Dakota Beacon

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Recognize the names?

            No? Too bad. They are good friends and soul mates of President Barack Obama. They hosted Obama’s coming out party in 1995 when he ran for the Illinois state senate. Prior to that they were urban terrorists.

            Most folks do not know about Ayers or Dohrn any more than they know the real Obama. They know little about Obama’s past, his education, or the culture that shaped him.

            Given the fact that the traditional media never vetted Obama’s connection with Bill and Bernardine, why should anyone know anything of their relationship? CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, Washington Post, New York Times, Time Magazine and others either buried the story or ignored it altogether. Their mission was to see Obama elected.

            Leave it to the new media -- Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, National Review, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institute, talk radio, and a host of other news outlets -- to do what the old guard once did.

            The American Spectator is part of that new media. This quasi-intellectual magazine published by R. (Robert) Emmett Tyrrell since 1967 ran a detailed piece in the September 2011 issue detailing once again the exploits of Ayers and Dohrn (now Mr. and Mrs. Bill Ayers, if you will) and their decades-long association with President Obama.

            So, who are Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the pair Obama so fervently denies having associated with? In a word, they are 1960s radicals. Ayers and Dohrn were terrorists who, even today, state they wish they had done more than they did.

            A limousine revolutionary, Bill Ayers came from wealthy parents living in the well-to-do Chicago suburbs. His father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and politically well-connected. It was through Thomas Ayers’ political connections with the powerful Daley dynasty (both father and son spent decades as Chicago mayors) that produced the Obama-Ayers-Dohrn connection 20 years prior to the Obama presidency. The current White House Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, is brother of former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley.

            The American Spectator goes on to recount how Bill Ayers, during his hell-raising days, was an active member of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Weathermen believed in violent class hatred and worldwide revolution. As such, Ayers frequently engaged in violent demonstrations wreaking havoc on private property and injuring police. For Ayers this was not enough.

            Both Ayers and Dohrn had been on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” list for years. A 1976 FBI report on the Weathermen concluded that Ayers was responsible for 30 bombings and attempted bombings including the Pentagon in 1972 and the State Department in 1975. Most notorious was the 1981 armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck and the killing of two policemen and a Brinks guard.

            Dohrn, for her part, states she was a revolutionary communist and is still proud of that fact. In 1968 she and other Weathermen began meeting with communist governments and the Viet Cong. They also stepped up their campaign of violence.

            Federal indictments were handed down in 1970 charging Ayers and Dohrn with multiple felonies. The pair went underground only to re-emerge 11 years later. Richard M. Daley, then Cook County state’s attorney, represented Ayers and Dohrn. He had charges dropped against Ayers and reached a plea bargain for Dohrn in which she served less than a year in jail.

            As radicals, Ayers and Dohrn are neither repentant nor reformed. Both are now teaching in Illinois at the university level.

            Obama, Ayers and Dohrn share many of the same values as indicated by the issues and policies they worked on together including education reform, juvenile justice, community organizing and ACORN. All three went to great lengths in 2008 to mislead voters about their relationship.

            Tyrrell assumes the risks one would expect any publisher or journalist to take in fulfilling the roll of the Fourth Estate. In doing so he paid a price. During the 1990s Tyrrell wrote critically of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their involvement in witness tampering in the independent counsel’s probe into the Whitewater affair. The Clinton Justice Department retaliated with a harassing investigation against Tyrrell. In 2000 Tyrrell was forced to sell The American Spectator to venture capitalist George Gilder. By 2003 the Justice Department had failed to produce a single indictment and consequently dropped the investigation. Gilder then resold the magazine to Tyrrell.

            Tyrrell is spunky enough to take on another President’s administration. Three cheers for the courage of The American Spectator and the alternative media. Without this conservative counterculture Americans would have remained ignorant of the Obama-Ayers-Dohrn connection. Even now the traditional media continues as sycophants in the Obama re-election campaign.