Jen, the low comedy of the spin you mention — that Barack Obama didn’t know about Ayers’s past as a Weatherman — is beyond absurd for a reason you don’t mention. Ayers is married to a woman named Bernardine Dohrn. She, too, was a Weather Underground monster. She, too, was present at a party in Hyde Park in 1995 where Obama met Ayers — indeed, she was one of the party’s hosts, given that the party took place in the Ayers-Dohrn family manse. Owing to the fact that she was a pretty half-Jewish girl from a nice family with a respectable education, she became an iconographic figure when she turned terrorist in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, she was, throughout the 1970s, perhaps the most famous fugitive in the United States, so much so that in 1987, her life underground with Ayers became the fictionalized subject of the highly praised movie Running on Empty. Her surrender to authorities in the fall of 1980, when Obama was 19 years old, was a huge story. If there is any conceivable way that Obama might not have known about Ayers’s past to begin with, it is inconceivable that a person as culturally literate as Barack Obama would not have known who Bernardine Dohrn was — mere fact that he was married to Bernardine Dohrn would have given the game away to anyone who had been paying even the slightest attention to the world around him. And Obama pays attention.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 11:12 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.