The Obama people say this Ayers connection (they crossed paths; no big deal) was fully aired during the primaries. Let's see if it was. It is a very serious matter if a nominee for president with a very real chance of winning has not just connections but sympathies with a terrorist who is fundamentally opposed to the American regime. The fact that Obama's pastor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, has the same attitude toward this country politically, makes it all the more urgent that we investigate whether this charming and ambitious and relatively untested fellow is putting one over on us.
Sol Stern at City Journal gives us "The Bomber as School Reformer" on the Obama-Ayers connection.
Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted. Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday’s front-page story in the New York Times.
The article explored the putative relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama during the time they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a fiveyear philanthropic venture that, starting in 1995, distributed over $160 million in school-improvement grants to the Windy City’s public schools. Ayers wrote the grant proposal that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm ofthe project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. ...
Obama is a man whose father left him when he was very young, and he has had several fathers of sorts since them. Jeremiah Wright was one of them, and shaped the young community oragnizer's outlook. William Ayers seems to have taken a fatherly interest in Barack Obama as one who was well suited in outlook and ability to carry on his radical work where he was personally unable to go.
But Bill "the Bomber" Ayers had no idea that this angry young community organizer would take that radical agenda into the White House. Will he find what Lenin called "useful idiots" in a majority of the American electorate?
Addition: Let me add this precious quote from Stern. (Warning to our youth: you have to know basic Cold War history.)
"Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) "
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