Posted on 04/18/2008 11:38:26 AM PDT by tobyhill
Sen. Barack Obama was asked during a televised debate about his links to a former member of the Vietnam-era militant Weather Underground organization, Bill Ayers, who is now a professor of education at the University of Chicago.
The Illinois senator running for the Democratic nomination for president served with Ayers on the board of an anti-poverty foundation in Chicago.
Obama said he was only eight-years-old when the Weather Underground committed its best known bombing and was being falsely linked with "detestable acts".
He noted that Bill Clinton, husband of his opponent Hillary Clinton, pardoned two members of the group during the last days of his presidency.
Following are some facts about the Weather Underground:
- The Weather Underground was formed in 1969 originally as Weatherman or the Weathermen, emerging from radical left-wing and militant student protest groups opposed to the Vietnam War.
- The name was based on a line from a Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues" that ran: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
- From 1969 until 1975 the group carried out a domestic terror campaign that included bombing the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, police facilities and banks. At least one police officer died and several injured.........
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Has there been a more influential songwriter in the last 50 years?
Buck Owens ?
The whole Bill Ayres controversy reminds me of the scene in I’m Gonna Get You Sucka where the character played by Clarence Williams is asked what happened to all the black militants who wanted to overthrow The System.
Williams answered:”Well,we all went down to take over the Federal Building that day but it turned out they were hiring so 1000 of us walked out with jobs.End of Movement”
Ayres dad was the President on Con Edison.He came up very bourgeois.And now he’s a university professor.
How very bourgeois.
NOW A YOUTUBE SING-ALONG - http://youtube.com/watch?v=W5InLaXYHYQ
When Mayor Daley, Obama can make Ayers, a radical killer-bomber just a nice professor, perhaps Illinois voters might change their minds on ‘hope and change’ in the coming election. Probably not but that might show how low Dems have fallen in common sense and historical understanding.
they opposed authority, government, laws, morality, etc.
the Weathermen advocated the overthrow of the US government by force - it is a matter of record - don’t forget.
a subversive organization by every fiber of its being.
and they practiced what they preached.
they were terrorists of the first order and in their hearts probably are today. And if the conditions were favorable, they would be at it again IMHO.
Remember well Ayers and his associates!!!
don’t dismiss him too lightly.
many of the 60’s-70’s radicals are doing the same or sit in Congress as Dems. Many have or had high positions in government bureaucracies. All are probably pushing the same ideologies from wherever they are.
Quick story and then I must run to work.
Knew an ultra radical during my days at USF.Bragged about”fighting the pigs”in Chicago,1968.Tried to recruit me into SDS and said we needed to put the capitalist pigs on trial.
He is currently the head of COLLECTIONS for a major city hospital near here.
The Oppressive Capitalist Pigs must have got to him.
I love the irony.
He refused to answer my e-mail two years ago when I wanted to question him about this change.
he is probably still harboring the same ideology - just below the surface.
The local Chicago press isn’t even trying to rattle Daley’s cage a little about supporting a terrorist who has no remorse...and he’s easy to rattle.
“That was 40 years ago” just ain’t gonna cut it, but no one’s making a peep about this.
ping
Who?
A new Classic Line.
Who hired him at the University of Illinois? Who appointed him to sit on the board at the Wood Fund? How many students has he taught? How many families has he associated with? It is obvious that he has found some form of respectability especially in liberal circles.
I mean there must be so many 60's radicals out there in mainstream America living the good life, while our former president, Bill Clinton, gets a pass for pardoning 16 violent FALN Terrorists, and two Weathermen, serving time in prison.
Obama was 8 years old when Ayers was associated with the Weathermen. I don't even know if Obama was living in the United States at the time. I asked some of my friends who are around Obama's age and they didn't even know what I was talking about, like, who are the Weathermen?
One of the greatest movies of all time. Jim Brown can actually be funny- Al Pacino cannot.
Keenan and Damon are brilliant. This movie has legs also because nobody objects to a joke pointed at oneself.
That says more about modern education than Obama. The Weathermen were not just “radicals” or “militants” they were conspirators, and murderers. Their aim was to overthrow the government of the United States. Their tools were bombs and guns.
The country is full of murderers running free; remember that Simpson chap?
The FBI got some of their information through means not acceptable to the justice dept.
All charges against him were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct during the long search for the fugitives
What I don’t understand about the Ayres case is just HOW he got the professor position at University of Chicago in the FIRST place?
Did they not check his background?
Another funny parody movie is Fear of a Black Hat and the Robert Townsend movie,Hollywood Shuffle.
I didn’t think they were fully ‘underground’.
Some 88% of college profs are supposedly left wingers. In my Dept, myself and one other is conservative. 12 are lefties. This is not just anecdotal. It is all over the nation. My BA school, American U. probably has zero conservs on staff. My MA school, Vanderbilt might have some but more and more schools just hire lefties. It is pathetic and it undermines any scholatic honesty in evaluating policies,history or culture.
I went to college from 1965 to 1971 and had many great professors of all political stripes.They did lean more to the Leftist spectrum but if you really wanted a conservative prof,they were not hard to find.
I didn’t see black hat but I know that without “Shuffle” there might be no “sucka”.
Well in stats, and certainly in my case, 1956-1961, I did not find many conserv. It of course depends on your state and region too. On the Left and Right Coasts you would find few conservs but picking a choosing a school say like Chapman in Orange, Ca., you would find a group.
I went to a Jesuit school,University of San Francisco.One thing that impressed me about the teaching Fathers is that they were sticklers for scholarly preciseness.You couldn’t just throw a bunch of flowery rhetoric at them in the papers you turned in.They wanted sources cited,footnotes properly attached and insisted on proper syntax and formatting.
Most were conservative but one of my best instructors,a Jesuit liberal named Fr.Johnson,later became the school president.He was fair to all political viewpoints,and,unlike many liberals,never penalized you for a good argument that had a conservative take on an issue.
Excellent, though I am a Prot pastor and history teacher, I learned how to punt a football from a Jesuit priest in Cape May, NJ. As two conservs, let us pray that we can win some down ticket races for the Pubs so the lefties do not overwhelm the nation in a sea of socialist pacifism.
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