Weather Underground victim Elrod on Obama and Ayers' ballot

I voted an hour ago at Thomas Edison School in Morton Grove. I had to wait five minutes--my longest wait since I moving here.

The ballot in Illinois is long, mostly because of the judicial retention portion of the ballot. Judges in this state are elected, which is a bad way to pick men and women to serve on the bench. In the 1980s, 17 Cook County judges--almost all of whom were convicted--were indicted on bribery charges. The last twenty years have been relatively uneventful on the indictment front, but it's my opinion that fear of getting caught has kept a lot of our judges honest.

One of the names on the retention ballot was Richard J. Elrod. Retention is a countywide process, so just as I was offered the choice of keeping Elrod on the bench, so did Bill Ayers, his fellow unrepentant terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and Barack Obama.

Elrod is a parapalegic. His neck was broken, this is Elrod's account, as a result of a scuffle during the 1969 "Days of Rage" with Brian Flanagan, a member of the Weather Underground. You know, Ayers and Dohrn's terror group. Flanagan denies this, and to this day Flanagan says Elrod tried to tackle him, and a jury found him innocent of all charges involving the incident.

Still...There was a Weather Underground Days of Rage, and had there not been such a hate-fest, Elrod's neck would not have been broken. And Weather Undergound members would not have been able to sing this hurtful tune, sung to the melody of Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay":

Lay, Elrod, lay,
Lay in the street for a while
Stay in your bed for a while
You thought you could stop the Weatherman
But up-front people put you on your can,
Stay in your iron lung,
Play, Elrod, play
Play with your toes for a while

Thirty-nine years later Ayers, Dorhn, Obama and myself were faced with a lot of choices regarding keeping judges on the bench in Cook County. As I mentioned earlier, one of those names was Richard J. Elrod.

After Ayers voted--at the same polling site as Barack Obama--a reporter asked the UIC professor, "Who did you vote for?"

My question for Ayers is, "Did you vote to retain Elrod."

Oh, I voted to keep Elrod on the job.

The picture, courtesy of Chicago Magazine, is of Elrod, shortly after his neck was broken.

Related posts:

The Weather Underground and Ward Churchill-UPDATED!

Some more about the Weather Underground

DePaul student's Denver radio interview follow up: A rat is smelled, and does Ward have a Weather Underground link?

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