Even republicans don't like Romney's sour grapes

[_cinepro]

I agree that Republicans need to move on from the "people voted for Obama because they like free stuff" rationalization. That may have been a factor for some people, but it's an unproductive argument.

Although I wonder how much help Bush got in 2004 from his support for the prescription drug benefits for seniors.

[_Droopy]

Is Billy Ayers in touch with the country, Eric?

So now he's "Billy" Ayers, eh?

Do conservatives/republicans/reactionaries still assert Ayers is President Obama's ghostwriter?


P.S

The Real Bill Ayers

So, in other words, you're going to take the words of a pathological liar and unrepentant terrorist who intended to kill and maim numerous innocent people and subvert, overthrow, and destroy constitutional, liberal democratic government, over a substantial corpus of historical documentation and evidence?

Yes, you are, because that's who you are, Eric.

Par for the proverbial coarse.

[_Droopy]

P.S., here's the real William Ayers:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/indi ... indid=2169

Bill Ayers was born in December 1944 and was raised in a Chicago suburb. In the mid-1960s he taught at a radical alternative school -- part of the "free school movement" -- where students addressed teachers by their first names, and where no grades or report cards were given. By age 21, Ayers had become the director of that school. In 1968 he earned a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Michigan.

In the late Sixties, Ayers became a leader of the Weather Underground (WU), a splinter faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Characterizing WU as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.” One of Ayers' fellow WU leaders was Bernardine Dohrn, the woman who would later become his wife.

In a July 29, 1969 speech which he delivered at the University of Oregon, Ayers boasted of SDS's role in the Venceremos Brigades, a project initiated by the Cuban intelligence agency to recruit and train American leftists as “brigadistas” capable of waging guerrilla warfare.

Ayers was an active participant in the 1969 “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago, which were led by WU's antecedent group, Weatherman. In the mayhem, nearly 300 members of the organization engaged in vandalism, arson, and vicious attacks against police and civilians alike. Their immediate objective was to spread their anti-war, anti-American message. Their long-term goal, however, was to cause the collapse of the United States and to create, in its stead, a new communist society over which they themselves would rule. With regard to those Americans who might refuse to embrace communism, Ayers and his comrades -- including Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Linda Evans, Jeff Jones, and numerous others -- proposed that such resisters should be sent to reeducation camps and killed. The terrorists estimated that it would be necessary to eliminate some 25 million people in this fashion, so as to advance the revolution.

In his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts his life as a Sixties radical and boasts that he “participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.” Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers writes, “Everything was absolutely ideal.... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.” He further recalls his fascination with the fact that "a good bomb" could render even "big buildings and wide streets ... fragile and destructible," leaving behind a "majestic scene" of utter destruction.

All told, Ayers and the Weather Underground were responsible for 30 bombings aimed at destroying the defense and security infrastructures of the U.S. "I don't regret setting bombs," said Ayers in 2001, "I feel we didn't do enough." Contemplating whether or not he might again use bombs against the U.S. sometime in the future, he wrote: “I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.”

In 1970, Ayers’ then-girlfriend Diana Oughton, along with Weatherman members Terry Robbins and Ted Gold, were killed when a bomb they were constructing exploded unexpectedly. That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by hundreds of Army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Ayers himself attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.” Notably, Ayers' fingerprints were found at the bomb-making site, along with an assortment of anti-personnel weapons, stabbing implements, C-4 plastic explosive, and dozens of Marxist-Leninist publications.

After the death of his girlfriend, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn spent the rest of the decade as fugitives running from the FBI.

In 1974 Ayers co-authored -- along with Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn -- a book titled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism. This book contained the following statements:

"We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men ... deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism."
"Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."
"The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war."
"Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle."
"Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.
Without armed struggle there can be no victory."
"We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society."
"Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to mobilize poor and working people against imperialism."
"Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit."

The title Prairie Fire was an allusion to Mao Zedong's 1930 observation that "a single spark can start a prairie fire." Ayers and his co-authors dedicated the book to a bevy of violent, America-hating revolutionaries -- including Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin who had killed Robert F. Kennedy.

In 1980 Ayers and Dohrn surrendered to law-enforcement authorities, but all charges against them were later dropped due to an “improper surveillance” technicality -- government authorities had failed to get a warrant for some of their surveillance. Said Ayers regarding this stroke of good fortune: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird. America is a great country.”

Next, Ayers embarked on a quest to radicalize America by working within, rather than outside of, the nation's mainstream institutions. In particular, he sought to embed himself in a position of influence within the education establishment. In 1984 Ayers earned a master's degree in Early Childhood Education from Bank Street College. Three years later he received a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Columbia University's Teachers College.

In 1987 Ayers was hired as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, a post he would hold until 2010. As of October 2008, his office door at the university was adorned with photographs of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X.

In 1994 Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Michael Klonsky were among those listed on a "Membership, Subscription and Mailing List" for the Chicago Committees of Correspondence, an offshoot of the Communist Party USA.

In 1995, Ayers and Dohrn hosted meetings at their Chicago home to introduce Barack Obama to their neighbors and political allies, as Obama prepared to make his first run for the Illinois state senate. Also present at the meetings were Alice Palmer and Quentin Young.

There is strong evidence suggesting that Ayers wrote Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama's 1995 memoir.

In 1995, Ayers -- whose stated educational objective is to “teach against [the] oppression” allegedly inherent in American society -- founded a “school reform organization” called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), which granted money to far-left groups and causes such as the community organization ACORN. Ayers' teacher-training programs, which were funded by CAC, were designed to serve as “sites of resistance” against an oppressive social system.

Ayers also created, in collaboration with longtime communist Mike Klonsky, the so-called "Small Schools Movement" (SSM), where individual schools committed themselves to the promotion of specific political themes and pushed students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” A chief goal of SSM is to teach students that American capitalism is a racist, materialistic doctrine that has done incalculable harm to societies all over the world. One of the more infamous students to attend an SSM school (Mountain View High School in Arizona) was Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who -- on January 8, 2011 in Tucson -- shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head, leaving her in critical condition. Loughner also sprayed gunfire at others in the vicinity, wounding thirteen and killing six.

In 1999 Ayers joined the Woods Fund of Chicago, where he served as a board member alongside Barack Obama until December 2002, at which time Obama left. Ayers went on to become Woods' board chairman.

Notwithstanding his radical past, Ayers in 2001 rejected the claim that he and his fellow Weather Underground members had ever been terrorists. “Terrorists destroy randomly,” he wrote, “while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.”

Also in 2001, Ayers expressed his enduring hatred for the United States: “What a country. It makes me want to puke.”

At a 2007 reunion of former members of the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, Ayers reemphasized his contempt for the U.S., asserting that the nation's chief hallmarks included "oppression," "authoritarianism," and "a kind of rising incipient American form of fascism." Moreover, he claimed that the U.S. was guilty of pursuing "empire unapologetic[ally]"; waging "war without end" against "an undefined enemy that’s supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism"; engaging in "unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion"; oppressing brown- and black-skinned people with "white supremacy"; perpetrating "violent attacks" against "women and girls"; expanding "surveillance in every sphere of our lives"; and "targeting ... gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture ..."

In November 2007, Ayers spoke at a Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) "Convergence" in Chicago. Though not officially listed as a member of MDS, he has referred to the organization's activities as "our work."

In March 2008 Ayers was elected (by a large majority of his peers) as Vice President for Curriculum Studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), putting him in a position to exert great influence over what is taught in America's teacher-training colleges and its public schools. Specifically, Ayers seeks to inculcate teachers-in-training with a “social commitment” to the values of “Marx,” and with a desire to become agents of social change in K-12 classrooms. Whereas “capitalism promotes racism and militarism,” Ayers explains, “teaching invites transformations” and is “the motor-force of revolution.” According to a former AERA employee, “Ayers' radical worldview, which depicts America as “the main source of the world's racism and oppression,” thoroughly “permeates” AERA.

Ayers has also contributed money to Teaching for Change, an organization that seeks to turn K-12 schools into “centers of justice where students learn to read, write, and change the world.”

Ayers' influence in education is not limited solely to his work in the United States. Indeed, he currently sits on the board of the Miranda International Center, a Venezuelan government think tank dedicated to bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan schools. (Ayers greatly admires Venezuela's Marxist President Hugo Chavez.)

At a May 18, 2009 rally organized by the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine, Ayers joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright in addressing a crowd of more than 400 people at the First United Church of Oak Park (a Chicago suburb) just prior to participating in an annual walk designed to call attention to Israel's alleged crimes against the Palestinian people. Today Ayers is an affiliated activist of the anti-Israel organization Free Gaza, along with such luminaries as Bernardine Dohrn, Jodie Evans, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Adam Shapiro. Ayers is also an endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. To view a list of additional notable endorsers and supporters, click here.

In August 2010, Ayers announced that he was retiring from his teaching post at the University of Illinois. However, he continues his work with AERA and serves also as an editorial-board member of In These Times, a Chicago-based socialist journal.

Beginning in the fall of 2011, Ayers was a strong supporter of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which he described as a “North American Spring,” akin to the “Arab Spring.” Said Ayers: “These kinds of movements expand our consciousness of what’s possible.” On October 19, 2011, Ayers led a “teach-in” for members of "Occupy Chicago" (that city's OWS contingent) on the tactics and history of “non-violent direct action.” He lauded the Chicago activists for their “brilliance”; condemned America's “violent culture”; and derided the Tea Party movement as a bastion of “jingoism, nativism, racism.”

In March 2011, Ayers addressed an Occupy Wall Street contingent in New York City and told them: "I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference. Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it."

Ayers has authored a series of books about parenting and educating children, including: A Kind and Just Parent; The Good Preschool Teacher; Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools; and Teaching Towards Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom.

Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn raised three children. One is named Malik (the Muslim name of Malcolm X). Another is named Zayd (after Zayd Shakur, a Black Liberation Army revolutionary who was killed while driving the cop-killer JoAnne Chesimard -- a.k.a. Assata Shakur -- to a hideout). The third, a boy named Chesa Boudin, was raised by Ayers and Dohrn after his natural parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their roles in the 1981 Brinks murders, a joint Weatherman and Black Liberation Army operation that resulted in the killing of two police officers and an armed guard.

[_Eric]

unrepentant terrorist who intended to kill and maim numerous innocent people...

Not true.

...over a substantial corpus of historical documentation and evidence?

What historical documentation are you referring to? Let's evaluate it.

Yes, you are, because that's who you are, Eric.

Any person with Netflix (they even offer a 30-day free trial) can watch The Weather Underground for themselves and see if your description of Bill Ayers and The Weather Underground is fair.

[_Droopy]

Not true.

Utterly factual - including in Ayers own words. There is a huge corpus of analysis and scholarship on Ayers and the Weather Underground - serious reading, Eric - as opposed to Hollywood revisionist propaganda films made by nostalgic shills for the very general philosophy Ayers supported. You might want to think about getting more of your history from such serious reading, Eric, and less from the Dream Factory.

What historical documentation are you referring to? Let's evaluate it.

David Horowitz, the leading historian and analysis of the New Left in the country, and who knew Ayers (and many other leading intellectuals and activists of the era) has written extensively and exhaustively on Ayers, the SDS, and the Weather Underground. Start there, there's a huge amount of ground to cover. You might also read Ayers own books for yourself. He's as unrepentant as any criminal and criminal mind could ever be, as a number of his own statements in print attest.

The fact that you're even defending this individual, Eric, is a sick and dreary testament to what really lies at the core of the dark heart of the Left. You are not, by any means, the only one to have abandoned both your intellectual and moral bearings and balance to this degree. The sixties and early seventies were choked with people such as yourself (I know, as I was there) and the modern left is still composed of people very much like them (as they are their intellectual, moral, and psychological progeny).

[_Eric]

Not true.

Utterly factual - including in Ayers own words.

You mean words like these?

“We never hurt anybody and we never killed anybody.”

David Horowitz, the leading historian...

David Horowitz? The homeless guy?

Horowitz has since waged a compulsive rhetorical assault on new left icons like Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, and Tom Hayden, who remind Horowitz of his former self and have built productive lives (and earned university sinecures) without fully reckoning with the enormity of past sins.

Start there, there's a huge amount of ground to cover. You might also read Ayers own books for yourself. He's as unrepentant as any criminal and criminal mind could ever be, as a number of his own statements in print attest.

More on your best source:

[Horowitz] still travels the country making the case for a muscular Zionism, but he has never visited Israel. He rejects economic determinism as a discredited Marxist method of interpretation, but on climate change his “leftist instincts are very suspicious. There’s too much money going to scientists to say there’s global warming.”

The fact that you're even defending this individual, Eric, is a sick and dreary testament to what really lies at the core of the dark heart of the Left.

You brought up Ayers, not me. I don't find him to be relevant at all, but as always, I'm more than happy to journey with you down the rabbit hole.


P.S

[No] university archive has asked to collect [Horowitz's] papers and reminiscences... in 2012, his books are not just ignored by the New York Times, but by the Weekly Standard and National Review.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... d-horowitz

Ouch.

[_Droopy]

You mean words like these?

“We never hurt anybody and we never killed anybody.”

Since you quite clearly failed to even read what I've posted thus far (and prefer ignorant, irrelevant ad hominem smears against Horowitz in lieu of serious argument) I'll have to give you another chance to at least appear intellectually competent:

Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist
By Andrew C. McCarthy

In that Fox interview that Rich linked to, Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people — the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, “by design”; they only wanted to cause property damage:

Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal.

Right.

First of all, “that moment in the townhouse” he’s talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers’ Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization’s ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he “participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972,” he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

And he wasn’t singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama’s motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman “War Council” meeting in 1969, Ayers’ fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” And as Jonah recalled yesterday, “In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a threefingered ‘fork’ gesture its official salute.” They weren’t talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself “the Family” colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.
On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk, were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm. semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.

When she was sentenced to 58 years’ imprisonment in 1985, the only remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned Rosenberg — commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

And as to his words, what I'm actually referring to is things like:

"I don't regret setting bombs...I feel we didn't do enough." (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books ... wanted=all) as well as other statements, including one he made in Fugitive Days, in which, within the context of any possibility of using similar tactics against the Untied States as the Weathermen used in the late sixties and early seventies, "I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility...”

""I acted appropriately in the context of those times."

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magaz ... o-Regrets/

Ayers capacity for the grossest wallowing in self-delusion, as well as his utter moral vacuity is only matched by that of his sycophants - fellow Morlocks feeding on the flesh of those who have actually created and maintain the nation. Oh, and the nation? America?

"What a country. It makes me want to puke.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... 7rdlhy.asp

[_Eric]

I'll have to give you another chance to at least appear intellectually competent:

Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist
By Andrew C. McCarthy

In that Fox interview...

I already know about what he did with the Weathermen. I also know this is a huge distraction from the fact that North Carolina's delegates are out of touch with the rest of the country, but that's okay. If the invocation of the extreme right's boogeyman, Bill Ayers, is your best response to this post:

Because North Carolina's delegates are sooo in touch with the rest of the country...


(Racist Eugenics: Alive and Well in NC)

Then I think it's obvious who lost that argument.

The bottom line is that Ayers said he never intended to hurt any innocent people, and that is supported by the facts.

Horowitz blames the Black Panther Party for the death of his friend, becomes a racist himself and -- surprise -- aligns with the extreme right. The guy can't even succeed in his new career as a professional provocateur, and yet I am supposed to take him for his word over a primary source? Ayers is still alive, he's still talking, there is no reason to believe any of the hacks you've referenced over the man in question.

[_beastie]

2 governors and an, arguably not competent, advisor...wow! really supports the broad claim of "even republicans".

so when 5 of the 157 delegates from NC did not endorse Obama at the convention we should have posted "even democrats don't want to nominate Obama"

This is all really moot, as the Republican party has now rendered itself irrelevant to the conservative movement and to the struggle for constitutional, limited government.

A party that has, in as many years, delivered itself into the jaws of abject defeat time and time again, against opponents who should have been raw meat waiting to be cooked and served, has no credibility in assessing their last epic fail against an incumbent who had no record whatsoever to run on and a history of both feckless incompetence and a very disturbing ideological core.

These words are music to my ears. Dare we hope that the droopies of this world will finally leave the republican party alone and form their own party?

[_beastie]

2 governors and an, arguably not competent, advisor...wow! really supports the broad claim of "even republicans".

so when 5 of the 157 delegates from NC did not endorse Obama at the convention we should have posted "even democrats don't want to nominate Obama"

Oh, plenty more are lining up. Including Chris Christie.

Just in case anyone was tempted to believe Romney's retraction of his 47% comments, he helped us out by letting us know that retraction was political BS. His 47% comment and these taped comments are the true Romney - a creature so born of privilege that he doesn't even recognize what it's done for his life, and what the lives of others are like.