Grathwohl tipped off police to this latter plot, and they cleared the area. When they finally found the Detroit bomb, it was unexploded. It contained 13 sticks of dynamite with an M-80 firecracker to detonate them, along with a burnt-out cigarette.
“The only thing Bill didn’t take into consideration in making his bomb,” Grathwohl testified, “was the fact that these wicks, those fuses on those firecrackers are waterproof with heavy paraffin, and a cigarette burning by itself does not always have enough heat to melt that paraffin and light the powder. And I didn’t volunteer any information to the contrary.” Grathwohl did not know who had actually planted the bomb.
The wide-ranging testimony — first brought to my attention by Cliff Kincaid of
Accuracy in Media, which I subsequently found on file in the Library of Congress — appears to be very credible. In covering the controversy over Bill Ayers, the mainstream media has so far pretended it does not exist.
It would be irresponsible and wrong to assert that Sen. Obama is somehow “guilty by association” of anything Ayers or Dohrn have done, or that he has any sympathy toward terrorism. He does not. Obama was only a child when these events occurred.
But the senator’s choice to associate with domestic terrorists evinces an appalling lack of personal judgment that is part of a broad pattern in his adult life.
This argument is extremely easy to make, given Obama’s many, many choices to build relationships that are most charitably described as “problematic.” By what criteria does a man choose
his friends and
associates and end up with the likes of Tony Rezko, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and
Bill Ayers? Given that he had a choice of political allies, why would he align himself with and endorse in elections the worst perpetrators of Chicago’s crooked machine politics? Why would he choose as campaign and outreach advisors two men (Robert Malley and Mazen Asbahi) who have since had to resign over alleged ties to Hamas, as well as others who advocate reparations for slavery (Charles Ogletree) and praise Hugo Chavez as a champion of democracy in Venezuela (Cornel West)?
Given his lack of judgment, what sort of nominations can we expect a President Obama to make? What kind of diplomacy will he conduct when he meets “without precondition” with leaders of terror-sponsoring states? Diplomacy consists largely in making personal judgments about other people and their character and intentions — precisely the sort of judgments Obama has shown he is incapable of making.
These are legitimate questions, and the Obama research team’s shoddy arguments do not answer them.
— David Freddoso is a staff reporter for National Review Online. This essay is adapted from his newly released book, The Case Against Barack Obama.< Back 1 2 
