How's the Weather Underground?

Got some, dirt on my shoulder,
could you brush it off for me
--Dirt Off Your Shoulder, Jay-Z
__________________

The New York Times' MoDo of all people picked up on Obama's unspoken reference to Jay-Z's rap recently but I don't think this one is so easy to brush off (Brush it Off), despite the urging of the press that anything negatively related to Obama really is insignificant.

Once upon a time in a long ago and far away place called America there was a revolutionary organization called the Black Liberation Army (BLA). A terrorist organization, their purpose was nothing less than violent overthrow of the government.

People named Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had organizational and operational links to the BLA. People who are now associates of presidential hopeful Barack Obama. The WaPo even wrote an apologia for the two last week, replete with dorky picture of Ayers with wife and unrepentant fellow revolutionary, Bernardine Dohrn (Former 60's Radical is Now Considered Mainstream.)

Ayers and Dohrn were also members of the radical leftist Weather Underground Organization (WUO). In the WUO position paper, signed by Ayers and Dohrn, they described themselves as a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements, to achieve the goal of "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world Communism."

(With their racially separate but equal "fighting forces," I guess they didn't quite get the idea that Plessy vs. Ferguson needed to go, too. I'm sure as the victorious, racially divided armies stood around, they would have figured that one out.)

They carried out a domestic terror campaign of bombings, jailbreaks and riots. However, the WaPo depicts Ayers and Dohrn as the most assimilated of 60-year-olds. Silly to make a flap over. Surely they wear Birkenstocks on the weekend and probably drive a Prius and drink soy lattes at the corner Starbucks.

They portray the WUO as a bunch of largely ineffectual white dweebs. But what these dweebs had planned was anything but mild.

WU Member Brian Flanagan said a planned bombing of U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Ft. Dix had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory." How does that strike you? It was foiled only due to an earlier explosion at their safe house.

Bill Ayers, now a respectable university professor said in a New York Times piece (9/11/01) that he does not "regret setting bombs. I believe we didn't do enough."

Yet the WUO seems to have acquired a patina of inexplicable respectability today. Something quaint and nostalgic for a colorless time. And though WUO never killed anyone outside of their group with their bombs, the BLA with which they were affiliated, did. Specifically, two police officers and an armed guard in a Brinks robbery near Nyack, NY, in 1981.

The memory of the WUO's extreme left wing ideology seems remote. Obama opts out by saying he was only 8 years old at the time, and attending a madrassa in Indonesia.

The MSM never raises the linkages and crossover activities of Ayers and Dohrn, people with whom Obama has enjoyed personal home visitations.

Does this make Obama a BLA terrorist or supporter? Maybe -- maybe not. But it is worth exploration before this election proceeds further.

The press ignored President Bush's purported drunken driving, and it is now evident that he has been driving this country while drunk.

Do we want Obama to drive the country while being black and sympathetic to Black Liberation Army ideology? His rageful mentor of 20 years, anti-American cleric Wright, is not encouraging. Obama had a choice between mild-mannered preacher and revolutionary, and he chose the latter.

We as a nation are acting as an individual leaping into a rebound relationship, and those rarely work out well. This is a time for considered introspection, not flip-flopping over into the thing that looks to be the opposite of the pain-inducing relationship [= the past eight years of George W. Bush & Co.]

We are in a Phony War on Terror [PWOT©] and fear is the daily product sold to the American taxpayer. We are told that al-Qaeda sleepers and undercover agents are in our very midst.

If so, then is it not possible that Obama's associate Ayers -- who has never recanted his violent activities -- and Dohrn are long-term BLA sleepers?

Their linkage with Obama needs to be explored.

--Jim and Lisa