Mainstream Chicago professor: Violent resistance not necessarily the answer

posted at 12:05 pm on September 9, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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How long after today’s statement will we hear Barack Obama declare that “this is not the Bill Ayers that I knew”?  Unfortunately for Obama, Ayers continues to show that he’s the same unrepentant domestic terrorist we all knew, and whom Obama called “mainstream” on his campaign site until his team wisely scrubbed it in the spring.  In a cartoon on his site, Ayers doesn’t express an ounce of remorse for his campaign of violence and terror.

Here’s the full statement, as provided by Jake Tapper, who can’t believe the part I bolded:

“It’s impossible to get to be my age and not have plenty of regrets. The one thing I don’t regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being.

“During the Vietnam war, the Weather Underground took credit for bombing several government installations as a dramatic form of armed propaganda. Action was taken against symbolic targets in order to declare a state of emergency. But warnings were always called in, and by design  no one was ever hurt.

“When I say, ‘We didn’t do enough,’ a lot of people rush to think, ‘That must mean, “We didn’t bomb enough s—.”‘ But that’s not the point at all. It’s not a tactical statement, it’s an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, ‘we’ means ‘everyone.’

“The war in Vietnam was not only illegal, it was profoundly immoral, millions of people were needlessly killed. Even though I worked hard to end the war, I feel to this day that I didn’t do enough because the war dragged on for years after the majority of the American people came to oppose it. I don’t think violent resistance is necessarily the answer, but I do think opposition and refusal is imperative.”

First, let’s get the quote back into its context, which Ayers elides in this new spin.  The entire quote was ”I don’t regret setting bombs.  I feel we didn’t do enough.” He clearly was talking tactics in the context of that quote, and nothing he says today changes that.

But even beyond that, Ayers offers no remorse at all for his actions.  He never even offers the possibility that he should apologize for his crimes.  In the September 2001 article that ran on the day that 3,000 Americans died in terrorist attacks, Ayers said that he’d consider doing it all over again:

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ”I don’t want to discount the possibility,” he said.

And in today’s statement, Ayers says that violent resistance is not necessarily the answer — as if in a democracy, one has to consider that among the options for political change.  Is that what Barack Obama calls mainstream? Under what circumstances would Obama see violent resistance in America as a mainstream option?

The more one sees and hears from Bill Ayers, the clearer Obama’s connections to radicals becomes.  Hopefully, we will hear even more from Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger in the next eight weeks.

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