No Left Turns asks a question that I've also wondered about:
Several blogs have linked to material about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, noting that Dohrn and Ayers helped Obama start his political career in the 1990s.
The focus on Obama, and whether there is any significance to his connection (whatever it is) with Ayers, has obscured the real scandal here. Both Ayers and Dohrn are now faculty members in good standing at Universities in the Chicago area. Their views are virtually unchanged from those they held in their younger days. Moreover, their views are probably hard to distinguish from those held by a significant number of their colleagues. The scandal, in other words, is that no one has asked why that is the case, and how we might change it. Are our colleges and universities damaged beyond repair?
William Ayers teaches education courses to prospective teachers at University of Illinois at Chicago, a taxpayer funded school, by the way, and his wife teaches at Northwestern. Ayers was a self-confessed terrorist who bombed a number of buildings back in the sixties and tried to kill police. He would have gone to jail for attempted murder except for a technical mistake in the investigation which got him off. He has said recently that he wishes he had done more. His wife did go to jail for about a year for aiding and abetting the Weather Underground in a number of their crimes and according to Powerline has publicly and enthusiastically approved of the Charles Manson folks for their grisly murders of a pregnant movie actress and her companions. Today she teaches law at Northwestern.
One wonders whether the schools which employ Ayers and Dohrn would hire someone who bombed abortion clinics or the editorial offices of The New York Times. One wonders especially whether they would be permitted to teach education and law. I have a hard time picturing it.
Meanwhile, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who is by all accounts a fine man with a number of academic distinctions to his credit, was denied tenure by Iowa State University because he commited the grievous sin of thinking that the universe shows evidence of having been intentionally planned. So he's out of a job, and while he searches for a position through which he can make a positive contribution to society these two unrepentant psychopathic terrorists are being paid to teach our children to destroy their society, and the administrators and state legislators of Illinois are evidently fine with that.
What's more, this pair of violent felons is evidently chummy with the man who may well be the next president of the United States.
God help us.
Michelle Malkin has much more on Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and others who are connected to the man who promises us hope and change.
RLC