Obama Terrorist Supporter Ayers Unrepentant for Bombings; Another Obama Agent of Change (Opinion, Analysis)

Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.)

....We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

"..."The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured.

Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at."

William Ayers, who was a founder of the 1960s and 1970s radical group the Weather Underground, told FOX News correspondent James Rosen in a candid 2004 interview that he still believed he was “on the side of justice” years after the group’s wave of attacks.

In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11 attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out “many other acts of terror … even recently, that are comparable,” and claimed he and his bomb-planting comrades were “restrained” in their actions.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama’s political career in Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event for the future state senator in 1995.

Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by “hope and love,” not despair, and said he did not think the group’s violent acts, targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were “a big deal.”

I arrived in Manhattan in time for the March 7, 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village which killed 3 Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb to be set off at a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb, a makeshift anti-personnel weapon studded with roofing nails, exploded prematurely killing Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins.

Are you confused by the head spinning machinations of Barack Obama that allowed him to purchase a house worth $2.6 million (with a vacant lot next door that can be accessed only through the property where the house sits) for around $1.65 million? (Don’t worry, so is most of the press.)

Do you wonder why this “Agent of Change” and modern day prophet Barack Obama would have gotten himself involved with a man indicted for political corruption and fraud?

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A 24-count indictment unveiled Wednesday by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald charges Mr. Rezko, 51, in an “extensive” fraud scheme in which he allegedly demanded payments from firms wanting work from a huge state pension fund and favorable rulings from a state board that regulates hospital developments.
Mr. Fitzgerald said the illegal activities constituted “a pay-to-play scheme on steroids.

“It was a feeding frenzy. People were feeding at the trough for millions of dollars,” he said.

How extensive was this kickback scheme? After Governor Blagojevich was elected, Rezko handed him a 26 page list of people he was recommending for jobs in the new administration. Contained in that list were people being recommended by Barack Obama. One of those names was the real estate agent who handled the controversial sale of a house to Obama.

How many of the people on that list actually got a job in state government? Jack Lavin, the CFO of Rezko’s company Rezko Enterprises, was named head of the Illinois Department of Economic Opportunity. And Kelly King Dibble, who was in charge of business development for Rezko’s real estate development company, got a real plum; executive director of the Illinois Housing Development Authority.

Gee. No conflict of interest there.

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JUST WHAT DID OBAMA DO IN RETURN FOR REZKO’S SUPPORT?

There were small things, such as hiring the son of one of Rezko’s associates as an intern in his senate office. And there were a little larger favors:

As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens.

The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.

....

The fact that the proposed housing was outside of the district he represented as a state senator is an interesting addendum to the story. With no real political interest of his own or any benefit for his constituents, Obama (playing the oldest and most cherished of political games) rubbed the back of a man who had rubbed his - to the tune of $855,000.

Obama has denied doing any favors for Rezko. He is right. Putting pressure on bureaucrats to give a crony a contract worth $855,000 in personal fees is beyond “favor” and enters the realm of corrupt deal.