Guilty by Association

Former Weather Underground terrorist vandalist William Ayers has been given a plum op-ed by his friends at the New York Times to explain his non-association with Obama.

He provides no great revelations, only the same boilerplate reasons he used with CNN and GMA about staying out of the race to avoid the sound bite culture. Considering all the exclusive time and space he's now being given by the Obama-friendly Times, GMA, CNN perhaps the good professor should re-think that decision.

Matter of fact, the Times was so friendly they preferred to give him a platform rather than a grilling. For instance, they could have asked him what's on the Rashid Khalidi going-away party tape that was so sensitive the LA Times is still mothballing it; or whether he still holds some of the views he held during the writing of Prairie Fire. Evidently 'fit to print' only means the distinguished professor's version of the news, which involves deflecting from the issue:

We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

He didn't further elaborate on whether ending the war required a program to neutralize all the rich people and move America towards communism while staying in contact with Cuban operatives for some strange reason, although he did express a thin layer of blanket remorse, so it's hard to say.

The deflection has always been about how deep the relationship was between these two men today. One saw wisdom in a radical preacher and kept listening for 20 years, allowing that same preacher to marry him to a woman who'd previously worked with Ayers' wife; the other took recent pleasure in tap dancing on the US flag and has spent time praising Hugo Chavez's version of school reform. The fact that both were involved in two school reform boards was hardly trivial under that cloud.

Had he spoken to the press during the election Ayers ran the risk of bringing some of those views to the surface to the point where mainstream media types would be forced to question Obama's judgment or perhaps his real passions. So Ayers dummied up, choosing instead to lay low while Axelrod and company ran a deception campaign centered on the 60s when Obama was 8. It worked. But we still don't know the extent of the association, leading to dark narratives groping for the truth.

Perhaps as time marches on the truth will come out. Other WU members are now also beginning to talk and they're telling their leftist peers to chill--that Obama is only running a feint with his less than moonbatty cabinet picks, and that one fine day when the current crisis is over he'll steer the ship hard towards port.

The thing is nobody, not even the WU and Ayers, can be absolutely sure. Obama is in many ways still an enigma, and that says a lot about 'what we really know about this man'.

MORE 12/6/08

With all due respect to Jules Crittendon, he's still missing the point on this whole thing. Neither the bombings nor Ayers' parsing on them in later life means very much in regards to why he mattered in this election.

GOBSMACKED 12/6/08

Via LGF, Mona Charen opines on Obama's centrist cabinet picks. Don't worry Ms. Charen, he still hasn't picked all the traditional liberal positions yet. Or CIA. Just today he announced fellow Hawaiian General Shinseki would be at Veterans Affairs, a man whom conventional wisdom has assigned Bush-hating tendencies.

News outlets are already describing Shinseki's departure from DoD as "forced out", "ousted" or "quietly retired" despite the always correct Factcheck.org:

But the administration didn't force General Shinseki to retire. In fact, The Washington Times reported Shinseki's plans to retire nearly a year before his Feb. 25, 2003 testimony. The Times article was published April 19, 2002:

But indeed, the general was certainly correct on the troop levels and sounds like a good pick overall. If only Obama had agreed with him to send all those troops for the surge.