The quality of rehabilitation is very strained; Update: “Rehabilitation” in 1998

posted at 8:50 am on October 10, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Barack Obama has offered his latest defense of his political partnership with William Ayers.  Let’s call it Ayers v3.0.  First, readers will recall, Ayers was just some guy in Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood, whose adult children somehow went to the same school as Obama’s daughters.  When that didn’t fly, Obama allowed that they had worked on “a board” together, but never really interacted.  Now with the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge showing that Obama worked closely with the unrepentant domestic terrorist for at least a decade on two boards, Obama has a new explanation — he thought Ayers was “rehabilitated”:

In an interview with the sympathetic conservative talk radio host this afternoon, Obama offered the clearest explanation yet of how an extremely careful politician allowed himself anywhere near a former ’60s radical who would become a Republican target in this year’s presidential campaign.

Obama “had assumed” from Bill Ayers’ stature in Chicago, he told the Philadelphia-based Michael Smerconish, that Ayers had been “rehabilitated” since his 1960s crimes. …

“The gentleman in question, Bill Ayers, is a college professor, teaches education at the University of Illinois,” he said. “That’s how i met him — working on a school reform project that was funded by an ambassador and very close friend of Ronald Reagan’s” along with “a bunch of conservative businessmen and civic leaders.”

“Ultimately, I ended up learning about the fact that he had engaged in this reprehensible act 40 years ago, but I was eight years old at the time and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated,” Obama said.

First, it wasn’t just one reprehensible act.  The Weather Underground committed many reprehensible acts, including the bombing of the Pentagon, attempting to kill a judge and his entire family, and plotting to kill police officers and their wives in New York.  That last attempt failed when the nail bomb the terrorists were assembling blew up in their faces in a measure of poetic justice.  And William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were part of it all.

Obama says he presumed that Ayers had been “rehabilitated” because he was out in the open in Chicago.  However, Ayers wrote a book about his exploits in the Weather Underground and notoriously danced on the American flag to show his contempt in a Chicago Magazine profile to promote his memoirs.  He told the New York Times in an interview that ran on 9/11 that he “didn’t regret” his terrorist bombings, and that he wished he’d done more.  Obama wasn’t eight years old in 2001, was he?

That dog won’t hunt.  Obama wants us to trust his judgment, and now he’s trying to tell us that he had no idea that Ayers was still a radical intent on overthrowing the capitalist system and producing radical political change.  What exactly did Obama think Ayers was doing with his school projects to produce political activists out of children unfortunate enough to get sucked into them — projects that Obama sent money as part of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?  Did he just give away millions of dollars to his political partner without once looking into what he was doing?

That sounds like judgment you can trust, doesn’t it?  Boiled down, it says, “Trust me — I’m naive and incurious.”

Update: Maybe Obama didn’t watch ABC News or Connie Chung when his political partner and his wife appeared on national television in 1998, while Obama and Ayers worked on the CAC. Does this sound “rehabilitated” to you?

Not only do Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn reject the opportunity to express any remorse, Dohrn says she’d do it all again, with Ayers nodding. They don’t regret setting bombs, and they don’t regret committing terrorist acts. In fact, Dohrn says, “I wish we were more militant.”

Obama thought this was rehabilitation? Er, sure, just like he thinks they’re “mainstream”. His political partners bombed the Pentagon, and wish they had bombed more.

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for the video.

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