Obama and his supporters brusquely dismiss the drawing of sensible inferences from these gestures of admiration as “guilt by association.” In point of fact, though, the Obamas didn’t just
associate with Wright. They
subsidized him to the tune of over $20,000 — not exactly chump change from a couple without great means or any history of philanthropy to speak of. And until recent public attention to the pastor’s noxious rants threatened to derail his White House bid, Sen. Obama kept Wright officially
on board as part of his campaign’s “African American Religious Leadership Committee.”
BILL AYERS AND BERNADINE DOHRN With this as background, is it really all that startling that Sen. Obama enjoys a friendly relationship with Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of terrorists?
I want to be clear here: Not terrorist sympathizers.
Terrorists.
The mainstream media, in their zeal to elect a Democrat, are assiduously airbrushing Ayers: “an aging lefty with a foolish past,” as the
Chicago Sun-Times has so delicately put it. In fact, it is the press that is rife with foolish, aging lefties. Ayers, by contrast, is an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past — one who beat the system he so reviles when, after his years of fugitivity, terrorism charges were dropped due to government surveillance violations. He’s “guilty as sin,” by his own concession, but “free as a bird.”
Ayers didn’t just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it. As his memoir gleefully
recalled, “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
Whether Pentagon bombing day was more or less ideal than other days, when he, Dohrn and their Weathermen comrades bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and sundry banks, police stations and courthouses, Ayers does not say. But on each occasion, there was surely optimism that the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.
There were lots of bombs. There is no remorse. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the
New York Times in 2001, sorry only that he and the others “didn’t do enough.” Like what? We can’t be sure, though
National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg
recounts Ayers’s sentiments back in the day: “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 and Dohrn have done the actual dirty work of terror, while Jeremiah Wright draws the line at waving pom-poms. But the prism through which they assay the dirty work is precisely the same: America has it coming.
For them, that makes all the difference. It’s not terror, just chickens coming home to roost. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” Ayers
rationalizes with nauseating arrogance, “while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Right. As her companion
Discover the Networks profile illustrates, Dohrn now goes even further:
insisting their bombings weren’t terrorist acts at all: “We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody.”
Maybe she’s forgotten the “bastards getting what was coming to them” part. Or maybe she’s just lying. She was, we can be confident, something less than a model of compassion back then — like at the Weathermen “War Council” meeting in 1969, when she famously
gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
Charming. The “War Council,” it should be noted, concluded by first condemning the United States for — what else? — its pervasive racism, then formally declaring war against what the Weathermen called “AmeriKKKa.” Rev. Wright would have understood.
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