Obama's Meeting With Terrorists

This is a startling item from the February 22, 2008 The Politico, detailing Obama's meeting with two people whose involvement with people building bombs to kill Americans isn't even open to dispute:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”

...

Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.

Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.

“I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.

And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits.

Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non grata at a progressive educators’ conference in the summer of 2006.

“We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past,” he quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as writing to him.

Here's an article telling a bit more about the bomb making factory that went wrong, and how one of the survivors of that explosion went on to do a Brinks armored car robbery that killed three guards, leaving nine children without fathers. Oh yes, this was a crowd that was trying to start a race war in the United States:

In her parole hearing, Boudin -- a veteran of the terrorist Weather Underground -- claimed that she participated in the robbery because she felt guilty for being white. She told the commissioners she believed the crime would help 'oppressed' black people and advance the cause of 'civil rights'.

This is an astonishing reminder that Obama's leftist politics aren't just connections to antiwar activists of the 1960s putting flowers in their hair and carrying signs. The Ayers and Dohrn were part of a crowd that was making bombs as part of their war on the United States government, murdering people that had to work for a living (unlike this bunch of spoiled rich kids).

If you think this isn't much of an issue--all of this blowing up buildings and murdering people was a long time ago--imagine what the media hoopla would be if someone discovered that McCain had, in the 1990s, met at the home of Edgar Ray Killen. We would be hearing endlessly about McCain's questionable judgment, about McCain's opposition some years ago to making Martin Luther King's birthday into a holiday, with the implication that McCain was some sort of closet Klansman. But Obama gets a free ride.

As Ace of Spades HQ points out:

Unless McCain is a complete idiot, he'll drive this one like a stolen Ferrari.