© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
February 26, 2009

You did not have to be a weatherman to know that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers would quickly blow cold on the Obama presidency.

Still, the speed and the severity of Ayers’ criticism, let alone the medium for doing so, shocked even veteran Ayers’ watchers.

On Monday, less than five weeks into the Obama era, Ayers blasted Obama’s decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan as a “colossal mistake.”

“We've seen this happen before,” Ayers told Sean Hannity’s guest host Alan Colmes on Hannity, a show held in deep contempt even among the shallow left. “We've seen a hopeful presidency, Lyndon Johnson's presidency, burn up in the furnace of war."

Ouch!

In the way of precedent, Benedict Ayers cut his radical teeth during Johnson’s doomed presidency, and he turned on Johnson as well.

“I'd rallied for Johnson, marched in his [1964] campaign,” boasted Ayers in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, “and two years later was leading the chants: Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Ayers uses the word “colossal” when something truly disturbs him. Consider the following unsubtle passage from Fugitive Days.

“The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world.”

In the way of defense, however feeble, Ayers was writing about the Pentagon during the Vietnam years. He did not mellow much when the war in Vietnam wound down.

Although Ayers penned his memoir at the tail end of the Clinton years, he could not reconcile himself even to Clinton’s flaccid projection of American power.

“In our names the U.S. project shatters community everywhere—in the Middle East, in Colombia, in the Philippines,” he wrote. “The world roils in agony and despair, the catastrophe deepens, and our ears are covered, our eyes are closed.”

Obama never had a chance. Ayers has so much emotional equity invested in hating America that nothing Obama could have done short of letting Hugo Chavez set defense policy and Queer Nation design new uniforms would have appeased him.

Ayers’ pique would not much matter were he really just the “guy who lives in my neighborhood” that Obama had claimed to have long ago outgrown.

Ayers’ pique would not much matter were he really just the “guy who lives in my neighborhood” that Obama had claimed to have long ago outgrown.

As Obama understands, though, Ayers is much more than that. He is the potential extortionist who lives in the neighborhood, and both parties know it.

As I have previously documented, the evidence strongly indicates that Ayers played a major role in the crafting of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, the book on which the Obama genius myth is grounded.

Much depends on this myth, most notably Obama’s positioning strategy in a 2012 election against Sarah Palin, the current resident Republican “dunce,” a designation as fictional as Obama’s genius status.

In a five-minute press conference, an angry and estranged Ayers could reveal Obama to be a political Milli Vanilli. As Ayers knows, there is power in that.

If an Obama presidency would inevitably disappoint Ayers, one has to question why he would have spent so much time grooming his protégé for political office.

The answer is simple enough. Ayers could not have anticipated that Obama would ascend as high as he has.

In a post-election Salon interview, Ayers gave a glimpse into his motivations for helping Obama, and they were not as grand as they might seem in retrospect.

“Everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious,” said Ayers of Obama. “For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago.”

The political calculus behind that ambition helped shape Dreams. This was a careful book, likely written to launch the career of a future Chicago mayor.

As mayor of Chicago, Obama could have been enormously useful to a power broker and “educator” like Ayers. President Obama, however, could not even be seen with “unrepentant terrorist” Ayers.

Still, Ayers has all the leverage. The question remains—how will he use it?