During the discussion of Ayers' and the Weather Underground's genocidal plan to murder 25 million Americans, it occurred to me that focusing on tactics (like terrorism and murder) tends to sideline the murderous ideology that drives them.

In what I think is an attempt to frame the debate away from ideology, typical "fact check" discussions of Bill Ayers downplay his ideology, with words like "communism" not being mentioned.

From the Obama campaign "Fact Check" site:

"Is Barack Obama consorting with a radical? Hardly. Ayers is nothing more than an aging lefty with a foolish past who is doing good. And while, yes, Obama is friendly with Ayers, it appears to be only in the way of two community activists whose circles overlap."

The Facts

Bill Ayers has acknowledged that he was one of the leaders of a group known as the Weather Underground, which carried out a series of small-scale bombings at the Capitol and the Pentagon in 1970 and 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam War. He was charged with conspiracy to bomb, but the charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct. Over the last two decades, he has been better known in Chicago as an education expert, and it was in that role that he became acquainted with Obama in 1995. The two men served together on the board of an anti-poverty group, and Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's re-election campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 2001.

Yet Communism -- and Communists -- excuse such murders as being something other than murder. They are "liquidations" or the application of "revolutionary justice" to "enemies" of "the people."

Unfortunately, Ayers only stands out because of his involvement in terrorist acts. My concern is that the focus on terrorism misses this larger point, which is that his form of terrorism is incidental to and was always subordinate to the ideology of communism. Terrorism was but a tactic, and the fact that he does not currently engage in terrorist acts is tactical. His ideology has not changed in the least. So, the focus on Ayers' past terrorism (which must come as a relief to communists in general) avoids focusing on his past communism as well as his present communism, of which he is proud to this day.

Here's Ayers on the past:

Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No it is not. I don't regret that. The people of the world are being exploited and oppressed and militarized by the great imperialist powers, led by the United States. That is the situation today in my view.
...
And I'm not sorry about anything that I participated to try to end that war or against that government that was waging that war.

Is one of those regrets that I took extreme measures against the United States at a time of tremendous crisis? No it is not. I don't regret that. The people of the world are being exploited and oppressed and militarized by the great imperialist powers, led by the United States. That is the situation today in my view.
...
And I'm not sorry about anything that I participated to try to end that war or against that government that was waging that war.

Personally, I think it's sickening. The only thing I can say in Ayers defense is that he's within his First Amendment rights in glorifying murderers.

Yet Ayers and his supporters would disagree with my viewpoint. To him and those who think like him, Guevara is not a murderer, because his murders were committed in furtherance of his ideology. It will never be (and can never be) admitted by Ayers or his supporters that their ideology itself is murderous, and that communism cannot be imposed on people without murder, which of course it never has been.

Ayers is now a teacher, and as he subordinated his terrorist acts to the greater picture of communism, he now sees his educational efforts the same way.

Notice the way he conflates his past terrorism into merely a teaching opportunity in this YouTube interview with Chavista comrades (in front of the murderer's icon, of course).

Via Ed Morrissey who excerpts some pertinent quotes:

3:20 - The particular crisis we faced with the Vietnam War was a crisis that called on us to escalate, to resist in more intense and, and, uh, uh, in more extreme ways. But one way of looking at it is that the Weather Underground was a great teaching moment. And, to the extent that we didn't fully realize what we were trying to do, we were bad teachers, and to the extent that we did good things, we were good teachers.
5:42 - I mean, to go from underground, when we really thought we were in a revolutionary crisis ... and there's no question that when we left the underground, we lost something valuable -- we lost our treasure.

Obama says he barely knows him, but in the years when he was meeting and serving together on the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, as well as launching his career with a fundraiser in Ayers' Che Guevara-festooned house, Ayers made at least four Marxist pilgrimages to Caracas to praise Chavez's dictatorial regime.

He sits on the board of a Venezuelan government think tank called Miranda International Center, focused on bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan school children.

Recent polls show this turning of schools toward Marxist indoctrination terrifies average Venezuelans. Venezuelan dissidents also accuse Miranda of rewriting constitutions in South America to grant leftist leaders absolute power, with some saying Ayers had a role in 2007's effort to give Chavez total power inside Venezuela.

Again, except for mentions like that ,Ayers' murderous ideology -- Communism -- is largely overlooked, while the punditry focus on what was a tactic -- terrorism.

Either Communism doesn't matter or people are afraid to use the word.

What concerns me is that the focus on Ayers the terrorist turns inevitably turns into a debate over how old Obama was at the time of the bombings, how close his relationship was with Ayers, whether G. Gordon Liddy is comparable to Ayers, etc. and avoids any mention of communism, much less a serious discussion of whether it is appropriate for a president who (unless I am mistaken) sees nothing wrong with working with communists, and dispensing money to communists.

One of the lesser known communists who managed to receive nearly $2 million from Ayers and Obama is a guy named Mike Klonsky.

Andrew McCarthy (God bless him) has written a long, detailed piece about Klonsky, and he stresses what I have tried to stress in this post -- that the debate over terrorist tactics (and whether they are repented) avoids any focus on the murderous ideology behind the tactics:

With what little media oxygen there has been sucked out by the largely uninformative discussion of Ayers (and his wife and Weather Underground ally, Bernadine Dohrn) -- in which the mantra "unrepentant terrorist" has been a pale substitute for the critical matter of the Ayers's ideology that Obama plainly shares -- much has been missed. Significantly, that includes another key Obama contact, Mike Klonsky.

Here's what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a "social justice" blog on the official Obama campaign website.

To be clear, as it seems always necessary to repeat when Obamaniacs, in their best Saul Alinsky tradition, shout down the opposition: This is not about guilt by association. The issue is not that Obama knows Klonsky ... or Ayers ... or Dohrn ... or Wright ... or Rashid Khalidi ...

The issue is that Obama promoted and collaborated with these anti-American radicals. The issue is that he shared their ideology.

Does anyone know?

As far as I can tell, the only hint of a discussion by Obama of whether he shares their ideology was the description of Ayers as "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis."

Does that mean only irregularly?