Aside from Pennsylvania, the recurrent buzz this week has been Obama’s connection to terrorists/criminals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. The conservative blogosphere has been particularly dilligent in covering yet another of Obama’s alarming connections. Power Line’s John Hinderaker describes them as “famous radicals, and fugitives from the law, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” In 1995, they held a fundraiser for Obama, and Obama continues to defend his relationship with them despite their anti-American comments as late as 2007. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey explains why all of this is important: “Obama and the Left want to demand an end to the probing of the years-long Obama-Ayers association as irrelevant. Never mind that Ayers has openly bragged of bombing the Pentagon. Never mind that Obama and Ayers voted to give $75,000 to Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat protege in the PLO, during their tenure with the Woods Foundation.” The past two days, John Hinderaker posted numerous audio clips of Ayers’s and Dohrn’s hateful comments both past and present. Radio host Guy Benson uncovered the audio. “These clips show that Obama’s pals are as unhinged as ever, and they severely undermine Team Obama’s spin that Ayers and Dohrn are now ‘respectable’ members of the political ‘mainstream,'” he said. Hinderaker added, “Obama emerged from the far-left fringe of Chicago politics, and his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn, like his relationship with spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright, raises important questions about Obama’s own political beliefs.” Hugh Hewitt has also been covering the story, and wonders why the MSM didn’t find these clips a long time ago, “What else will we be discovering about Barack Obama’s friends, and about the candidate?” Why are these clips, particularly the most recent ones, important? Obama’s supporters have claimed that Obama was only a child when Ayers and Dohrn were terrorists, but Ace reminds us that they were “engaging in the hardest of hard-left America-hating rhetoric in 2007 (when, as they note, Obama was at the tender, potty-training age of 47.” And Hugh Hewitt reports Politico‘s Mike Allen’s conclusion: “[I]t undercuts Senator Obama’s, one of Senator Obama’s defenses, which is that Bill Ayers’ outrageous statements were made when he, the Senator, was in elementary school.” What does this relationship tell us about Obama? Goldfarb wrote here that “Obama doesn’t view left-wing radicals the way the rest of the country does, he doesn’t understand why anyone would be upset that he associates with them, and more than that he seems dismissive of any such concerns.” Ace adds, “The left continues to insist that prior terrorism against the United States and her citizens, if part of a leftwing ‘movement,’ is all just a ‘youthful indiscretion’ easily forgiven and better forgotten. I don’t agree, and neither do most Americans.” Obama has some more explaining to do.
