More Ayers; A necessary reminder

Bill Ayers is a man who should still be in jail for the terrorism he and his cronies gleefully engaged in in the seventies. But he walks free, and his is quite chummy with Barack Obama. Today at NRO's Corner, Andy McCarthy gives a much needed reminder of who Bill Ayers is, and what he stood for:

In that Fox interview that Rich linked to, Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people — the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, "by design"; they only wanted to cause property damage:

Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal.

Right.

First of all, "that moment in the townhouse" he's talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."

This man was not out to just break some windows, and engage in the civil disobedience of the antiwar movement. They wanted to send a clear message to the establishment that they were under siege and the Weather Underground was behind it. They encouraged kids to commit violence in the name of "change" and "hope" (ring a bell, folks?), and to this day they haven't changed their tune. More from Mr. McCarthy:

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972," he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

And he wasn't singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama's motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman “War Council” meeting in 1969, Ayers' fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, 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!” And as Jonah recalled yesterday, "In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a three-fingered 'fork' gesture its official salute." They weren't talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself "the Family" colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.

It should be noted that Obama keeps trying to make the argument that all of this happened back when he was 8 years old. Captain Ed reminds us that their reign of violence continued into the eighties. That's the problem with Obama's spin on this legitimate campaign issue. We're not attacking him because we don't like who he associates with (though that is part of it), but rather we're going after him on this because the man he calls a friend is a remorseless terrorist. That's the point of this.

He worked with this man on the Annenberg Committee. He worked with him on the Woods Foundation. He launched his political career from Ayers' home. This isn't just a passing association, like his spin regarding Tony Rezko. This was a well-known friendship. If I associated with a man who was a known and unrepentant terrorist, the other friends I had would wish me good luck in life, and walk the other direction. It's disturbing that Democrats and Obama supporters are willing to excuse this relationship as if it were nothing of significance or consequence.

No wonder why Obama has no problem sitting down with thugs. He knows one personally.

Publius II