SHADOWLAND

Christopher Dickey

Stormy Weatherman

The former terrorist Bill Ayers may want to see McCain get elected.

Oct 16, 2008

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Can it be that the washed-up Weatherman Bill Ayers is the last big obstacle remaining between Barack Obama and the White House? And how, I wonder, does Ayers feel about that?

Of course we know there are many reasons that John McCain and Sarah Palin would invoke the name of this terrorist-turned-educator, trying to slime Obama with guilt by association as recently as the debate Wednesday night. The Republican team, even as it attacks the Democrats for talking about the recent past (the continuing, worsening record of the current Republican administration), is itself focused obsessively on the distant past—the Vietnam war of 40 years ago and the counterculture that grew up in opposition to it.

Never mind that Obama was in elementary school back then. The 1960s were the crucible that forged McCain's image of himself and gave him the political credentials he's built his career on. His conduct as a prisoner of the Vietnamese is his badge of honor, and while McCain was being tortured in Hanoi, Ayers was doing his damnedest to give aid and comfort to the enemy. If I were McCain, I'd have a whole lot of trouble with that.

The Weather Underground Organization to which Ayers belonged was a handful of self-appointed, self-described American Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, all of them white, many of them the sons and daughters of privilege. They grew famous for tossing around incandescent rhetoric and incendiary devices, but much of their time was spent in self-righteous bull sessions, dropping acid or coupling at random in what their doctrinaire language described as "smashing monogamy."

That Ayers had given up the bomb throwing and emerged from the underground into mainstream academia long before Obama met him in the 1990s is little comfort to an emotional McCain, and of little interest to the notably incurious Palin. The Alaskan governor's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" is so deeply fraught with sinister subtexts that she clearly finds it irresistible, and it sure helps work up rage on the right-wing fringe.

But what about Ayers himself? Again, how does he feel about the political problem posed by his ephemeral association with Obama? He's not giving interviews, and his Web site is Delphic. The latest entry, from Sept. 25, reads: "EMERGENCY!!! Suspend the Debates! And if that sounds remotely reasonable, think of it as a dress rehearsal, a practice run, a prelude: EMERGENCY!!! Suspend the Elections!" Probably this is an inside joke. Maybe someone finds it funny. As I say, it's hard to know what Ayers is thinking just now.

Yet it is clear from his own 2001 book, "Fugitive Days" (Beacon), and from other more recent tomes by his erstwhile comrades, as well as the excellent 2004 documentary movie "The Weather Underground," directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, that Ayers still thinks like a revolutionary, if not a terrorist.

If you have spent much time with radical leftist revolutionaries, real apostles of class war, as I have over the years, you know there is no class of people they hate more than liberals like Obama. The reason is simple. Revolutionaries want confrontation and crisis; they want to exacerbate the contradictions, as they say, so their struggle is well defined and people have to choose sides. They hate The Man, but they don't know what to do without him.

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Posted By: Liberty2u @ 11/03/2008 1:12:26 AM

There's a lot of crazy folks in the world. A lot of people were against the war in Vietnam.
From what some of my vet friends tell me, it's a war that should have never been fault.
I don't get much out of them besides that it's to difficult for them to talk about it.

With all due respect, just because your a POW, doesn't mean your ready to be President. There were many POW's, that didn't get the help they needed after the war. Are they forgotten? YES, many were forgotten. When they came home, there wasn't much for them to come home to.

I don't blame Obama for what went on in the 60's. He was just a child. I don't play that guilt by association.
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Posted By: mccainsupporter @ 10/30/2008 4:27:09 PM

Bill Ayers and a Barack Obama connection.

Chicago has a tradition for bomb makers beginning with the Haymarket affair bomb that killed 7 police officers in 1886. The bomb was thrown during a May Day rally for striking workers. There is a statue in Haymarket Square marking the place of the bombings.

A Chicago native the Unabomber is now serving a life sentence at SuperMax Federal Penitentiary in Florence Colorado for killing three people with mail bombs. The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski grew up in the Chicago area, graduated from Harvard University before getting his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan, and then taught at U.C. at Berkley. The Unabomber received his moniker by targeting universities and airlines. Ted Kaczynski targeted professors at Northwestern University in Chicago and a United Airlines President with his bomb packages. As a radical leftist environmentalist, the fatal victims of Unabomber Ted Kaczinski included an ad executive for Exxon and a timber industry lobbyist.

Bill Ayers the domestic terrorist and Weathermen bomb maker is two years younger than Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber, but both have Chicago connections and both received degrees from the University of Michigan about the same time. Bill Ayers received an undergraduate degree in American studies and Ted Kazinski received his Phd in mathematics from the University of Michigan a year earlier than Bill Ayers undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. Not only a founder of the Weathermen Underground, Bill Ayers was a leader and organizer of the Students for Democratic Society SDS at the University of Michigan. Bill Ayers went on to get his Masters in teaching at Columbia in 1987.
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Posted By: mccainsupporter @ 10/30/2008 4:26:31 PM

Lets look at the educational credentials of each individual:

Ted Kaczynski, Unabomber: Harvard BA, University of Michigan Phd.
Bill Ayers: University of Michigan BA, Columbia University Masters in Ed.
Barack Obama: Columbia University BA and Harvard J.D.

It does seem curious that these three individuals each have two degrees and all the degrees for the three individuals only come from three institutions of higher learning, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Michigan. The timing is curious too. Perhaps there is a nexus further than Bill Ayers and Ted Kaczynski being raised in Chicago and Barack Obama having a strong connection in his early adulthood and all three going to these three universities.

The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski pled guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Ted Kaczynski said he acted alone. However, the question arises whether he received training or collaborated with anyone in the past. Bill Ayers and Ted Kaczynski were both extreme leftist liberals who attended the University of Michigan together for three years. As a Phd student, Ted taught undergraduates and as a teaching assistant came into contact with many undergraduates. Bill Ayers was a gregarious student who founded the Students for Democratic Society at the University of Michigan and would have likely came into contact with a fellow radical liberal such as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski who also attended the University of Michigan at the same time. The question becomes whether two people who later both became bomb makers collaborated while at the University of Michigan regarding bomb making techniques. If any alleged conspiracy or collaboration occurred Bill Ayers would have had to undertake an affirmative act such as informing on Ted Kaczynski to end his participation in any alleged conspiracy that ultimately resulted in injuries to sixteen people and three deaths.