It Takes A Village
Sorry, that was Hillary’s line. But here’s another member of Obama’s trendy, progressive Hyde Park village. Washington Post fact-checks the flap over whether Obama should be held accountable for his association with unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers.
Powerline, with a transcript, finds the whiny Obama tired and drained by the relentless … politicking. You know what they say. Can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Gateway snorts at the change-hoping uniter’s effort to divert attention with a right-flanking manuever. Volokh helpfully explains how one thing is not like the other. My question is, what’s a guy who was quoted on Sept. 11, 2001, saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough” doing on the faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago? No painfully obvious remarks about the amoral radical leftism and selective tolerance for free speech of American universities, please.
Here’s a blogger that purports to be Ayers himself, parsing his lack of bomb-setting regret:
1.Regrets. I’m often quoted saying that I have “no regrets.” This is not true. For anyone paying attention—and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways—life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.
The illegal, murderous, imperial war against Viet Nam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese, a disaster for Americans, and a world tragedy. Many of us understood this, and many tried to stop the war. Those of us who tried recognize that our efforts were inadequate: the war dragged on for a decade, thousands were slaughtered every week, and we couldn’t stop it. In the end the U.S. military was defeated and the war ended, but we surely didn’t do enough.
2. Terror. Terrorism—according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N.—is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten, or coerce a population toward some political end. This means, of course, that terrorism is not the exclusive province of a cult, a religious sect, or a group of fanatics. It can be any of these, but it can also be—and often is—executed by governments and states. A bombing in a café in Israel is terrorism, and an Israeli assault on a neighborhood in Gaza is terrorism; the September 11 attacks were acts of terrorism, and the U.S. bombings in Viet Nam for a decade were acts of terrorism. Terrorism is never justifiable, even in a just cause—the Union fight in the 1860’s was just, for example, but Shernan’s March to the Sea was indefensible terror. I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently.
3. Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good—must win.
We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary. We need to bring our imaginations together and forge an unbreakable human alliance. We need to unite to transform and save ourselves as we fight to change the world and save humanity.
He calls it an “attempt at clarity,” but I’m not sure it’s a success. I’m not exactly seeing a denial that he actually said such a thing or a protestation that he was misquoted. It looks more like the alleged regret for failing to set enough bombs has not been taken in the larger context of his regrets over failing to stop the military-industrial complex’s imperialist genocide, or something like that. He does say he never advocated or participated in terrorism, but all the ideological yapping about what is or isn’t terrorism, again with no claim that he didn’t say what he is quoted to have said, looks a tad cute. I guess that comes down to what you think terrorism is, and within that context, what is is.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll pass on the uniting to transform and save. Be sure to read the letters at the link. They’re a hoot. Nice to hear he’s now an old geezer with grandkids living a quiet life now. Bygones.
As long as we’re talking about regrets, here’s a palate cleanser from the late great Sid Vicious. My Way. Damn, that was good. Here’s another version.
Topics: pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:08 pm on Thursday, April 17, 2008
9 Responses to “It Takes A Village”
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April 17th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
As someone who went to Vietnam at the beginning of Johnson’s term, I know that the lying SOB is incapable of recognizing reality. *We* (Ayres baby killers) didn’t lose the war! Scum like Ayres lost the war for us and we weren’t happy about it. Mr. Ayres should be more circumspect in his pronouncements, Louie the Fourteenth was just as convinced of the rightness of his cause. His end, though more permanent, should give Mr. Ayres pause for reflection, the war isn’t over yet. Mr. Ayres should rightly be shunned in history and the present, if possible, for his part in the loss in Vietnam and hopefully will be. Victory includes the defeat of our home grown enemy.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Edit the previous as required.
April 17th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it.
This is an out and out falsehood. As for “not stopping Vietnam”, I feel the actions of people like Ayers extended the war and cost thousands of lives. He may be a gentle old grandpa now, but he has blood on his hands that he can’t wash away with pious lefty platitudes.
April 17th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Rebecca, inside the gentle old grandpa is a scumsucking executioner waiting to come out when he thinks that he won’t be charged.
There are a lot of ‘If you really believed in this then you would…’ people out there, but for this one, I would say, and put myself in the position of practicing what I preach, ‘If you really believed the war was immoral then you would have established lines in the field against the US military and conducted yourself as a combatant instead of a coward.’
April 17th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Sorry, need to finish. Then I would be there to make sure he found out how incompetent he really was.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
My shipmates and I rescued hundreds of the million or so who took their childrens’ hands and jumped into the ocean to get away from the “gentle progressive peasants” Ayers thought were the victims of US “terrorism”. I wonder if he has any regrets about aiding and abetting that. I also notice he gives the USSR and the PRC a free pass in this whole moral equivalence charade as well, they are not mentioned in his goofy imperialism rant, in spite of the PRC’s foray into Vietnam, Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. Boy the commies sound like they sure did their share of bashing recalcitrant third world skulls for being such peaceful egalitarian souls. I don’t recall any of his violent acts in protest of those events, bombing the Kremlin or anything. And finally, if he is such a non-judgemental morally driven soul, how can he possibly tolerate living here in the very heart of evil while taking money from that fat gig at UI?
April 18th, 2008 at 2:57 am
Yeah, 2 million dead souls is a blip on his radar screen. The POS!
Too bad that he doesn’t read anyplace that I comment at.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am
It’s simply amazing that a man like this could be a professor at a major university. At least, it should be.
I’m really not sure that there is much of value being learned in non-professional, non-technical colleges at this point. The only real value of attending is that little slip of paper they give you at the end, which unfortunately, is itself only valuable as a way to order people into their appropriate jobs and career paths. (Which is a typical socialist’s image of how the world should be, by the way.)
April 18th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Ayres: “a revolution against . . . materialism”.
Right. Sure. OK, Mr. Hyde Park English professor. What sort of neighborhood do you live in? Got a very nice house, do you?
John Lennon: “Imagine no possessions.”
OK, Mr. multi-millionaire ex-Beatle. You go first.
Are they idiots? Frauds? Or both?