Ayers

[cmac2012]

Does anyone know for a fact when Obama learned of Ayers' past?

I found this response on this topic on a blog. Not bad:

Six degrees of separation type connection. I have done community work locally with individuals I barely knew and found out later that they had previous criminal records. Now if I run for office will I be guilty by association? With this kind of logic serving diner at a soup kitchen can be politically damning act.

In the articles I've read about Ayers, they always include:

"I don't regret setting bombs . . . . . I feel we didn't do enough."

Don't get me wrong, I think the whole crowd was way off the deep end, and I was never in the same hemisphere with that kind of crap in those days.

My point is this quote is misleading. The larger context reveals that he said something like "I feel we didn't do enough . . . to stop the war." He's also said that upon seeing the documentary about the weathermen, he was struck by their arrogant belief that they alone had the answer.

I'm sick of this crap.

Come up with real facts or shut up.

[tankdriver]

Originally Posted by cmac2012

Come up with real facts.

lol facts.

[Botnst]

Unreal facts are cool.

In unrelated news, the discoverer of LSD died recently.

B

[cmac2012]

I'm sure ya'all are dying to read what Ayers had to say about how his words have been twisted:

Clarifying the Facts— a letter to the New York Times
September 15, 2001

To The Editors—

In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960’s about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.

Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.

Smith writes of me: “Even today, he ‘finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This fragment seems to support her “love affair with bombs” thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote:

We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it?

Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government’s love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.

Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia.

My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.

Bill Ayers
Chicago, IL

[Botnst]

They were happier days.

In unrelated news, did you hear that the guy who discovered LSD died?

[Chad300tdt]

Originally Posted by Botnst

They were happier days.

In unrelated news, did you hear that the guy who discovered LSD died?

This must have been intentional

[cmac2012]

Originally Posted by Botnst

They were happier days.

In unrelated news, did you hear that the guy who discovered LSD died?

You know, I'm wondering if there is any set of circumstances that would give you pause as long as the CiC had given the order, Old Glory was raised, and American uniformed men were in harms way.

Lessee, loading thousands of jews on trains and shipping them to the great beyond? Sir, yes sir!

If the high tech slaughter of a bunch of peasants 8,000 miles away, with no navy or air force that means anything, doesns't give you pause, a bunch of peasants who didn't so much as insult our families, I can only conclude that there would be no act, regardless of the depth of criminal depravity, that you would refrain from, as long as sufficient nationalistic fervor and official sanction had been secured.

Shake hands with your postcard painting buddy.

[Palangi]

Here are a few quotes you might have missed.....


From: “Our Class Stand” by Bernardine Dohrn
Osawatomie, Autumn 1975 edition

“We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism..”


From: “Politics in Command” by Celia Sojurn and Billy Ayers
Document issues in the spring of 1976

“Our goal is to build communist organization toward the stage where armed struggle becomes a mass phenomenon led by a Marxist-Leninist party; a revolutionary stage.”


Quote taken during “Days of Rage” Chicago, 1968


Bill Ayers:
“We are revolutionary Communists. We’re fighting to destroy imperialism and establish a socialist state.”


Quote taken in Chicago, 1970

Bill Ayers:
“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.”


These people actually issued a declaration af war against the United States. I don't remember them signing any peace treaty.

Tell me why it is not proper to ask a presidential candidate about his associations with these azzholes??

And by the way, Barack Heinrich Obama is a millionaire. Do you suppose maybe Ayers would like to bump him off?? Actually, Ayers is now a rich kollege perfesser. Maybe he should bump himself off.....

[cmac2012]

Have you read Ayers letter above? He's now an apparently respected educator in the dept. of education. What a state senator is not supposed to go to a professors house?

And once more, OF COURSE that crowd were creeps. Their arrogance was on steroids. But you have to bear in mind, that America was a strange place at that time. Vietnam disgusted me as well as my WW2 war hero daddy.

I never burned the flag but I hated it for a long time onna acount of that war.

[Palangi]

Respected by who? Other leftist crackpots?? Doesn't mean squat to me.

Dohrn wrote childrens books. Does that change the fact that she was a terrorist? Not in my book.

Certain things aren't forgivable. Attempting violent communist revolution is one of them.

Far as I am concerned, line 'em up along side of Jane Fonda and just shoot 'em.

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by cmac2012

You know, I'm wondering if there is any set of circumstances that would give you pause as long as the CiC had given the order, Old Glory was raised, and American uniformed men were in harms way.

Lessee, loading thousands of jews on trains and shipping them to the great beyond? Sir, yes sir!

If the high tech slaughter of a bunch of peasants 8,000 miles away, with no navy or air force that means anything, doesns't give you pause, a bunch of peasants who didn't so much as insult our families, I can only conclude that there would be no act, regardless of the depth of criminal depravity, that you would refrain from, as long as sufficient nationalistic fervor and official sanction had been secured.

Shake hands with your postcard painting buddy.

That's a great reason to dynamite you rown people alright. Can't argue with that logic. That Ayers is my hero, yassuh! He was helpinmg those chickens come home to roost!

Man I do love that LSU or LSD. Whatever.

B

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by Palangi

Here are a few quotes you might have missed.....


From: “Our Class Stand” by Bernardine Dohrn
Osawatomie, Autumn 1975 edition

“We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism..”


From: “Politics in Command” by Celia Sojurn and Billy Ayers
Document issues in the spring of 1976

“Our goal is to build communist organization toward the stage where armed struggle becomes a mass phenomenon led by a Marxist-Leninist party; a revolutionary stage.”


Quote taken during “Days of Rage” Chicago, 1968


Bill Ayers:
“We are revolutionary Communists. We’re fighting to destroy imperialism and establish a socialist state.”


Quote taken in Chicago, 1970

Bill Ayers:
“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.”
... .....

They wuz jus' foolin' around. What's the big deal?

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by cmac2012

...
I never burned the flag but I hated it for a long time onna acount of that war.

Ooooooo, that really wuz bad.

[tankdriver]

Originally Posted by cmac2012

Have you read Ayers letter above? He's now an apparently respected educator in the dept. of education. What a state senator is not supposed to go to a professors house?

And once more, OF COURSE that crowd were creeps. Their arrogance was on steroids. But you have to bear in mind, that America was a strange place at that time. Vietnam disgusted me as well as my WW2 war hero daddy.

I never burned the flag but I hated it for a long time onna acount of that war.

It's hardly fair to let someone change their view of the world over the last 40 years. I wonder how old he was in 1970.

[Botnst]

Originally Posted by tankdriver

It's hardly fair to let someone change their view of the world over the last 40 years. I wonder how old he was in 1970.

Lots of murderers get life. Should they be let out? How about if they're really smart, erudite, and remorseful? How about if their dumb as a stump, illiterate and remorseful?

What if Ayers had only killed 1 person and felt really, really bad about it and if the victim was somebody unimportant like a cop or a vagrant?

B