The forgotten Ayers manifesto

The invaluable Zombietime blog has published excerpts from the 1974 short book/long pamphlet entitled Prairie Fire, published by the Weather Underground while they were in hiding as fugitives. I remember publication of Prairie Fire vividly, as it served to demonstrate the audacity and skill of these well-educated revolutionaries, able to thumb their noses at authority and remain "guilty as hell, free as a bird" (in the subsequent words of Ayers).

Keep in mind that Ayers has never repudiated either his actions or his ideology of the past. Keep in mind that despite the Obama campaign's phony denials ("just a guy in the neighborhood", "kids go to the same school"), Obama worked closely with Ayers handing out tens of millions of dollars to radical educators who then failed to achieve any measurable iumprovement in education, because they were radicalizing students with Afro-centric doctrines, and other readical ideas instead of actually teaching the kids anythign useful.

There's nothing illegal about being a communist. People in this country are free to hold whatever political beliefs they so choose. I don't know William Ayers, I've never met him (that I'm aware of), and I have nothing against him personally.

This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.

Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama's past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.

Furthermore: Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him.