Spring Break
People shouldn't be fooled by GOP terrorist accusations
Evan Finch
Issue date: 10/8/08 Section: Opinion
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The well-orchestrated nature of political campaigns certainly guarantees this situation was planned for in advance. With Obama ahead in the polls he has the most to lose from nefarious accusations, while McCain has the most to gain.
Enter attack politics and Bill Ayers. For those of you unaware, he was a key member of the Weather Underground, a radical organization that in the late '60s splintered off from Students for a Democratic Society. Later in life, as a respected educator he's spent some time around the junior senator from Illinois.
Governor Palin said of Obama's association with Ayers: "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
Nice, Mrs. Palin. Of course your remarks are dependent on your constituents lacking any grasp on the tumultuous sociopolitical nature of the late 1960s and 1970s. First and foremost, does this mean Obama agrees with what Ayers did? Logic seems to escape arguments like these in favor of biased assumption.
Weathermen, as members of the Weather Underground were known, took action against the government for its systematic repression of political dissent particularly surrounding the Vietnam War.
Yes, the Weather Underground bombed various government structures throughout the early 1970s. Though it doesn't serve to justify, advanced warning was always provided to people inside the targeted buildings in order to provide time to evacuate. Why?
Let's recall My Lai, a massacre of hundreds of innocent Vietnamese, or COINTELPRO, a wildly illegal surveillance program run by the FBI discovered after dissidents broke into an FBI office, or the outright murder of Fred Hampton, which the city of Chicago has since admitted, or carpet bombing during Tet Offensive.
Where are all these perfect little flowers and butterflies Obama's supposed see, Mrs. Palin?
You may ask why someone like Ayers isn't in jail. It's because the FBI administrated programs so blatantly unconstitutional in order to stifle people who spoke out that the courts dropped most charges against the Weathermen who participated in the various bombings.
These were times of extreme political and social upheaval. Bill Ayers' goal, and though he said he regrets his methods, was to do economic damage to the U.S. governments' physical infrastructure, not to kill people. He did this because he wanted to see the killing and oppression of Vietnam stop, and with politicians like Richard Nixon and his infamous list of enemies (which he used to FBI to monitor and harass) I doubt ordinary means were going to enact any realistic political change.
Ayers is now a Ph.D. elementary education theorist and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He's been honored by the city of Chicago for his accomplishments. Perhaps people should educate themselves prior to making rash judgments about anything a politician says in an attack statement.
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