Redstate

How dare one of the animate backdrops to Bill Ayers' fantasy narrative speak.

By Moe Lane Posted in Bill Ayers | Liberals | Obamafiles | Weather Underground — Comments (19) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Perhaps if you had done more, William Ayers, you might have kept this person from writing this. Do you regret that?

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

(Via Hot Air)

Nine years old at the time, Bill. But hey, you guys really showed that military-industrial complex what was what, right? Not to mention all those South Vietnamese that unfortunately had to be sacrificed so that you and your comrades could feel good about yourselves.

Read on.

The piece really should be read in its entirety, but let me isolate two more sections. First:

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.

[snip - but read it, too]

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.

The snipped portion relates how Mr. Murtagh takes personally the revelation that Ayers regrets not burning him and his family to death; said regret is no less chilling for being essentially divorced from any sort of personal animus. If you wonder why we still find the Weathermen outrageous, you should consider that it's in large part due to the fact that (I say this not as a mental health care professional, mind you) the most public ones were and are sociopaths*. We have enough problems with hardline Islamist fantasy ideologists to be comfortable with people being comfortable with the domestic versions.

The other bit?

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”

Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

John, I frankly don't think that he cares. On the bright side, Senator Obama will, eventually. All you need to do is get his Oregon numbers down three or four points and he'll disavow this guy in nothing flat.

Because he's just swell that way.

Moe Lane

*Excuse me: "unrepentant" is the current term of art.