Jonah writes today about some of Senator Obama's livelier chums:
'Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon."
This excerpt from William Ayers' memoir appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — a few hours before Al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground — the group that declared "war" on the U.S. government in 1970 — told the Times, "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough."
Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him.
Jonah wants to know how such people can be regarded as, in Cass Sunstein's words, as "legitimate members of the community." Well, the left is deeply invested in counter-tribalism, as John O'Sullivan calls it. Hence, Michelle Obama's statement that her husband's campaign is the first thing in her four decades plus on this earth that's made her "proud" of America. She has been blessed to live a life that almost anyone else on the planet would envy and she could only have lived it in the United States. But so what? If you accept this counter-tribalism, as the left does, as a kind of harmless alternative lifestyle, it's not that big a leap to indulge violent (if largely ineffective) sedition. In a sense, someone like William Ayers, who acted on his convictions, validates the far larger number of campus radicals who simply leveraged them into cosy lifelong sinecures. |