Interesting article on William Ayers

[Kelly the Dog]

One night, Ayers recalled, he and Dohrn were watching Bill O’Reilly, who was going on about “discovering” Ayers’s 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire.” “I had to laugh,” Ayers said. “No one read it when it was first issued!” He said that he laughed, too, when he listened to Sarah Palin’s descriptions of Obama “palling around with terrorists.” In fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”

 

Ayers said that while he hasn’t been bothered by the many threats—“and I’m not complaining”—the calls and e-mails he has received have been “pretty intense.” “I got two threats in one day on the Internet,” he said, referring to an incident that took place last summer when he was sitting in his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he has taught education for two decades. “The first one said there was a posse coming to shoot me, and the second said they were going to kidnap me and water-board me. This friend of mine, a university cop, said, ‘Gosh, I hope the guy who’s coming to shoot you gets here first.’”

 

Ayers seemed curiously calm and cheerful about the way he had been made an issue in the campaign. He seemed unbothered to have been part of what he called “the Swiftboating” process of the 2008 campaign.

 

“It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.” Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.

 

As the polling day drew into the late afternoon, the level of security in Hyde Park matched the level of anticipation. Obama’s house, four blocks away, was surrounded.

 

Ayers said he felt “a lot of sympathy” for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “who was treated grotesquely and unfairly” by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: “Wright’s a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone.” Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of economic equality. “Martin Luther King was not a saint,” Ayers said. “He was an angry pilgrim.” Ayers said that he had commiserated recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right wing in recent weeks.

 

Across the street, neighborhood kids chanted “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” and “Yes we can!” for the cameras. Ayers smiled, looking a little like a more boomer Fred MacMurray in an episode of “My Three Sons.”

 

Ayers said that he had never meant to imply, in an interview with the Times, published coincidentally on 9/11, that he somehow wished he and the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence in the old days. Instead, he said, “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more sh--.” Ayers said that he had never been responsible for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in Vietnam in which “thousands of people were being killed every week.”

 

“While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme radicalism against property,” he said. “We killed no one and hurt no one. Three of our people killed themselves.” And yet he was not without regrets. He mocked one of his earlier books, co-written with Dohrn, saying that, while it still is reflective of his radical and activist politics today, he was guilty of “rhetoric that’s juvenile and inflated—it is what it is.”

 

“I wish I had been wiser,” Ayers said. “I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/...ighborhood.html

[Gene Frenkle]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/...ighborhood.html

Saying Obama pals around with terrorists is SO last week...

[buckeyemike]

I don't care for Ayers at all, but I think that the whole thing about the Ayers-Obama connection is ludicrous.

 

A 65 year old former radical is the LAST thing this country should be worried about. Most of the people who complained about Ayers acted as if he were a member of the Weathermen last week. That was 40 years ago, when Ayers was nothing but a spoiled punk rich kid from the outer suburbs of Chicago.

 

Hell, I wasn't even born in 1968, so I don't care much about the 60s. It was a long time ago, and Ayers is an old man now.

[Kelly the Dog]

Saying Obama pals around with terrorists is SO last week...

There were dozens of TV crews waiting around the Hyde Park polling place where Obama and his wife would go vote. William Ayers went to the same place a couple hours apart and a Fox crew tried to get him to talk but he never said a word. They even asked him who he voted for. I would have loved to see him answer "John McCain", regardless of who he actually did vote for. That would have been great. Ayers is such a coward.

[DC Tom]

Where's the part where he said "Hah! You elected a guy who pals around with terrorits, now I own your asses! All your base are belong to me, suckas!"

[Kelly the Dog]

Where's the part where he said "Hah! You elected a guy who pals around with terrorits, now I own your asses! All your base are belong to me, suckas!"

He could have had so much fun. Again, what a lousy domestic terrorist. No balls at all.