Ayers: Obama a "family friend"

It's no surprise to me that the relationship between President-elect Barack Obama and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers is not how Obama characterized it.

In an April debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama dismissed the radical as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" and an English professor.

In fact Ayers is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and someone Obama worked very closely with while the president-elect was chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Ayers, an anti-capitalist, is trying to capitalize on Obama's election with a new version of his terror memoir, Fugitive Days, and he was written a new afterword for the book.

The Chicago Tribune has more:

In the updated version of his 2001 book "Fugitive Days," Ayers calls into question one of the more incendiary quotes attributed to him during the campaign: "I'm nowadays quoted as saying, 'I don't regret setting bombs. I wish we'd set more bombs. I don't think we did enough.'

"I never actually said that I 'set bombs,' nor that I wished there were 'more bombs.' ... I killed no one, and I harmed no one, and I didn't regret for a minute resisting the murderous assault on Viet Nam with every ounce of my being."

Like most 1960s anti-war radicals, my guess is that Ayers will have little to say about the mass exodus of refugees, about 2 million of them--the "Boat People"--from Viet Nam--after the Communist victory.

More about the afterword:

In it, Ayers -- who did not respond to requests for comment -- summarized his relationship with Obama: "[W]e had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, (emphasis mine) held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."

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