Ayers: Bombing America Not A Big Deal

Someone should ask Barack Obama point blank: at what point during his 21-year relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers (and to a lesser-documented but no less real extent, Ayer's terrorist wife and Charles Manson fan, Bernadine Dohrn) did Ayers and Obama discuss Ayer's involvement with the Weather Underground, and what was said?

In over two decades of knowing each other and running in Chicago's political cauldron of aging New Left radicals, SDS leftovers, graying Weatherman, Marxist-Leninists, angry activist priests and fringe religions, the "glory days" of the 1960s and 70s must have come up in conversation.

Did the bombings ever come up in conversations at one another's homes? Did they ever have side conversations before or after the official business of their many working relationships in the ABCs Coalition, the Woods Fund, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?

Mr. Obama owes us an explanation.

For his part, a three-year-old interview in a current Ayer's story fills in part of the puzzle:

In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11 attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out "many other acts of terror ... even recently, that are comparable," and claimed he and his bomb-planting comrades were "restrained" in their actions.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama's political career in Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event for the future state senator in 1995.

Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by "hope and love," not despair, and said he did not think the group's violent acts, targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were "a big deal."

What a very interesting psychological profile Mr. Ayers must have.

Was it "hope" or "love" that led his fellow Weathermen to purchase two cases of dynamite, lengths of pipe, and roofing nails to build anti-personnel bombs?

Ayers was the boyfriend of fellow Weatherman bomb-builder Diana Oughten. Oughten was thought to be constructing massive pipe-bombs that used roofing nails for shrapnel in a Greenwich Village townhome, when they accidentally went off.

The target of those bombs wasn't to be a statute in an empty park at night.

It wasn't a federal building targeted at a time when most employees would have gone home.

The anti-personnel bombs she and other Weathermen were constructing were designed expressly to take the greatest human toll possible, and they were to be placed at a non-commissioned officer's dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, targeting young soldiers, their wives, their girlfriends.

The multiple bombs were built to cause as much loss of life as possible, similar what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold tried to do with their failed propane bombs at Columbine.

But the Weathermen never made it to their target of choice. The bombs they meant for innocents detonated as they were being assembled in a townhouse basement, killing terrorists Oughten, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins.

Perhaps they would be happy to know that the bombs worked as designed, if prematurely. From the pieces of Oughten they were able to collect after the blast and other evidence, they think Oughten was standing over one of the bombs, perhaps with her hands on it, when it went off.

If the Weathermen had been successful in detonating multiple nail-filled bombs a dance filled with off-duty soldiers and their dates, would Bill Ayers still claim that the bombings of his group were " no big deal"?

Bloody taffeta and lace and the images of shocked, mutilated survivors would have changed that equation.

Just because the Weathermen were spectacularly unsuccessful in their attempts to prepare for mass murder doesn't make them any less vile.

Nor does it excuse Barack Obama from consorting with them for over 20 years.

Update: Andy McCarthy runs very much a parallel route, Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist.

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