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This
election, the crusty hero with the
bulldog bite caught my eye early in the game. I envisioned him,
dressed in a coonskin hat, staring down Iran's
Ahmadinajad,
Venezuela's Chavez, North Korea's
Kim Jong-II
or Russia's Putin, if sabers rattle.
McCain's my man, I bragged to the world, but Obama the Omnipotent ran the
table.
On
November 5th, the morning sun yielded joy for 53% of the population. The more aged gent with the energy of a
racehorse and the integrity of a monk had his brains beat in, receiving
47% of votes to suffer a 6% loss.
Most voters, weary of bad financial news,
complained of an itchiness to tap the voting screen and be done with
it. Media voices thumped - vote your heart out, baby;
Democrats registered anybody with a heartbeat; and McCain and Palin
tried Vaudeville on Saturday Night Live.
The outlandish exhibition brought back the insanity of the Vietnam Era.
 "Yes,
'n how many times can a man turn his head,
pretending he just doesn't see?"
I finished college during the summers of the late 60's/early 70's while teaching
at a private school. Meanwhile, in 1969, at a meeting of
anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum, a guy named Bill
Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of
bombings that would include the Pentagon and United States Capitol.
During that era, I played my guitar and sang protest
songs with sweet gusto and flowing hair, yet newspaper accounts of the
Weathermen frightened me. A year after I graduated, Ayers authored the
'73 book Prairie Fire
which he dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. I
sensed a headache coming on whenever I tried to make sense of it all.
After all, I was busy: Teaching full time, analyzing the unusual
12-chord tuning structure of Joni Mitchell's hypnotic guitar, and
studying how Mary kept her swinging, blond hair stick-straight while
singing with partners, Peter and Paul.
"If
I had a hammer..."
Bill Ayers and his wife were hissing snakes whose
Weathermen group set bombs as part of their terrorist escapades. I
admired lovely activist Jane Fonda and her Vassar degree, disliked the war,
but
read the news accounts with confusion.
When
anti-Vietnam radical Bill Ayers confessed to the bombings of the
Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol and walked away a free man, I cringed. Due
to a mix-up by the FBI who wiretapped Ayers improperly, he served no jail
time at all and the case was dismissed. Ayers bragged, "Guilty as hell,
free as a bird - America is a great country."
Better yet, listen to Ayers’ wife. In
her 1969 heyday at the “War Council”
in Flint, Michigan, Bernadette Dohrn used
incendiary
rhetoric to
influence her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman “fork salute,” Dohrn shared her opinions about the bloody
murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant
actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other
inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to
death.
“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, and then they ate dinner in the
same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach!
Wild!” she ranted.
Today, Bill Ayers is an education
professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His wife,
Bernadette Dohrn, teaches at Northwestern University. You shake your head - how could that be if Ayers and Dohrn were such bad
people?
"I'd hammer out danger; I'd hammer out a warning..."
And what does this
have to do with Barack Obama?
Come
January 20, 2009,
will a cache of 1960's radicals finagle a musical chair to
influence policy? Do the likes of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and wife Bernadette Dohrn, who came out of hiding in the 1970’s, linger in
the shadows? Will
Chicago emerge as a side street Capitol? Why haven't I been able to unearth Obama's university
records, his thesis, or his editor commentary during his Harvard Review
stewardship? And, why are his undergrad years at Columbia U mysteriously guarded?
Exhibit A - Influential Families: With all
the arrogance they could muster, these two rich brats, Ayers and Dohrn,
from the right side of the tracks, thumbed their noses at the very
establishment that allowed them the freedom to wreck havoc in our
country. Afterwards, they carved cozy niches for themselves
in academia. From '84 to '88, well past the Weathermen Era, a
prestigious Chicago law firm employed Bernadette Dohrn. A key
partner hired Dohrn and knew Thomas G. Ayers, the
father of Dorn's husband. "We often hire friends," the partner
Triemens
told
the Chicago
Tribune.
However, Dohrn was not admitted to the New York or Illinois bar, due to
her criminal background..
Not bad
for a gal who served nearly a year in jail.
What does this have
to do with our new President-elect?
Jump to 1991, when Northwestern
University School of Law
in Chicago hired Dohrn as an adjunct professor of law. Trienens
claimed he
did not get her that job, despite that he sat on the Board of Trustees
of Northwestern, as did Dohrn's father-in-law who was chairman of the
board until 1986 when Trienens succeeded him. To spin this saga more - Trienens said that it was Robert Bennett, dean of the law
school, who hired her. Conveniently, Dohrn was hired as an "adjunct" so her
appointment did not need to be approved by the faculty, and no vote on
it was ever taken. A real back door placement.
No
need to examine the stepping stones of hubby Bill Ayers, a now esteemed education professor at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. He, too, owes his heart to
Daddy.
Fast forward to 1995. Ayers, now
the education professor, met Obama at a luncheon meeting about
school reform and lived in the same Chicago neighborhood as Obama, who was
named to the Project Board of Directors to oversee the distribution of
Annenberg grants in Chicago.
Since then,
their paths have crossed many times:
1. At a 1995 coffee that Mr.
and Mrs. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office 2. On the schools project
3. On a charitable board 4. In casual encounters
as Hyde Park neighbors. 5. On the board of a
community anti-poverty group, between 2000 and 2002, during which time
the board met twelve times.
Isn't this
is a lot more contact than Obama admitted throughout
the election in order to bury the association? Said Barack, "Those bombings that Ayres
is accused of happened when I was just eight years old," and that's all he would say.
Exhibit B - Michael
Barone,
columnist
with the
US News and World Report, Aug 22, 2008, wrote a piece entitled
, “Obama
Needs to Explain His Ties to William Ayers.”
“Ayers
evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and
politics—how much, we can't be sure unless the Richard J. Daley
Library" {relents and agrees to} “open(s) the CAC
archive. But most American politicians would not have chosen to
associate with a man with Ayers's past, or of Ayers's beliefs. It's
something voters might reasonably want to take into account.” -
Barone
More recently, who can forget Ayers' 2000 quote to
The New York Times, when he bragged right before the 9-11
tragedy , "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do
enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again," as saying "I
don't want to discount the possibility.”
"I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this
land."
I'll not dwell on another Obama buddy, Tony Rezko, a
Chicago developer
who contributed to Obama and even helped him find a residence by first
purchasing the home himself and then selling it to Obama for 300K less than what he paid for it. Rezko
will soon be sentenced to jail for corruption, bribery, mail fraud and
income tax invasion. He used a 14 million dollar grant to build senior citizen housing so
shabby that it was boarded up.
As of November 4, 2008, a freshly chosen horse
scratches at the gate to fix our nation’s track while citizens vex over questions like these:
1. Who will hold the United Auto Workers partially accountable for
the Big Three
(Ford, General Motors and Chrysler) industry’s ills,
and then trickle up to inspect the financial abuses of their high level
managers and CEO's? For example, with the UAW's historical
hourly wage package of $70-75 per hour, negotiated lower out of
desperation in 2007 and with worker buy out retirement packages of 140K,
does the auto industry
deserve our loyalty? With CEOs, like Ford CEO,
Alan Mulally, who received $2 million in base salary, a $4 million bonus, and more than $11
million of stock and options for 2007, how do we spray away the stench
so Henry Ford doesn't turn over in his grave?
2. Will our new president-elect suffer pay back
allegiances from the support of old
terrorist cronies, like Ayers and Dohrn, and religion-based supporters?
3. Will Obama remind citizens of the scales of justice
for those who toil at esteemed
colleges and universities to lead the American Dream yet keep them
reasonably accountable?
4. Will he help temper abortion statistics that now approach 49
million, when a quote by the likes of "The View" panelist, Sherri
Shepherd, didn't help with her careless words, "I Had More Abortions
Than I Would like to Count." A majority of voters support some form of
abortion rights, but within reasonable gestation limits of three
months. Obama, though, has been quoted to disregard this centuries-old
recommended time limit and chooses to validate the heinous late-term
abortion.
5.
Will the new Prez post billboards, "Have you noticed our SAT scores lately"?
and will the new administration tame a parental entitlement mindset
under "504” laws?
An Austin, Texas law firm, Richards Lindsay & Martin, LLP,
makes its
bucks entirely on defense of school districts and special education
protections. As a result, teachers everywhere are forced to plunk undeserved A’s and B’s on
report cards that muddy USA standards of achievement. Many "inclusion"
students couldn't pass a test if their lives depended on it, yet sport
high profile report cards that put average and better students to
shame.
But,
I choose to embrace
positive hopes despite my emerging
nervous twitch.
Senator, you are soon Head Man of the Land.
Voters know that election posturing produces tall tales on the stump
but when the 2009 diapered baby arrives, I ask that you not set
agendas that cause nightmares for moderates. Stand firm
against our enemies; they might test you more
than they would have challenged Ole Bulldog McCain. If you are a unifier, show it. Go centrist; you
campaigned as one.
Know that no handout of "bread and circuses" - to
quote Roman history - will dissuade some of us from tracing
your past to the
present. Yet,
Mr. Obama, I
offer my support if you can explain a few peccadilloes from your past
and erase the possibility of a radical 1960's era revisited.
"The answer, my friend,
is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind."
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