Bill Ayers & Joe the Plumber

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Ralph Reiland

So what are we supposed to think about William Ayers and his lovely wife, Bernardine Dohrn, former Weathermen co-bombers and the co-hosts of an event in their living room in 1995 to introduce Barack Obama to the upscale Hyde Park community in Chicago and launch his run for the state senate?

We're to think that it's no issue because Obama was in third grade when Dohrn and Ayers were targeting cops, judges and American soldiers? That it's all ancient history, just Vietnam-era radicalism, and that Ayers and Dohrn, if still not apologetic or repentant, are now respected and beneficial members of Chicago's university community? That Dohrn and Ayers have changed, that they're no longer targeting "AmeriKKKa" and "the rich"?

Answering a question about Ayers from co-moderator George Stephanopoulos during the April 16 Democratic primary debate, Barack Obama took his first shot at making Ayers a non-issue. "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood," said Obama, "who's a professor of English in Chicago."

That's like describing Son of Sam as a local postal worker -- accurate, but it conceals more than it reveals.

David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam," did sell stamps but he also terrorized New York City in the summer of 1977 with a string of shootings that left six people dead and seven wounded. He specialized in targeting attractive young women with long brown hair.

And it's true that Ayers lives in Obama's neighborhood, a few blocks away, as Obama said, but he also, as a key founding member of the ultra-violent Weather Underground, declared war on the United States.

With a broader hit list than Berkowitz, Ayers and Dohrn specialized in targeting police officers, Brinks drivers, Army officers, courthouses, the Pentagon, the Capitol building, capitalism, American power, "white skin privilege," and "the rich."

Seeking to destroy the United States from within "the belly of the beast," Ayers and Dohrn convened a "War Council" in Flint, Mich., in 1969. From the stage, Dohrn, holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman "fork salute," praised Charles Manson and the recently committed bloody murders by Manson's crazed followers of actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and six others -- all deemed too "rich" to be allowed to live.

"Dig it," shouted Dohrn, thrilled about the "Tate Eight" murders, to the assembled horde of America-haters. "First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"

Sharon Tate, pregnant at the time, was stabbed in the womb. Her baby, one assumes in the minds of the murdering levelers, would have been born with too many advantages, too much of a head start.

In October 1969, Richard Elrod, a Chicago district attorney, was seriously injured in the Weatherman riot that erupted during Chicago's "Days of Rage." Elrod was paralyzed for life as a result. Dohrn, a key leader of the compassionate left, later led a celebration of Elrod's paralysis by leading her comrades in a parody of a Bob Dylan song " "Lay, Elrod, Lay."

Nice woman! Not exactly the type I'd pick to host my coming out party and pass around the hors d'oeuvres. I'd be afraid to trust her with anything more than a plastic fork!

All ancient history? No. The children left without fathers as a result of the brutal murders of police officers by the group organized by Ayers and Dohrn are still around. On the night that Ms. Dohrn was passing around the Pinot noir and spinach balls for Obama's coming out party, all that the grandchildren of murdered police officers Ed O'Grady, Waverly Brown and Brian McDonnell had were photos of their grandfathers on the mantel.

The great story of the 20th century, basically unlearned by the intelligentsia and untaught in school, is that the pathological hatreds of "the rich" and the subsequent repressive measures by the far left to force societal leveling, as viciously expressed by Manson, Ayers and Dohrn, has produced history's most bloody and repressive tyrannies.

Writ large and backed by the power of government, those class hatreds, as implemented in the Soviet Union, China, Asia and Latin America, produced a wholesale repression that culminated in the deaths of 100 million people -- deaths, as Lenin said early on, of the "noxious insects" who didn't buy the forced march to egalitarianism.

Joe the Plumber was right when he said that punishing success is a "slippery slope."

Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University