"Guilty as Hell, Free as a Bird, America is Great..." - Water-Cooler Talks

Cross-posted by Maggie at Maggie's Notebook

2001 photo of William Ayers trouncing the U.S. Flag
Photo credit: Chicago Magazine

Liberals see no problem with a relationship between Barack Obama and Weatherman terrorist, William Ayers. After all, Ayers was just a young man caught up in the 1960's protest of the VietNam war...he's respectable now, because you see, he is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago.

Here's a quote from Ayers explaining the Weatherman philosophy. Tell me if this is the average "60's protester?"

Kill all the rich people, break up their cars and apartments, bring the revolution home...that's where it's really at.

So, how many parents died at the hands of their child following the admonitions of the Weatherman? We'll never know.

David Horowitz gives us a first-hand look at Ayers

I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."

What I saw was a shallowness beyond conception. All the Weather leaders I interviewed shared a similar vacuity. They were living inside a utopian fantasy, a separate reality, and had no idea of what they had done. Nor any way to measure it. Appreciating the nation to which they were born, recognizing the great gifts of freedom and opportunity their parents and communities had given them, distinguishing between right and wrong – it was all above their mental and moral ceiling.

In the days ahead, this is one of the dangers we face.

Obama and Ayers and his convicted felon terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were likely connected as early as 1988. In fact, it's a willing suspension of disbelief to think they were not. Why? Global Labor - When Did Bill Ayers and Barack Obama Meet? has done some mighty research.

Ayers helped organize a major force in the lobbying for that 1988 campaign, the Alliance For Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs. The Developing Communities Project which Obama headed at that time was a member of the ABCs, apparently one of the few members of the ABCs that worked with the black community. Many in the black community knew that teaching, the unions and school administration were one avenue to the middle class for blacks and thus were wary of the reform effort.

Certainly support for "local control" would have been a pre-requisite to allowing Obama to chair, at such a young and untested age, the Annenberg Challenge. Thus, I think we can safely date the beginning of the Obama-Ayers relationship to at least 1988 when the ABCs effort was underway in Chicago schools. That was also when Ayers and Obama would have met up with the future Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, who would have been hired by Ayers and Obama, Ken Rolling. Rolling in 1988 was on the staff of the Woods Fund which provided several grants to the school reform effort and to Obama's Developing Communities Project at that time. Of course, a decade later, in 1999, as is already widely known, Ayers would join Obama on the board of the Woods Fund itself.

The Obama's, Michelle and Barack, were both employed by the law firm Sidley Austin; so were William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dorhn was refused admission to the New York bar but...

More from Global Labor:...she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984.

Howard Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers [William Ayers' father].

Tom Ayers' firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for many years. She later worked in their Chicago office when she and Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987. She left Sidley in 1988.

Later, both Barack and Michelle Obama were hired by Sidley Austin. I think it ridiculous to assume there was no talk around the office water-cooler about the Ayers.

Still later, Barack Obama went to work for Judson Miner, "a small civil rights law firm in Chicago."

Miner was also classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago law school in 1967 where they were both were involved in anti-war activity.

Barack Obama will do most anything to keep this relationship hidden. When you get to the voting booth, or hopefully long before, remember the photo above and Obama's lack of judgement.

If he really abhorred William Ayers' past, he still continued to use him to propel his career forward.

Thanks to reader BobF.