| In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement. ....Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation. But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides. In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is. |
No its not, its a shell game of the worst kind. Now I understand why he is so eager to meet with America's enemies because he doesn't have a no voice not to associate with people like this and even refuse to condemn/reject them.
| Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life. They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance. Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University. But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members. Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed. “I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001. And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits. .....“Ayers was a terrorist. Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist. Ayers has never offered one word of apology — he glories in it, thinks it’s terrific. And that to me is not what I would call acceptable or mainstream behavior,” said Dan Polsby, a former law professor at Northwestern who is now dean of George Mason University Law School. “If Obama takes a different view on that — well, OK, that’s data about Obama.” |
Exactly and what is Obama's answer to this sort of association?
| Obama’s campaign dismisses the notion that his relationship with Ayers should be seen through the lens of the latter’s violent past, or his present lack of regret for the bombings. “Sen. Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence,” said Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton. “But he was an 8-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous.” He described Ayers as “a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a former aide to Mayor Richard J. Daley,” referring to printed reports that he had “advised” Daley on school reform. As Bloomberg News reported recently, Obama and Ayers have crossed paths repeatedly in the last decade. In 1997, Obama cited Ayers’ critique of the juvenile justice system in a Chicago Tribune article on what prominent Chicagoans were reading. He and Ayers served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago for three years starting in 1999. In 2001, Ayers also gave $200 to Obama’s state Senate reelection campaign. Many details of the 1995 meeting are shrouded by time and by Obama’s and Ayers’ refusals to discuss it. |
If he can't get away from this sort of domestic garbage, how the hell is he going to deal with more dangerous international variety?
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