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HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
THE MURDERER AND THE
WOULD-BE PRESIDENT
Posted, October 6, 2008, 12:01 p.m

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Barack Obama knew he wanted to become president a long time ago and has taken very careful steps along the way to get him where he is today, on the verge of becoming the next President of the United States. The steps included covering up his tracks.

To wit, there are no records of his years in the Illinois Senate and in the United States Senate he did very little in the approximately 200 days he participated in the Senate before he went on the campaign trail in his bid for the presidency.

Some will even say that his famed Chicago speech in which he opposed the Iraq War was a deliberate step to ensure his bid to the White House. Rather than an ideological speech, his argument against the war was a step rather than a core belief to frame the Iraq debate against the women he knew would be his number one nemesis on the route to the White House, Hillary Clinton the Senator from the State of New York. It was Hillary’s city where the terrorists struck and New York’s junior Senator would feel compelled to vote for the war against Saddam Hussein when it was framed as a war against the terrorists who had bombed the World Trade Center

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For all the kudos Obama gets for being ahead of the curve on the anti-war sentiment, it is curious that there is virtually no record of that now famous speech. There is a one-line mention of the rally in the Chicago papers, and now there is a video contrived by the Obama campaign to re-enact that Chicago speech that too many don’t recall.

So by and large the cool, contrived, self-controlled candidate, Barack Obama has done a very good job of setting up his run for the presidency. The two books he published, particularly his most applauded Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance were part of his pr campaign to aid in his ascendance to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But some things he was sloppy about. Most notable, of course is his twenty year association with the not so Reverend and very wrong, Jeremiah Wright. But Obama, a practical man, stayed in Wright’s church those many years knowing that Wright’s incendiary comments might come back to haunt him because it was politically expedient for him to do so. He needed the well-connected and powerful Chicago player, Wright, to help him navigate the dirty waters of the city on the lake, Chicago.

Another relationship Obama risked his bid for the presidency with is Tony Rezko. Rezko, now a convicted felon, did for the Obama’s what he did for many other Chicago politicos high on power but short on cash: helped them purchase their homes.

The very careful and deliberate Obama surely knew exactly what he was getting into when he made the deal on the property in the tony Hyde Park section of Chicago. But, again, Mr. Obama gambled with his future when he cut the deal with Rezko. One can just imagine Obama’s wife Michelle pleading with her husband to get her the house she always dreamed of living in - Obama the dream weaver.

The third of Obama’s associations, and the one most troubling and underexplored is the mysterious relationship Obama has with homegrown terrorist and founding member of the 1960’s radical Weather Underground, Bill Ayres and his Weather Underground associate and now wife, Bernadine Dohrn.

There has been a mountain of material written about Obama’s relationship with the unrepentant Bill Ayers who admitted responsibility for roughly a dozen bombings that targeted the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and other buildings. Ayres went underground, hiding for a decade after three people were killed when a bomb the group had set accidentally exploded. Charges were later dropped against Ayres due to a legal technicality.

In subsequent years, Ayres became a tenured professor of education and informal adviser to Mayor Richard M. Daley on the subject of school reform. He has been a neighbor of Obama's in  Hyde Park  hosting an apparent fundraiser for him when Obama first ran for the state Senate in 1995. Ayres and Obama served together on a nonprofit board that distributed educational grants in the city. There remain unanswered questions about that as well.

Obama, who has denounced Ayers's actions in the 1960s and 1970s, has described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" and said the two do not exchange ideas on a regular basis. But the association has become fodder for many conservatives, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) predicted during her failed bid for the Democratic Parties’ nomination that Republicans would make an issue of the Obama-Ayres connection in the general election.

Senator Clinton was right as this past weekend Sarah Palin, the GOP’s Vice presidential nominee accused the Democratic presidential nominee of being "someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists (Ayres and Dohrn)."

Obama spokesman, Bill Burton issued a statement when the Ayres issue first became a part of the political dialogue. “Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.”

Obama wasn’t eight when he and Ayres broke bread together at Ayres home, or served on boards together.

During the primaries the story gained some traction, but Obama beat out Clinton nevertheless, and became the Democratic Party’s nominee. With the Rezko, Wright, Father Michael Phleger (see: Guilt by Association) as well as his relationship with Palestinian sympathizer Rashid Khalidi, and another controversial figure Reverend Louis Farrahkan, it was a more powerful story as part of the whole. But again, it was brushed aside as guilt by association.

It is actually guilt OF association.

To many people the 1960’s in now a myth of epic proportions, and while there are those who understand the reason for those radical years, right-minded people condemn the violence of the provocateurs of those tumultuous times.

The bombing of the Pentagon by the Weatherman was no myth; it was a real event as was the bombing that took place on February 16, 1970, at the Park Station of the San Francisco Police Department also the work of the Weathermen. In the blast, a pipe bomb filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles set off on a window ledge, the bomb by all accounts built by Bernadine Dorhn. The shrapnel killed Police Sergeant, Brian V. McDonnell. Another police officer, Robert Fogarty, received severe wounds to his face and legs and was left permanently partially blinded.

The 1969 Days of Rage were when the Weatherman unleashed their anarchy on the streets of Chicago. Ask Richard Elrod, then a young ambitious lawyer who worked for the city and who was left a cripple in trying to stem the violence of that day when he collided with Weatherman Brian Flanagan on the streets of Chicago, what he thinks of Bill Ayres. That day, Elrod’s neck was broken in the mêlée and Elrod would spend the rest of his life struggling against his physical limitations imposed by the paralysis caused by the broken neck. Today he relies on crutches, or two canes but mostly an electric scooter to get around.

How Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn got away with all of this and why they were so easily accepted into academia where professors are potent role models for America’s future adults remains a question yet to be answered. Neither Ayres nor Dorhn have undergone any rehabilitation having eluded prison sentences thanks to the incompetence of prosecuting attorneys.

An attorney and aspiring world leader, it would seem Barack Obama would have considered the ramifications of having any association with the likes of Ayres and Dorhn, homegrown American terrorists as they are often called. But clearly, Obama thought the risk of an association with the husband and wife radicals could serve his sole purpose, to achieve the pinnacle of success in the world of politics, become the President of the United States.

Obama has weathered the accusation of guilt by association with his murdering friends largely because the Weatherman and those times seem almost a cartoon in the annals of America’s recent history, tied in with the myths that were never the realities of the likes of the now dead from overdoses, Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and the legendary Door’s lead singer, Jim Morrison.

But think not Hippies, bell bottom jeans, LSD, and kumbaya when you envision Ayres. Rather, see the faces of the Weatherman murdered Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell, or the permanently scarred eyes of police officer, Robert Fogarty. Think what it would be like to spend your life without the use of your legs and if you would feel comfortable sharing a bottle of wine in the home of the couple who wreaked their havoc on so many lives.

Imagine how you’d feel introducing your college bound son or daughter to their new professor, Hey, I want to introduce you to your professor, Mr. Ayres, a murderer.

And by the way explain to your children that on September 11, 2001, a day that will go down in infamy, the day Osama bin Laden bombed the Pentagon that Mr. Ayres, the only other man besides Osama bin Laden to bomb the Pentagon, told the New York Times “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.''

All Content Copyright ©2007-2008. Reprints only by permission from
Halli Casser-Jayne/The CJ Political Report