Will Boston cause Obama to 'evolve' on Bill and Bernardine?

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Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

 

This was a heinous and cowardly act. And given what we now know about what took place, the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism.  Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual.

- President Obama on the Boston Marathon Bombings, April 16, 2013

 

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THE DAILY BEAST :  There was a big hullabaloo duirng the 2008 presidential election over your relationship to Obama. What is or was your relationship to him?

BILL AYERS : I brief him every Monday in the White House, and he never listens! No. The truth is exactly what he said and what the campaign said in 2008. David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

-- Bill Ayers On the Weathermen, Obama’s Crap Job & More, April 3, 2013

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"Now we are everywhere...we are not just attacking targets...guard your planes, guard your colleges, guard your banks, guard your children, guard your doors."

- Bernardine Dohrn, 1970

 

 

 

 

 

 

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''

- No Regrets For A Love of Explosives, NYTimes, September 11, 2001

 

"Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror."

- President Barack Obama, April 16, 2013

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This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers insists he has no regrets. "I acted appropriately in the context of those times," he says. But it's hard to reconcile this quick-witted man with that revolutionary. Today Bill Ayers seems too happy to have ever been so angry.

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-- "No Regrets For A Love of Explosives, NYTimes, September 11, 2001

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For years, his was "Joe." Hers was "Rose."

"I was at the top of my field," the wife says. "I was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list."

She smiles at her husband.

"He was on the bottom," she adds. "I was most wanted, he was just wanted, sort of wanted."

"Sexism," he contends, shrugging. "We were facing the same federal charges. She has better legs. I could have been No. 1."

They laugh.

"She likes my jokes."

"Laughter," she says, "is what has kept us together all these years."

The couple, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, will need their sense of humor in the coming weeks...

-- Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, September 2001 "The Calm After the Storm"

 

 

 

 

In 1970, Bill Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

-- Rebel Without A Pause, Chicago Magazine 1993

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Weathermom Guess who's opening speaker for the Women...

September 23, 1990|By Kathy O`Malley and Dorothy Collin.

Weathermom

Guess who`s opening speaker for the Women in Charge conference sponsored by the Junior League and United Way? Why, none other than Bernardine Dohrn. The conference brochure describes her as ``a child advocate, a law graduate, a mother of three boys, an anti-war and civil rights activist, a Little League coach . . . `` That leaves out a few minor biographical details such as her role in the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969, her years on the FBI`s Most Wanted list and her conviction in connection with the infamous Brink`s robbery in New York. But that was then. Now, the most frightening thing about Dohrn, THE 1960s radical, is that she is not only a Little League coach, but she`s 48 years old.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Sept. 27, 1990:
Corrections and clarifications.
The INC. column Sept. 23 erroneously said Bernardine Dohrn had been convicted ``in connection with the infamous Brink`s robbery in New
York.`` In fact, she served seven months for civil contempt for not cooperating with a grand jury investigating the robbery.

- Chicago Tribune, 1990

 

 

 

At the time, she was unapologetic, and, to this day, she has made only guarded public expressions of remorse. Indeed, she told me she senses continuity between her past and her present work. Her brother-in-law John Ayers, adds, "I don't think she's ashamed in any way. She continues to have a radical view of American society." [...]

Stronger language comes from Peter Collier, a radical turned conservative whose 1989 book, Destructive Generation (co-written with David Horowitz), is bitterly critical of late-sixties political movements. "The part that I think is outrageous has very little to do with her," he says. "It's Northwestern and it's MacArthur and it's the bar. What it shows me is this moron Dan Quayle, he really hit a nerve here on this notion of the cultural elite, the idea that these people would protect and enhance the reputation of this vicious, bloody-minded woman who is kind of the Lady Macbeth of the movement. This is an amazing thing and it could happen only on the Left."

-- Rebel Without A Pause, Chicago Magazine, 1993

 

 

 

 In Destructive Generation, Collier recounts a chance meeting at around that time between Dohrn and Mark Rudd, another radical leader who'd also been underground for a time. "She asked him what he thought about the whole experience," Collier writes. "He told her that he thought of it as seven years of wasted life; that neither he nor they had accomplished anything, and he wished he'd gotten out at the beginning. 'She got furious [Rudd recounts] and said: "But what about the contribution we made to the overall struggle for armed struggle and revolution in America?" I couldn't believe the rhetoric. The same old shit. I just said to myself, "Oh, later for you, lady," and took off. Later on it occurred to me how her ego was still totally involved with all that dead history. How little she had looked at herself all those years. She should have had to admit how wrong her ideas were, how meshuga her self-conception was. A great revolutionary leader' She had no great revolutionary ideas. None of us did. She was just the daughter of a credit manager of a Milwaukee furniture store.'''

-- Rebel Without a Pause, Chicago Magazine, 1993

 

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Bill & Bernardine, Occupy Chicago May Day Protest, 2012

 

 

THE DAILY BEAST: All things considered, would you do it again the same way with the Weather Underground?

BILL AYERS: I feel like I’ve lived a very blessed life. Having three amazing kids and three amazing grandchildren, being a teacher for 40 years, it is all terrific stuff. And opposing the war in Vietnam with every fiber of my being? I couldn’t be happier or prouder of that. In terms of opposition to the war, I have no regrets. People want me to say I really regret being in extreme opposition of the war, and I don’t regret that.

Bill Ayers On the Weathermen, Obama’s Crap Job & More, April 3, 2013  

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Comments

[George Pal]

The depths of our descent may be calculated as inverse to the heights of their (Ayers, Dohrn, Obama, et al.) ascent. You may know them - members of a death cult - by the pretense that is their putatively political conviction, distilled – Hobsbawm's* Law – If it saves but one life it's worth the death of millions

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THE DAILY BEAST: All things considered, would you do it again the same way with the Weather Underground?
BA: I couldn’t be happier or prouder of that.

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*Eric Habsbawm – British Marxist historian, apologist, and historical amnesiac (historical amnesia may be to Marxists as short stature is to pygmies) – was asked by Michael Ignatieff, (Harvard academic and Canadian politician) whether he (EH) would still have his socialist society just as he would have it if the cost of it was 20 million dead.** Eric the Red simply answered, yes.

**Thousand Year Reichs start at 10 million dead. Low end Utopias start at 20 million. Obama strikes me as upper end carriage trade.