Jonah Goldberg [1], whose book [2]I have really got to sit down and read, remarks yesterday:
‘Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.”
This excerpt from William Ayers’ memoir appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — a few hours before Al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground — the group that declared “war” on the U.S. government in 1970 — told the Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is apparently a left-wing institution in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and Obama visited Ayers’ home as a rite of passage when launching his political career in the mid-1990s. The two also served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave money to Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife (and former Weather Underground compatriot) Bernardine Dohrn is the director.
[3]I don’t think Obama supports domestic terrorism, and I’m sure he can offer eloquent explanations for why he shouldn’t suffer any guilt by association. The Clinton campaign, however, did try to score a few political points, meekly linking to the Politico story on the campaign website’s blog. The campaign probably couldn’t be more aggressive without calling attention to how President Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican separatist terrorists, perceived to be a way to gain support for Hillary’s Senate bid from left-wing Puerto Ricans in New York.
What fascinates me, though, is how light the baggage is when one travels from violent radicalism to liberalism.
(The bolding is my own)
The WaPo’s Irony laden “Fact Checker [4]” goes to bat for Obama…
The question is not whether a connection can be established between Barack Obama and a former member of the Weathermen, but whether it has any significance for the 2008 presidential campaign.
(Snort!) Oh, I think it does.
Here’s the thing; The damage that is inflicted on Obama by this association is decidedly not that he is stupid enough to directly support terrorism, but that he is willing to suborn the radical leftist politics which lead to it. This in fact is the elephant in the room, where Democrats are concerned. Their linkages to radicals. Radicals who say things like:
“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” Ayers was widely quoted as saying at the time (though he told the Times he couldn’t remember if he said it).
Well, yes, drugs will do that for you. But look closely at the politics being espoused by both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, and in fact, the bulk of the Democratic Party today. Explain to me how the proposals they’ve been pushing.. tax the rich, et al, is really so much different. The only difference that I can see between this idiot Ayers, and the Democratic presidential candidates, is the latter have a tendency to use a weapon that is far more powerful than the explosives Ayers used: They use the more destructive weapon we call “Good Government”.
The goal in the end, is the same.
And as to the effect of this linkage…. if someone digs up a pic of the two together…. he won’t have Hillary Clinton to blame for it. Oh… I should note that Ayers is not the only link to radicalism. Go look up the name Bernardine Dohrn. Look also at Ben Smith’s column [5] of the other day. This isn’t going away anytime soon.
Larry Johnson [6] a few weeks ago, suggested that Ayers will be Obama’s Willie Horton, given the age of Terrorism. And I think he’s right. The American people are going to question, I think, if someone who associates with such an individual, and shares similar goals, if not the exact methods used, is what we really want in charge of our nation’s security.