An Open Letter to David S. Tanenhaus

In response to Bill, Barack, and Me published October 10, 2008 in Slate (subtitled:The Bill Ayers that Barack Obama and I worked with was no “domestic terrorist.”)

Mr. Tanehaus,

None of us are the same people we were in the 1970s, sir.  But the Bill Ayers you and Barack worked with still believes — in this decade — that the actions he took in the 1970s were the right things to do; in fact, he said he didn’t think it was enough.

Bill Ayers, standing on an American flag

Maybe you and Barack agree with him when he says those kind of things.  Maybe that’s why you don’t see that so many of us are troubled by Bill Ayers — not only for his actions in the 1970s, but also for his feelings about those actions expressed in a New York Times article (”No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen“) that was ironically published on the morning of 9/11/01, several years after Barack began working with Mr. Ayers and after he launched his political career in the former Weatherman’s home.

If you wish to tell the American people that this is not troubling for you, or even for Barack,  I believe you.  Maybe this kind of thing doesn’t bother 60s radicals and those they mentor.  Maybe some, like Bill Ayers, still believe the “cause” was justified by any means necessary. And that is so much a part of the problem.

Maybe you’d understand it better if Bill Ayers had instead been a right-wing radical who went around blowing up abortion clinics.  That would probably be something you and Barack could never forgive.  Me either.

This is exactly like that.

Furthermore, Bill Ayers is only one of Barack Obama’s political allies and friends who hate America and/or the values we cherish as Americans.  We haven’t forgotten Barack’s long-standing relationship with Jeremiah Wright, Fr. Pfleiger, Frank Marshall Davis, and others. Even the words of Barack Obama’s own wife, Michelle, at times suggests that there is something lacking in her love for a country that has made possible for her an education and lifestyle that can only be envied in many parts of this world.

So if you dare to apologize for Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, please know that it falls on deaf ears.  Those of us who love this country are not nearly as clueless as those who don’t love it think we are.