Entries associated with the tag "Bernardine Dohrn":

Who is Barack Obama?

He’s the Democratic candidate for president.

No, who is he really?

He’s someone who once consorted with William Ayers.

And what do you call people who have consorted?

Gee, a consortium I guess.

Just asking. So who’s William Ayers?

He’s a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He’s published several books and served on important boards.

No. Who is he really?

He used to be a Weatherman. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was one too. They were underground for a while. The Reader’s written about them. Here's an excellent cover story by Ben Joravsky and here are a couple of columns by yours truly.

What did the Weathermen do?

Back during the Vietnam war, they planted bombs.

Don’t you find it remarkable that someone who planted bombs now consorts with respectable people?

The only other bomber from that era who’s done as well is John McCain. He bombed Vietnamese.

Tell me more about this consortium.

In 1995 the Annenberg Foundation issued a $49.2 million grant to support school reform in Chicago. Ayers and Obama were both heavily involved in the Chicago campaign to get this money. So was Arnold Weber, former president of Northwestern University. When the grant was announced, Mayor Daley and Governor Edgar said a few words.

That's Daley as in the Daley-Blagojevich-Rezko-Obama cabal? And Edgar as in "I'm just here to keep the seat warm for convicted felon George Ryan"?

I guess.

And isn’t it the Northwestern law school that now employs Ayers’s wife?

I believe it is.

And runs something called the Center on Wrongful Convictions in order to spring convicted cop killers out of prison?

That's so.

Just asking. So who’s this Annenberg fellow?

Walter Annenberg was a prominent Philadelphia publisher whom President Nixon named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. It's estimated he gave away about $2 billion dollars during his life to various causes, mostly educational.

But who was he really?

He was the son of Moses "Moe" Annenberg, who late in life did time for tax evasion and early in his newspaper career, before he got rich, was hired along with his brother Max by William Randolph Hearst to peddle Hearst’s papers here and see to it anyone trying to peddle the opposition got beaten silly. One of their captains was Dion O’Banion, who became a major bootlegger and mob boss. Capone rubbed him out in 1924.

So when we talk about a consortium we’re talking about Obama and a variety of thugs, terrorists, mob kingpins, crooked pols, and pinko educators spanning decades.

So it seems.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But don't you think the public ought to know?

Barack Obama's finally clinched the Democratic nomination, but he'll probably look back on this stage of his campaign as the easy part. Among the issues he can expect to be pounded on in the months ahead is the one about who he knew and how he knew them.

Obama's already resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ to get out from under his associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger -- which didn't help at all with such hostiles as the National Review. Tony Rezko made national news as an Obama associate when he was convicted Wednesday, and the GOP jumped in immediately with this video. And here's Michael Kinsley on "Obama's radical friends" Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The former Weathermen "remain spectacularly unrepentant, self-indulgent, unreflective--still bloated with a sense of entitlement, still smug with certainty," in Kinsley's view, but he points out that if Obama has shown bad judgment in associating with them, so has  a "comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others -- including Republicans and conservatives." As Kinsley sees it, when Ayers, whose dad ran Commonwealth Edison and was on a lot of important boards, decided the revolution wasn't going to happen he simply went home and the establishment took him back into the fold.

Moral: Be careful who you meet on the way up. You'll meet them again on the way further up.

An approving nod to the Sun-Times for finding it no big deal that Barack Obama is on friendly terms with Bill Ayers, even though, back in the day, Ayers was a Weatherman who "bombed the U.S. Capitol, a bathroom in the Pentagon, and even cased out the White House." The Sun-Times regrets that Ayers "remains sadly unreflective about his Weatherman days, as revealed in his memoir Fugitive Days. . . . But Ayers, it is also true to say, has since followed in the footsteps of the great Chicago social worker Jane Addams, crusading for education and juvenile justice reform. His 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, has been praised for exposing how Cook County's juvenile justice system all but eliminates a child's chance for redemption."

Having gone so far as to compare Ayers to Jane Addams, the Sun-Times beat a swift retreat to a shrug. "Ayers," the editorial summed up, 'is nothing more than an aging lefty with a foolish past who is doing good."

I admired Fugitive Days for answering the $64 question, "What were they thinking?" To me, his refusal to disassociate himself from his old self made the book credible, though others wanted something more ashamed and repentant. At any rate, a few days after the book was published 9-11 happened. That same morning, the New York Times carried an interview with Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn that began with Ayers saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." The book was damned and disappeared.

Writing about William F. Buckley a few days ago, I quoted conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg scowling at the Obama-Ayers relationship. How come, Goldberg wondered, "being a radical means never having to say you're sorry"?

Is Ayers, for all his good works, unapologetic and unreflective?

I interviewed him when his book came out. "I gave up something precious--my own individual mind and heart," he told me then. "The distinction I'm making is that I don't think we should apologize for our extremism. I should apologize for a lot of other things."