Guilty (16 page)

It is also a fact that Ayers's wife, fellow Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, praised the Manson family for murdering Sharon Tate and others, shouting at a 1969 rally, “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they
ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!” In a better country, just saying “Dig it!” in public would get you twenty years in the slammer. At other rallies, Dohrn said, “Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's at.” It got to the point that the members of the Manson family had to distance themselves from Ayers and Dohrn.

Nor, as Obama and his adoring media claimed, were sociopaths Ayers and Dohrn just people who happened to live in his neighborhood: They were there at the inception of Obama's political career, hosting a fundraiser for Obama at their home back in 1995. Obama served with Ayers on the board of the radical Woods Fund, long after Ayers's 2001 wish that he had set more bombs. Obama shared a podium with Ayers at a University of Chicago event—organized by Michelle Obama, director of the university's Community Service Program.
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In keeping with Obama's statements on his other friends, like Tony Rezko (“This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew”)
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or the Reverend Wright (“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met twenty years ago”),
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perhaps Obama could have said, “The Bill Ayers I embraced at the kickoff party to my political career was not the same Bill Ayers who tried to murder hundreds of innocent Americans by blowing up the Pentagon and other buildings.” That has a nice ring to it.

What was a candidate for the United States presidency doing being friends with these former terrorists, Ayers and Dohrn? Why not Timothy McVeigh? Would anyone have a problem with handing the presidency to a friend of McVeigh's?

Obama also tried to dismiss his friendship with Ayers in one of the Democratic debates, on the grounds that Ayers is a college professor— well, yes, but that's a whole other problem—and that he hadn't tried to bomb any government buildings for years. In the ABC debate in April 2008, Obama said Ayers is “a professor of English in Chicago … and the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense.”
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(Technically, Ayers is a professor of education, meaning that he is less qualified to teach than the entire population of the United States.)

Forty years was a long time ago, but not as long ago as slavery existed in this country and we never hear the end of that. But the real problem was, Ayers and his Weatherman wife not only had never repented, they wouldn't stop boasting about being revolutionaries. To the contrary, blowing up buildings was their greatest glory! They were like Bette Davis in the movie
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
—endlessly reliving their ridiculous youth. They've never accomplished anything else. Run a search of their names. All you will find are documentaries, books, memoirs, and interviews about their days as “revolutionaries”! Ayers finally produced a book in 2001. Guess what it was about? Nope, it was not a treatise on economics. Come on, have another guess!

Ayers's now-famous quote published on September 11, 2001—“I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough”
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—was from an interview about … guess what? If you guessed the history of the Civil War, I'm sorry, but you're wrong again. In another
Times
interview a few days later—which is more interviews than the collective
Times
interviews given to bestselling conservative authors—Ayers clarified his remarks from the 9/11 edition by saying that this country makes him want to “puke.”
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The interview was conducted by a reporter who said her parents were Weathermen.

Mr. and Mrs.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
still attend SDS reunions, such as the one in 2007, where Ayers and Dohrn gave vapid speeches about AmeriKKKa being “the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth.” They give dramatic renderings of their days “underground” as if it took derring-do to hide in a country where 12 million illegal aliens stroll about Los Angeles unmolested. These so-called “Weathermen” are more boring than the Weather Channel.

In Ayers's 2001 book about his years as a domestic terrorist,
Revolutionary Days,
he cheerfully recalls, “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.”

He concludes his book with the following paragraph:

I guess Charles Manson is no longer considered one of the “cool” revolutionaries.

But why should Ayers and Dohrn apologize? They are the cosseted love children of the liberal intelligentsia. Liberal America awards them, fawns over them, the Democratic candidate for president hangs out with them. In the fastest automatic rehabilitation you've ever seen, they were taken in by the establishment and given professorships, where they are subsidized to opinionate all day. If only Timothy McVeigh had said he bombed the building in Oklahoma City to protest American “fascism, imperialism, and racism,” he too could be teaching at Northwestern University and sitting on a board with a future U.S. president.

The board that Obama and Ayers served on together, the left-wing Woods Fund, gave a big grant to the infamous Tides Foundation. This type of foundation-to-foundation giving is a notorious form of (legal) “laundering,” whereby the initial foundation avoids the stigma of the recipient foundation's subsequent ill-advised grants, even while making them possible. Tides is a monstrous group that has funded virtually every evil in the world, including not only outright terrorist supporters in the Mideast but numerous offensive U.S. groups as well.

Woods also gave money to the Arab American Action Network, an Israel-bashing group of loonies headed up by Obama's friend
Rashid Khalidi, the infamous Columbia “professor.” When Khalidi was leaving Chicago for New York in 2003, Obama attended a farewell party for Khalidi, along with Ayers and Dohrn, giving him a warm tribute and saying that Khalidi had begun a conversation that was necessary for “this entire world.”
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At Columbia University, Khalidi holds the Edward Said chair. A devoted admirer of Yasser Arafat, Khalidi was at the center of protests by Jewish professors, alumni, and students over the anti-Semitic tone of the Columbia Middle East Studies program. The United Arab Emirates gave a contribution of $200,000 to fund his professorship. Joel Klein, head of New York City's Department of Education, blocked Khalidi's appointment to an advisory position with the department, saying his harangues against Israel made the appointment inappropriate. The Woods Fund also gave a donation to Trinity Church, presided over by another pal of Obama's: racist and anti-Semitic loon Jeremiah Wright.

But none of this mattered because the media warned the public in advance not to believe any information they heard that did not reflect favorably on the Democratic candidate. That is the point of all their wailing about “smears” from the Republican Attack Machine: Republicans should not be allowed to talk. If Republicans make any argument against a Democrat, they are said to be engaging in personal attacks. If telling voters the facts about Democrats constitutes an “attack,” then maybe there is such a thing as a Republican Attack Machine. Most people call it a “tape recorder.”

In an aggressive move, the media, in tandem with the Obama campaign, began debunking patently preposterous slurs that no one else had heard. To great applause from the media, for example, the Obama campaign launched a website in June 2008 called “Fight the Smears” in response to this purported deluge of false and defamatory information about him and his wife coming from mysterious Republicans. The imaginary slurs were all thematically related to actual facts about Obama. So by loudly defeating a handful of ridiculous claims about him, the media covered up his undeniable problems. The myth of a Republican Attack Machine victimizing Democrats had once again been used to preempt meaningful debate on real issues.

Needless to say, the only smears debunked on Obama's website had already been thoroughly shredded, day in and day out, throughout the media. In fact, the only way anyone had heard of the alleged smears was by hearing them debunked. In all its glory, the famous Republican Attack Machine had produced a few Internet rumors that, even if untrue, were more fact-based than the things the media routinely say about Republicans.

We were repeatedly told, for example, of right-wing smears that Obama was a Muslim. This was particularly ungrateful, in light of the fact that conservative TV and radio host Sean Hannity had done more than anyone else in America to publicize Obama's “Christian” pastor, Reverend Wright. Moreover, when liberals thought no one else was listening, they boasted of Obama's Muslim background, citing it as a reason to vote for him. In a much-heralded article in the
Atlantic Monthly,
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liberal Andrew Sullivan wrote:

Liberals gleefully cited the fact that Obama “attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy” as a reason to vote for him—it will make our enemies love us! But some Americans didn't want our enemies to love us; they would prefer that our enemies fear us. Why weren't they allowed to cite the very same fact—that, as a boy, Obama attended a majority-Muslim school? It's a peculiar form of political debate that allows the exact same information about a candidate to be used if it is given as a reason to vote for him, but constitutes a hate crime if it is cited as a reason not to vote for him.

Sullivan touted the benefits that would come from a “brown-skinned” president, but when former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, a Hillary supporter, said “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position”
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—she was called a vile racist. Obama said her remarks were “divisive” and “patently absurd.”
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Ferraro was later forced to resign from Hillary's campaign.
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Maybe there were also some voters who didn't care one way or another about Obama's Muslim background or that he was half-black, but were starting to notice that he was Muslim when it helped, and not when it didn't; that he was a committed member of the Reverend Wright's flock when it helped, and not when it didn't; that he was black when it helped, and not when it didn't. Even that point couldn't be made. Any facts about Obama were portrayed as vicious smears— unless they were being cited as reasons to vote for him.

IN ANNOUNCING HIS “FIGHT THE SMEARS” WEBSITE, OBAMA said, “There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mail. And they pump them out long enough until finally, you, a mainstream reporter, ask me about them. And then that gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.” First, I would like to know the name of a mainstream reporter who asked Obama any difficult question, much less a question premised on a lie—other than how he planned to respond to Republican lies. Second, I have evidence that Obama and his wife said something inappropriate!

I don't think he's a Muslim, but I do think he said “I would” to the
question “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” Obama didn't even hesitate or “do nuance”—as he did in response to pastor Rick Warren's question about when life begins. There is no possible result of such a meeting apart from appeasement and humiliation of the United States. If we are prepared to talk, then we're looking for a deal. What kind of deal do you make with a madman until he is willing to surrender?