Axelrod's ridiculous claim: Obama didn't know of Ayers' bombing past

Thanks to the New York Times, and Sarah Palin's reference to him in a speech on Saturday, the Barack Obama campaign is now forced to deal with the Bill Ayers issue. Ayers is an unrepentant ex-terrorist in whose home Obama began his political career in 1995. Ayers is the man who secured the $50 million in funding for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge endeavor (which failed) to improve Chicago's public schools. Obama was the group's chairman. Obama and Ayers served on the board of The Woods Fund--Ayers was its chairman for a while. Ayers and Obama, and at least on one occasion, Ayers' equally unrepentant wife Bernardine Dorhn, sat in on a couple of panel discussions. In 1997, the Chicago Tribune asked Obama what book he was reading, he responded, it was Ayers' A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court.

Simply put,to Obama, Ayers is much more than what he said he was, just "a guy from my neighborhood." So when Obama's Svengali, David Axelrod, claimed this morning that the junior senator from my state didn't know about "the history," that is Ayers repugnant leadership of the Weather Underground, well, I don't know whether to scream, laugh, or cry.

Among the bombing targets Ayers claims credit for are the US Capitol (Where Obama works when he is not on the campaign trail) and the Pentagon building.

Apologists about the relationship have claimed that Ayers is part of the Chicago mainstream. This is complete crap. He is part of the far-left mainstream. Yes, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley worked with Ayers, now a University of Illinois (my alma mater) education professor in the early days of Chicago's school reform--it is crucial to remember that Ayers' father, CEO of the Chicago area's electric utility until the early 1980s, was a friend and confidante of Daley's father, the Richard J. Daley, "The Boss," who of course was Chicago's mayor too.

That's how things are done in Chicago.

The apologists are also claiming that Ayers' existence within academia upset no one until his Obama ties became known. More crap. I did my first Bill Ayers post in 2006, and Ayers thumbing his nose at America--while standing on the flag--has drawn the ire of conservatives for years.

But let us remember how smart Barack Obama is. Can we take seriously claim by the "Axelrod of Evil" that Obama did not know of Ayers' bombings.

Obama and I were born in 1961. Okay, at the time of the Weather Underground terror campaign, I didn't know about them. Neither did Obama. By the time I was in high school, I did--the group and others like them came up during high school history lessons. Obama probably heard about the Weather Underground the same way, or through radicals he knew while he was in his teens such as Frank Marshall Davis, a onetime Communist.

As I have a couple of times before, I'd like to focus on this passage from The Audacity of Hope:

In my teens, I became fascinated with the Dionysian, up for grabs quality of the era, and through books, films, and music, I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about: images of Huey Newton, the '68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift, and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude, I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.

Do you really think Obama did not know of Ayers' violent past? What kind of person "pals around with terrorists."

In Ayers's Fugitive Days, published in 2001 (not 1971), in response to the belief most Americans hold dear, that the Unites States is a great country, Ayers sneers, "It makes me want to puke."

Technorati tags: 60s Chicago radicals history Bill Ayers terrorism Weather Underground Obama politics Barack Obama Election Democrats Left Wing Extremists flag flag desecration University of Illinois