all up argues, it’s not as if today’s left is bristling with macho streetfighters. It’s hard to imagine anyone now applauding the Manson murders, as Dohrn notoriously did in l969, or dedicating a manifesto to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan. But just because it’s ancient history doesn’t mean you get to rewrite it to make yourself look good, just another idealistic young person upset about the war and racism.

None of this is relevant to the issue of how close to Ayers Barack Obama was (we think the connection with Jeremiah Wright is much more damning).

But let’s have intellectual clarity. Ayers was scum, and remains scum. Nobody should be supporting him (as Marquette Professor of Biomedical Engineering Jack Winters does).

The fact that he is a rather mainstream figure in schools of education says a lot (none of it flattering) about schools of education.

Obama’s Buddy Ayers: The Picture Tells It All

Via Badger Blogger, Barack Obama’s friend Bill Ayers in a pose that shows just what he thinks of America.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in Education, which tells you a lot about education schools these days.

His connections with Obama aren’t trivial.

But as Patrick at Badger Blogger put it, “Don’t Question Their Patriotism.”

[Update]

Best comment on this, from Fraley’s Daily Takes: “Now we know why Obama doesn’t wear a flag on his lapel. He’s afraid Bill Ayers will stand on his chest.”

Just How Serious Are Obama’s Ties to Weather Underground Terrorist?

From Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe:

Should voters care that Barack Obama is friendly with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, two onetime leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that committed dozens of bombings and other violent crimes between 1969 and 1975? That question came up during the recent Democratic debate in Philadelphia, and scorn by the bucketful was heaped on the ABC moderators who asked it.

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, for example, was appalled that Obama should be confronted with “such tired tripe” as the fact that he “once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist.” Michael Grunwald of Time derided the “extremely stupid politics” responsible for questions like the one about the “obscure sixties radical” with whom Obama “was allegedly ‘friendly.’” Other commentators were even more outraged.

The chorus of protests echoed Obama’s own defense. When George Stephanopoulos challenged him to explain his relationship with the unrepentant former terrorists -- “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers told The New York Times. “I feel we didn’t do enough” -- the senator dismissed the issue as irrelevant.

“This is a guy,” Obama said, “who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that [my] knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” His links to the ex-Weathermen he brushed aside as “flimsy,” saying he was sure “the American people are smarter than” to think he shares the terrorists’ radical views.

Obama didn’t leave it there. His campaign issued a 1,300-word “fact check” pooh-poohing his connection to Ayers and Dohrn as “phony,” “tenuous,” “a stretch” -- but simultaneously defending them as “respectable fixtures of the mainstream in Chicago.”

Yet Obama’s ties to Ayers and Dohrn aren’t nearly as trifling as he suggests, and their views -- today, not 40 years ago -- are about as “respectable” and “mainstream” as those of, say, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s
incendiary minister.

The key facts, reported by Ben Smith in Politico.com, are these: Barack Obama’s political career was launched in Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, when a group of “influential liberals” gathered in 1995 to meet the young organizer who was Illinois lawmaker Alice Palmer’s chosen successor. In the years that followed, Obama and Ayers would serve together as (paid) board members of the Woods Fund, a leftist Chicago foundation, and appear jointly on academic panels, at least one of which was organized by Michelle Obama. Ayers would even donate money to one of Obama’s political campaigns.

Arguably, none of this would matter if Ayers and Dohrn had long ago repudiated their violent extremism. But they have always refused to apologize for their monstrous behavior. “We weren’t extreme enough in fighting against the war,” Ayers avowed to the Chicago Tribune in 2001. In a memoir published that year, he exulted: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.” America, he said after Sept. 11, “is not a just and fair and decent place. . . . It makes me want to puke.”

In Chicago the other day, radio producer Guy Benson discovered video recordings of Ayers and Dohrn speaking at a reunion of antiwar radicals in November 2007. To live in the United States, Dohrn told the group, is to be “inside the heart of the monster” that is such a “purveyor of violence in the world.” Ayers denounced America as an imperial warmonger steeped in “jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy . . . attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on.” (Audio clips have been posted at the indispensable PowerLine blog.)

If a Republican candidate had connections this close with a Ku Klux Klan leader, it would fatally taint his candidacy. It’s hard to see why a different standard applies to Obama.