Bill Ayers
Posted at 5:04pm on May 30, 2008 Michael Kinsley Does Not Get It: The Real Victims of Obama's Radical Friends
Let's Try It This Way: Terrorists Are Bad. Decent People Should Not Befriend Them.
By Dan McLaughlin
Michael Kinsley thinks that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are not really such a big deal except to the extent they inadvertently helped Republicans:
Ayers and Dohrn never posed any real threat to U.S. national security. Their asinine chatter about killing people and their anti-American sloganeering were as ineffective as their bombs. But they did real harm. Their victims were liberals: the millions of people who were part of the mainstream antiwar movement and who later voted against Ronald Reagan...perhaps you can imagine how infuriating it was to the organizers of the big marches on Washington--struggling to keep them peaceful--that there were people of the left effectively in cahoots with the Nixon Administration, determined to undermine all those efforts.
Um, no. Kinsley admits right up front in the article the violent radicalism of the Weather Underground and its (and, specifically, Dohrn's) implication in, among other atrocities, the 1981 Brink's armored car robbery at the Nanuet Mall in my hometown, a robbery that killed Nyack Police Officer Waverly Brown, Nyack Police Sergeant Ed O'Grady and Brink's security guard Pete Paige, who collectively left behind three widows and six fatherless children, the youngest six months of age. I can promise you that I would not associate willingly with the likes of Ayers and Dohrn if they were on fire and I was carrying a bucket of water. Nor would most of the people who remember the Brink's case. Kinsley and Obama, perhaps, were still too angry about Nixon and Reagan to care.
The problem with folks like Ayers and Dohrn was not that they made the political lives of liberals difficult. Their real victims were the people killed by their organization. I vividly remember the Brink's robbery; it was the biggest news story ever in Rockland County. When I worked at the Rockland DA's office for a summer they took us to see the evidence, including the super-thick windshield glass from the armored Brink's truck that had a huge hole blown in it by their shotguns and M-16s.
So, maybe Ayers and Dohrn were not actually going to bring the United States to its knees. They did quite enough harm, thank you. Tim McVeigh never posed any real threat to U.S. national security, either. Nor did Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or the Klu Klux Klan. Would Kinsley be unconcerned about a presidential candidate who counted those associations among his friends? Maybe next he'll just explain it away as a necessary part of politics, like pandering to Marxists.
Kinsley instead suggests that at worst Obama is sorely lacking in....judgment. Read On...
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Bill Ayers | Michael Kinsley | murder | Obamafiles — Comments (38)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 3:32pm on May 23, 2008 Earth to Dana Milbank
By Erick
Did you mean to do this? Today you write:
Here are some things we can look forward to learning about Barack Obama:· That he was mentored in high school by a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party.
· That he launched his Illinois state Senate campaign in the home of a terrorist and a killer.
· That while serving as a state senator, he was a member of a socialist front group.
· That his affiliations are so dodgy that he would have trouble getting a government security clearance.
· That there is reason to doubt his "loyalty to the United States."
These and many other implausible accusations were offered by a group of conservatives yesterday -- including a living relic from the House Committee on Un-American Activities -- in a Capitol Hill basement. The charges ranged from the absurd to the merely questionable, but anybody who watched the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 make John Kerry look like a war criminal knows that's not the point.
Dana, my friend, the first two are true.
His communist mentor was Frank Marshall Davis.
And Obama got his successful start in politics in the living room of Bill Ayers.
Just because you might not like the group, Dana, does not mean everything they say is invalid.
And frankly, if everything else on that list is false, those first two should be enough to give non-elitists who live outside the Beltway pause.
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Bill Ayers | Dana Milbank | Frank Marshall Davis — Comments (14)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 6:25pm on Apr. 30, 2008 Bomb Throwers and Their Friends
By absentee
On the list of people I'd compare Barack Obama to, you won't find Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts. You might find him on Barack's list of people he'd like to be compared to, but that's not my list. The fact that Obama gave constitutional law classes in his (non-professorial) capacity as "Senior Lecturer" at the University of Chicago doesn't rise to the level of expertise and professionalism necessary for the comparison.
There is, however, some value in comparing how the left and the media dealt with Roberts during his confirmation hearings, and how they deal with Senator Obama now.
When George Stephanopoulos challenged Barack Obama about Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the wounded outcry from the left was stupefying. ABC had fired the first salvo in the destruction of Western Democracy, and the press as we know it was officially dead. A viral video obituary of Stephanopoulos made the rounds. New York magazine asked "Do Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos Hate America?"
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Bill Ayers | Character — Comments (39)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 11:07am on Apr. 30, 2008 John M Murtagh: Hi, I'm one of the people that the Weather Underground tried to kill.
How dare one of the animate backdrops to Bill Ayers' fantasy narrative speak.
By Moe Lane
Perhaps if you had done more, William Ayers, you might have kept this person from writing this. Do you regret that?
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.
(Via Hot Air)
Nine years old at the time, Bill. But hey, you guys really showed that military-industrial complex what was what, right? Not to mention all those South Vietnamese that unfortunately had to be sacrificed so that you and your comrades could feel good about yourselves.
Read on.
Posted in Bill Ayers | Liberals | Obamafiles | Weather Underground — Comments (19)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 2:22pm on Apr. 26, 2008 Obama, Ayers, and Wright
How many friends will it take?
By Soren Dayton
Today, Jim Geraghty over at NRO caught this line from another Jeremiah Wright sermon, "We cannot see that what we are doing is the same as al-Qaeda, under a different color flag." Remember, that this is the guy who has been Obama's friend for over 20 years, married him, baptized his children, and provided spiritual guidance to Obama.
I remember a statement that I noticed earlier from Bill Ayers, who I will now refer to as Barack's bombing blogging buddy, "I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently." Ayers, of course, gave money to Obama and hosted his first campaign event in 1996.
The Politico's Ben Smith says:
The politics of this depend on whether you think there's room for nuance in a conversation like this -- for seeing Wright as a man of the left, and a sometimes hyperbolic preacher, but not an extremist; or whether any mention of him at all just fuels the impression that Obama comes from too far out a place.
I think it may also depend on how many more of these there are. Like alleged PLO associate Rashid Khalidi who hosted a fundraiser in 2000. Even Talk Lefters are worried about that.
Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Bill Ayers | Jeremiah Wright | Rashid Khalidi — Comments (12)/ Email this page » / Read More »
