Obama’s strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama’s 1995 political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama’s joint service with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on academic panels, and what the New York Times called Obama’s “rave review” (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers’s book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed “a searing and timely account” in the Chicago Tribune.

For all the attention, the actual content of Ayers’s 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, as well as the political context of Obama’s interest in it, have so far passed unremarked. Obama supporters paint Ayers as having mellowed since his radical days, pointing to his wonkish interests. Yet Ayers’s radicalism pervades his book on Chicago’s juvenile court system. Founded in 1899 (long before juvenile murder rates shot off the charts), Chicago’s juvenile court was the first in the world, intended to serve as “a kind and just parent” to offenders. Ayers’s title, he explained in the book, is meant to “bristle with irony” as a commentary on an American “society out of control.” Ayers expressed the same sentiment more bluntly in an interview published in the New York Times shortly after 9/11, when he not only dismissed the notion of the United States as a “just and fair and decent place,” but said the claim “makes me want to puke.” A Kind and Just Parent is a thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully written book, which provides revealing and sometimes disturbing glimpses of life at a Chicago juvenile detention facility. The book also virtually defines the phrases “liberal guilt” and “soft on crime.” Ayers agon-izes over a high school field trip years ago, on which he and other white students toured a juvenile court system largely populated by black boys. When recounting horrific crimes-and even his own mugging-Ayers focuses on the terrified insecurity of the perpetrators, rather than the harm they inflict. Testifying at the trial of a young felon he’d been tutoring, Ayers calls him “nervous, a little shy  .  .  .  eager to please.” The prosecutor responds: “Would you call shooting someone eight times at close range ‘eager to please?’” Actually, Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a young murderer had “slavishly followed the orders” of his gang leader, rather than acting of his own free will.

Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper “structural problems of the system.” Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the “normal” and the “deviant.” The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society’s prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America’s prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers’s tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright’s anti-prison rants are plain.

Given his decision to recommend Ayers’s book in the Tribune, it’s fair to say that Obama is at least broadly sympathetic to this perspective. When Obama offers examples of ill-conceived legislation, he often points to building prisons: Instead of building another prison, why not expand health care entitlements? Biographer David Mendell cites Obama’s irritation with fellow legislators who “grandstand” by passing tough-on-crime legislation, while letting bills designed to bring “structural change” languish. Debating Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama bragged that he had “consistently fought against the industrial prison complex.” Obama’s Hyde Park Herald column echoes these points.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15386&R=13C6D7921

The prime example of why Democrats think Republicans are evil is the same as when women who get raped in Saudi Arabia and Iran are seen as the source of evil and thus, like all evil, must be destroyed to restore Goodness and Wholeness to greater society.

The existence of the victims that are created by evil methods and goals cannot be allowed to spread and lay claim to justice: for then the Democrats would fall and so endeth the dream of a perfect world. You have to be able to exploit people and then say that the people being exploited are to blame for everyone’s problems in order to maintain Democrat power and purity.

-Ymarsakar

Direct hit!

they are still cloning those folks. Just wait Book and be patient. You’ll hear them soon enough. You will hear all of them soon enough.

This is a prime example of why Democrats think Republicans are “evil.”

The prime example of why Democrats think Republicans are evil is the same as when women who get raped in Saudi Arabia and Iran are seen as the source of evil and thus, like all evil, must be destroyed to restore Goodness and Wholeness to greater society.

The existence of the victims that are created by evil methods and goals cannot be allowed to spread and lay claim to justice: for then the Democrats would fall and so endeth the dream of a perfect world. You have to be able to exploit people and then say that the people being exploited are to blame for everyone’s problems in order to maintain Democrat power and purity.

How can we as socialists or as communists or as leftists

I mentioned before in the Republicans are Evl Thread that there is no such thing as a “liberal” that can be arbitrarily stretched to fit any random group of people. There are no such things as liberals. There are only fake liberals, communists, socialists, Leftists, and classical liberals. You can add some more, but those are the basic ones in contention between Democrats and Republicans.

THe overlap between them does exist but they differ depending on the individuals in question and the strength of the movement. For example, many socialists refuse to call themselves communists, instead they want to call themselves “Social Democrats” because obviously democracy combined with socialism is so much better than communism. It’ll work this time, instead of communism. But communism is no different from socialism on a fundamental level and yet on the surface they have many things that separate them.

It is the same relationship between the aristocracy and the socialist revolutionaries. You would think that they would be on opposite sides since aristocrats want to conserve power and revolutonaries want to shake things up. However, in reality, both of those categories are just two sides of the same coin. Both want power to accumulate all at a certain point rather than being diffused downwards towards the people. The revolutionaries just want to accumulate power in their pre-chosen location rather than the aristos’.

Obama:

Did not know Ayers was a serious Weather Underground terrorist bomber, who avoided killing people only by dumb luck;

Did not know, despite being there twice a month (by his own admission) for twenty years and despite DVDs being for sale in the vestibule, that his pastor is a vile racist;

Did not have any familiarity with the teachings of Saul Alinsky, who is an out-and-out far left (I know it’s unfashionable these days to say “communist”) and often criminal agitator;

Did not know ACORN (currently under investigation in half a dozen states for voter fraud, today added Nevada to the list of state sin which their offices have been raided and their files seized by thge authorities), for which he worked as “community organizer,” has a long history of registering people to vote eight or ten times;

etc., etc., etc. That is, as you are all aware, merely the topmost tip of scratching the surface of things he apparently didn’t know, including how many states there are. But: that is his most usual explanation; “I didn’t know.”

You know what? Above and beyond anything else about him: if he’s this slow a study; if he’s this ignorant; if he’s this easily fooled; if he’s (not to put to fine a point upon it) this damn dumb: I don’t want him anywhere near making decisions about the future of my country.

How long before we get a “This isn’t the Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dorhn I knew” speech from Obama?
————-

Ask, and ye shall, all that:

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10062008/news/nationalnews/obama__i_didnt_know_of_ayers_terrorist_p_132394.htm

Is anyone following this Educators for Ayers petition? http://www.supportbillayers.org/
Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg have great posts on the topic up at The Corner. I’m fascinated by how WE are the ones guilty of “assaults designed to intimidate free thinking and stifle critical dialogue.” That business at WGN, well, that was just “a way to weigh in against fear and intimidation.”

Honestly, if we can’t make people care that Ayers is considered to have made “exemplary contribution—including publishing 16 books— to the field of education,” if we can’t make them see the folly of letting this man influence our children, then we’ll never make them care that he helped groom a presidential candidate.

Someone shouted “Kill Him!” regarding Obama during a Palin campaign stop today, and the same thing happened during a McCain rally.

You’re absolutely right, though it isn’t in the least surprising that Helen doesn’t get it: On what planet did this guy grow up? This is not how human beings normally behave, we are garrulous creatures. Except, apparently, for those who grew up with, or were educated with, or worked around Obama.

Regarding Ayers and Dorhn, I met them a couple of times in a casual way at my fairly radical university. Had a loose acquaintance – owing to proximity – with a hard-core SDS member. (In those days, in that place, it was, somehow or other, okay to be a violence-advocating revolutionary and also a sports nut. In two of my four undergrad years our hockey team was national champions, and even if you were a committed revolutiuonary it was OK to go the games with non-revolutuionary friends. It was OK to loll around the bleachers in Fenway Park with them – and some beer – too. In between phoning in bomb threats. Life was not all politics.)

Anyway, Ayers was one of those people best described in a way you possibly won’t get, but perhaps some of your other male readers will relate to: he was a scrawny little weed with one of those faces that said: “I’m an a**hole; hit me.” I always figured 90% of his issues were probably because when he was young his male classmates routinely did.

Dorhn was one of those who seemed to figure that the way to set herself apart was to abandon all societal norms. I think personal hygiene went overboard first, and you generally knew she was in the room well before you saw or heard her. (Sadly, she was not unique in this, it seemed especially to affect young female revolutionaries, who for reasons of their own worked desperately hard to render themselves unattractive. Often this was not much of a stretch.)

Of all these jerks, I think the one I most enjoyed was Mark Rudd, who always modestly attributed his success to having the loudest voice – a revolutionary with a sense of humor.

Imagine how many million more people’s descendants would be here had Lenin, Stalin, or Mao possessed the slightest flicker of a sense of humor.