WHO IS BILL AYERS? (For those of you whose memories started after the 1970s)1. Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois - Chicago.
2. Bill Ayers was a member of the radical Weather Underground which claimed responsibility for terrorist bombings in the U.S. between 1970 and 1974. One of the Pentagon.
3. They ran. They hid. They made the FBI's most wanted list.
4. The FBI infiltrated the organization and the ringleaders were captured and brought to trial. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were standing trial when...4. The case was dismissed in progress for "prosecutorial misconduct." Bill Ayers, his now-wife Bernadine Dohrn, and others escaped life imprisonment.
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Today, Bernadine Dohrn is an associate professor of law at Northwestern University. She and her husband Bill Ayers live in Chicago.Notable quotes:
Bernadine Dohrn, congratulating Charles Manson after the Tate/LaBianca murders...
"Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate's belly (sic). Wild!"
"Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!"
Here's a picture of professor Bill Ayers standing on the American flag.In an interview with the NY Times, published a few days after 9/11, this wonderful being said: "I don't regret setting bombs." And, "I feel we didn't do enough."
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE:
In the mid 1990s, a Chicago advocate for the poor, a "community organizer" by the name of Barrack Obama decided to launch a political career at the state level. That campaign was launched with a fund-raiser in the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Both Obama and Ayers were board members on a Chicago anti-poverty organization together for three years. Obama and Ayers lived within a few blocks of each other. They appeared together. Ayers donated to Obama's state senatorial campaign. ($200.)
Obama knew Bill Ayers, and it was not a passing relationship. Obama KNOWS Bill Ayers.
Obama says he shouldn't be held to account or associated with something that happened when he was 8 years old, that Bill Ayers has never been convicted of the bombings.
A police officer was killed in one of those bombings, in San Francisco. People were injured in campus bombings by the Weathermen.
The far left Liberal establishment cries foul: a person should not be "guilty by association" because it just isn't fair.
I beg to differ. Maybe your parents chose what people you could have as friends and who they wanted you to stay away from. There was a reason. I believe a man's character determines how he will act in a crisis, and what his core values are. I believe who he chooses to hang out with DOES reflect on his ability to be our President.
Obama didn't set off any bombs or kill anyone. Obama is not a terrorist. But he doesn't think he's doing anything morally wrong by hanging around with these people and hiring a bunch of tax cheats for his Cabinet. That bothers me.
"But he doesn't think he's doing anything morally wrong by hanging around with these people and hiring a bunch of tax cheats for his Cabinet."
ReplyDeleteYou can read his mind?
Wow.
Now I AM impressed.
You mean he would hang around with anarchists and tax cheats EVEN IF HE THOUGHT IT WAS MORALLY WRONG?
ReplyDeleteJesus. What you say is even worse.
I don't have to read his mind. He hangs around with anarchists and hires tax cheats in his cabinet.
It keeps getting worse...
ReplyDeleteI'd rather hang around with Bill Ayres than Rumsfeld and Cheney!
ReplyDeleteAnother slanted attack, from people who demand the needless right to carry guns, on the black president who wants to care for the poor among you.
Would that author not be better employed dropping bombs on Pakistani civilians perhaps?
Mr Ayers and his wife appear to support terrorism, murder, insurrection, and I'm surprised they weren't jailed.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as I understand it, the weather underground was a terrorist movement that used guns and bombs in an attempt to destabilise and overthrow the U.S government, which, they believed, was abusing its power and acting in an inhumane and illegal manner.
Now, correct me If I'm wrong, but didn't you just tell me, in the previous post, that the second amendment to the constitution was there so that armed citizens could overthrow their government if they believed it was abusing its power?
"Our constitution allows private citizens the right to own weaponry. When it was written, the lesson of Concord and Lexington was fresh. One never knows when one will have to throw off one's government again if it gets too oppressive. True, tanks and fighter aircraft are out of the price range of most private citizens, but the states each have their armies and air forces, and we can go guerilla if we have assault rifles at least. Only a government bent on tyranny seeks to disarm it's citizenry in order to not be threatened by them. I prefer my government to feel threatened."
One of the inherent problems in that second amendment is that it was written by a gang of murderous terrorists who used guns and bombs against the legally constituted government, in order to destabilise and overthrow it.
They fought an illegal guerilla war, and won, they ousted the ruling power, and re-wrote the rule-book. In doing so they enshrined the right of future citizens to emulate their behaviour and take up arms against future governments.
The weather underground did not win, so they did not get to rewrite the rules.
As for Ayers and Dohrn being Obama's friends, well, yes, that is of concern to me. I understand Mr Ayers bombed and destroyed a mens restroom in the Pentagon. I suggest extraordinary rendition, and an orange jumpsuit, followed by waterboarding in a foreign country whose morals are easily bypassed in return for dollars.
@Jeff King - I don't know if it is getting worse. It stays bad. :)
ReplyDelete@Soubriquet - The quote is correct; I do believe ONE of the main reasons Americans should keep weapons is in case their government attempts to systematically and tyrannically oppress them, like the British government did to them and, later, to India and other subject peoples. But I draw a distinction between genuine oppression of a huge percentage of the population and less than 30 kids who decided the U.S. Government should be overthrown because those kids didn't think the government was doing what they thought it should be doing. I think our government would have to be stepping on the rights of huge numbers of people, wholesale, daily, like the British did in the American Colonies, before the populace should actually take up arms. I don't think Bill Ayers and his ilk were either oppressed like that or had more than 29 friends; not entitled to start a revolution. And neither were the Black Panthers or other groups of the period entitled to start an armed revolution as a "grievance" against the government. If one can't convince a sufficient number of one’s fellow citizens to agree with one’s cause and philosophy, and make changes at the ballot box, then one should just shut the fuck up. Now, If they DO convince their fellow citizens they are right, and they DO vote in representatives who pass laws for change, and the executive branch of their government IGNORES those laws (or, worse, suspends the legislatures altogether, as the British did) then something else would need to be done to get that government's attention. But even then, armed rebellion would be far down the list of remedies. It was the number one thing on the spoiled college kids’ list.
I do have a question:
"As for Ayers and Dohrn being Obama's friends, well, yes, that is of concern to me."
Why? Why would that be a concern to you, given your stated position?
Health and fatigue-wise, I'm still not up to speed, and it's affecting my ability to argue, especially in a subject to which I don't really have an axe to grind.
ReplyDeleteI'll give up after this one... Starting with the last point, no, I suppose concern is too strong a word, actually, I don't really care. It's kind of unsurprising that a politician in high places has sleazy friends. As I think I've said before, you don't get into high office, certainly not in the United States, without being prepared to do questionable things, embracing untruths, suppressing truths. That's not an anti american statement, by the way, it's just the way things are. Over here too. Spin doctors, press briefings, lies, fake allegiances, hidden real allegiances. All politicians tend to be untrustworthy self-seekers.
But Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground.
The weather underground had a lot more sympathisers than 29.
Let's look at the world back then. We've just had the world turned upside-down by the second world war, one that generally was agreed to be a war that should be fought, it was generally believed to be a just war. But that war spawned nuclear weaponry, and unlocked the gate to a new era, one of the west versus the east, missile silos and dew lines, cheyenne mountain, always we were a button-push from annihilation. Our leaders told us this was necessary, because the reds were hell-bent on over-running us.
Our best protection from that was the ability to turn our world into a radio-active desert of fused ash. No kid who grew up in the fifties and sixties was ever in any doubt that the world could end, any minute.
Mc Carthyism.
Reds under the bed.
John F Kennedy. He was seen as a new breath of hope. Probably wasn't, really, but he got snuffed out, nobody ever figured out what really happened or why, Lee Harvey, Jack Ruby etc, and so his legend grew.
Hope denied.
More dead Kennedys.
LBJ, Nixon, Ford.
VietNam.
(two part comment. blogger said it was too long)
ReplyDeleteAmerican policy fervently believed in the domino theory, that if the Viet-Cong were allowed to triumph in viet-nam, then bit by bit, asia and the pacific would become communist, and communism was feared above all plagues.
So the american government shipped men and materials in ever increasing numbers to fight what it considered a just and necessary war.
Not all americans agreed it was just or necessary.
By the late sixties, there is a significant anti-war movement. In the nature of american politics, dissenters against government policy are seen as commie sympathisers and enemies of the state, Some burn flags, which is, in American eyes, heresy, because Americans are taught to worship the flag.
Mr Ayers and his pals, in the face of what they see as a tyrannical government in washington, a corrupt ruling body, which is leading america astray, and is forcing young americans against their will to go fight and die in an illegal and inhumane war, which Mr Ayers and his pals don't think should be any concern of america, they take up arms to oppose what they believe to be a corrupt government, acting against the interests of americans. They further believe that they should overthrow the state and create a communise peacenik america.
Which seems to me to be allowed for in the second amendment. I don't think there's any rule that states what proportion of the electorate must support a push against government.
If they'd wanted to do that, they'd have left out the bit about bearing arms, and "well ordered Militia", and just said "Call an election", surely.
Also, they were not very prescriptive about what, exactly, they mean by a "well ordered militia".
The weather underground, I learn from further reading, took great care, most of the time, to set its bombs to damage property, not people. Sometimes they failed, but in their eyes they were battling a government that was killing a lot of people, very deliberately, and shipping american teenagers out to kill, or be killed. That, to them, was justification enough for a few deaths. Colatteral damage, their government would later call it.
Collateral, they'd spell it correctly.
ReplyDelete@Soubriquet - Thank you for your comment anyway. Here's hoping the illness and fatigue soon pass, and your head clears.
ReplyDeleteBlogger often says comments are too long, but they seem to post anyway. I would copy the comment to my clipboard until I was sure it published, though.
ReplyDelete