Talk about chutzpah. The right-wing blogosphere is ballistic over Barack Obama [2]'s rather tenuous ties to a former member of the Weather Underground. It was Hillary Clinton [2] who first made an issue of the fact that Obama once served on the board of Chicago's progressive Woods Fund [3] with ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers [4]. Hillary later pleaded ignorance when reminded that her husband pardoned one member of the Weather Underground and commuted the sentence of another. (Huffington Post [5], April 17) Particularly hot under the collar about the fact that Ayers has any place at all in respectable American society is Joseph Farah [6] of WorldNetDaily [7]. After running down a litany of Ayers' and Bernardine Dohrn [8]'s rioting, bombing, travels to Cuba, juvenile rhetoric about killing your parents, etc., he fumes:
Now, suppose you or your children had a record like that. What kind of future would you expect? Would you imagine that following a brief period of quiet rehabilitation that you would be welcomed into tenured and comfortable positions in academia? Do you think you would get a chance to work with powerful politicians? Do you think you would have the opportunity to decide how hundreds of millions of dollars would be given away by a major philanthropic foundation?
That's exactly what happened to this pair of degenerates.
Today, Ayers teaches at the University of Illinois and works on "school reform" issues – which probably means designing ways to indoctrinate your children into his diseased, evil mindset. In 1999, he joined the Woods Fund of Chicago, where he served as a director alongside Barack Obama until the latter left in 2002. Ayers went on to become Woods' chairman of the board, overseeing the distribution of about $60 million a year. In 2002, the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where, coincidentally, his wife works.
Dohrn teaches law at Northwestern University and specializes in "juvenile justice reform" – which suggests she wants your kids to live out her undying dreams of chaos in America's streets and communities. She still runs the Children and Family Justice Center. She also sits on boards of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association!
It's worth noting that Ayers' father, Thomas, who stood by his son throughout his 11-year run as a fugitive, served as a trustee at Northwestern University and former board chairman.
Who says privilege doesn't have its perks?
Who says crime doesn't pay?
Who says the penalty for treason is death?
Also joining the Obama pile-on at WorldNetDaily is Pat Buchanan [9], who calls [10] him "a man comfortable with friends still proud of the radical role they played planting bombs in the 1960s."
Excuse us? This is the same Pat Buchanan who once had as presidential campaign advisor one Larry Pratt [11], leader of Gun Owners of America [12]—and one of the select attendees at the notorious 1992 radical-right conclave in Estes Park, Colorado, where the decision to launch the militia movement was taken. The meeting was presided over and hosted by white-supremacist Christian Identity [13] "minister" Pete Peters [14]. Pratt presented a proposal based on his book Armed People Victorious, for Christian militias in the US, modeled on the "civil patrols" established by Guatemala's military dictatorship in the '80s.
Also in attendance was Louis Beam [15], a veteran Klansman representing the Aryan Nations [16], who presented a paper entitled "Leaderless Resistance [17]"—the founding document of the militia movement, and the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh [18]. In 1988, Beam and ten other Aryan Nations militants had been charged (and acquitted) in a conspiracy to overthrow the US government. Prosecutors said the plot was to begin with blowing up the Oklahoma City federal building. (See analysis [19] by Michael Novic of People Against Racist Terror-PART, February 1996)
Cast the (Louis) Beam from thine own eye, WorldNetDaily.
See our last posts on the media culture wars [20], the radical right [21] and the armed left [22].
