Dan

Calabrese

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October 13, 2008

Read Bill Ayers’s Blog, Then Consider: What Did He Like About Obama?

Let’s turn the Obama/Ayers question upside down. I don’t really care why Barack Obama was attracted to Bill Ayers. Obama is attracted to anyone he thinks will help advance his personal ambitions.

I’m more interested in why Bill Ayers was attracted to Barack Obama, because once you know how Ayers thinks, you have to wonder about anyone he would go out of his way to support.

If you really want to get a sense of Bill Ayers, all you have to do is read his blog. He keeps it more or less up to date. He has lots to say about himself, his terrorist past and his association with Barack Obama. He claims in a letter to the New York Times, republished on his blog, that the Times misrepresented his famous “we didn’t do enough” quote in its September 11, 2001 story – suggesting he meant they didn’t do enough to oppose the Vietnam War, not that they didn’t do enough domestic bombing.

But in the same paragraph, he claims that he and the rest of the Weather Underground were “remarkably restrained.” You can draw your own conclusions about that, but one thing you can’t escape if you read much of Ayers’s blog is that he doesn’t think very highly of the United States.

In this same letter, Ayers describes his 2001 book titled Fugitive Days as “from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism.” And which acts of “terrorism” does he feel compelled to mention as primary examples?

It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distant violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it.

So he condemns terrorism in general, from start to finish, but when looking for something specific to demonstrate what really burns his butt, chooses to put only America’s deeds in the spotlight. Oh, he does mention the actions of our enemies – it was only four days after 9/11 after all. But unlike American “terrorism,” which only breeds “the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness,” Ayers sees the potential for good to come from 9/11:

All that we witnessed September 11 – the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people – may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movement of the 60s and 1970s may be more urgent now than ever.

See? When America gets attacked, maybe we’ll find out how the rest of the world feels, and maybe we’ll all start thinking like Bill Ayers.

In a story published on Friday by Slate, David Tanenbaum – who, like Obama, worked with Ayers on education issues in Chicago – insists that the Ayers he knew was nothing like the Weather Underground bomber. He wrote poetry, wrote letters to his kid in college and worked to oppose the agenda of people like Bill Bennett and John DiIulio, who wanted to take very violent teen offenders and try them as adults. According to Tanenbaum, this concern for youth was what made him a palatable colleague, not the actions of his past, of which Tanenbaum tells us he was unaware at the time.

Fine. Whether your thinking on youth crime is closer to Bennett and DiIulio, or closer to Ayers and Tanenbaum, let’s stipulate that Ayers’s work on this particular issue – if that’s all you knew of him – doesn’t make an association with him a disqualifier for the presidency.

A complete review of all Ayers’s writings – just on his blog alone – leaves no question that the man has deep antipathy for America’s role in the world and for free-market capitalism. His antipathy is so great that he even proposes abolishing the American flag and national anthem:

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism – that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder – one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

I think you can pretty well get the idea what Ayers thinks of America. Fine. He can think that if he wants.

Here’s what I want to know: What kind of politician would a guy like this choose to support – not only support, but host a fundraiser for in his home? Ayers hosted this event for Obama in 1995. It was a time when Obama was looking to emerge on the scene in Chicago politics, and Ayers was sufficiently enthusiastic about Obama to go to the trouble of inviting friends, neighbors and colleagues to meet him and contribute money.

Read Ayers’s blog. Look around. Do you get the impression that this is a guy who will just go out of his way to get behind any politician without first ascertaining that they shared the same agenda?

Bill Ayers saw something in Barack Obama that made him very enthusiastic about supporting him. He didn’t just put up a yard sign for him. He hosted the fundraiser that introduced him onto the political scene. This man – who thinks America is the primary terrorist in the world, and whose disdain for love of country is so deep that he wants to abolish our flag and national anthem – was convinced he had found a kindred spirit in Barack Obama.

Why?

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

This is Column # DC214. Request permission to publish here.