The Friends of Barack Obama

An excerpt from Power Line:

When Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer decided to retire in 1995, she hand-picked local left-winger Barack Obama as her successor. In order to introduce Obama to influential liberals in the district, she held a function at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. This was, really, the beginning of Obama's political career, and it linked him forever with Ayers and Dohrn, with whom, as his campaign has acknowledged, he continues to have a friendly relationship.

Ayers and Dohrn were famous radicals, and fugitives from the law, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dohrn, actually, was the more famous of the two; she was the head, as I recall, of Students for a Democratic Society or one of its factions. Dohrn was crazy. She is the only public figure, to my knowledge, to approve publicly and enthusiastically of the Charles Manson murders.

Ayers was a would-be murderer of soldiers and policemen, but he wasn't a very good terrorist. He had the ill fortune to choose September 11, 2001, as the day on which to publish an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he said that he didn't regret his attempted murders and only wished that he had planted more bombs.