As I was driving into work today, I heard Sean Hannity say that on his Sunday night program, he was going to talk about Barack Obama and his association with a guy named Bill Ayers. When Hannity starts talking about it, you know that Barack Obama is about to come under serious conservative fire for his association Ayers, a Northwestern University professor and one time member of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).

So who is Ayers and why should we care about his ties to Barack Obama? Today’s bombing of a Times Square recruiting station, is exactly the kind of violence Ayers perpetrated in the 1960’s. When we’ve got people calling to recreate ‘68, shouldn’t we learn some things about a guy who committed acts of terror the first time around, especially if he’s chummy with a presidential candidate?

You say the words “Weather Underground” today and many folks will probably think of the website where you can find out if it’s going to rain tomorrow. But the original Weather Underground dates back to 1960’s. And it had nothing to do with precipitation… more like precipitated violence.

The WUO was born from the ashes of another “activist” group of the 1960’s, the Students for a Democratic Society. Their name comes from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, in which Dylan sings ““You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” These “Weathermen” (they later changed their name to Weather Underground Organization) advocated violent action against the U.S. government. They were not content to enact change through the ballot box. Indeed, their desire was to see a revolution formented in part because of their acts of violence.

In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg says the Weather Underground was responsible for at least 250 bombings in 1969 and 1970. They are suspected of bombings in which a policeman in San Francisco, California died. They are responsible or suspected for bombs going off in the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, a number of corporations including ITT and Gulf Oil. A bomb meant to detonate at a dance for soldiers stationed at Fort Dix went off as it was being made in a Greenwich Village house, killing three WUO members. One of the WUO’s leaders, Mark Rudd proclaimed, “Liberal solutions, restructurings, partial understandings, compromise are not allowed anymore. The essence of the matter is we are out for social and political revolution, nothing less.” And one of Mark Rudd’s fellow leaders was a guy named Bill Ayers.

Ayers and his girlfriend (now wife) Bernadine Dohrn remained fugitives throughout the 1970’s. Because of illegal tactics used by the FBI, U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute for all but the most minor crimes and when Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in to authorities in 1980, they received little punishment. He’s now a college professor in Chicago, where he’s been associated with Barack Obama. The two served on the board of the Woods Fund. Ayers has been sufficiently impressed with Obama that he’s donated to his political campaigns. And Obama’s apparently not been bothered by Ayers and his terrorist acts enough to denounce the man and his political philosophies.

As Marathon Pundit put it so well:

“Why any organization would have Ayers serving on their board (he’s not chairman any more, but Ayers is still on The Woods Fund board), is astonishing to me and any other person with common sense. And who’d want to serve with him? That year, Ayers and Obama (who should’ve abstained) voted to invest $1 million in Woods Fund money into a firm run by a former boss of the then-state senator, Allison Davis. In a different business venture, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko.”

So, how concerned should we be by this? Has Ayers been “rehabilitated”? Hardly. In an interview published on September 11, 2001, Ayers said, “”I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough.” On Ayers’ own blog in an entry on March 3rd 2008 Ayers wrote that he’s “not exactly sure what exactly I’m expected to apologize for.” Ayers went on to say he “still refuse[s]s to grow up if the price is to falsely confess a sin I don’t take to be a sin.”

I mentioned Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. If your son or daughter wanted to take a class taught by Professor Ayers, wouldn’t you have some questions for the school? And shouldn’t we have some questions for the man who’s running for president?

Ayers is free today ultimately because our system of justice treated him with the mercy that comes from a free society. A totalitarian regime like Castro’s Cuba worshiped by the WUO (many of whom spent time there) would have executed Ayers for crimes against the state after the very first bomb. A smart man would realize this, yet Ayers seems blind to that reality. Yes, I’d have some questions for the school and the teacher.

And for Obama the question has to be asked. Why have you associated yourself with a man who clearly has not renounced his terrorist tactics and calls for violence? What do you think of Bill Ayers and his philosophy? And why do you associate yourself with such a man?