The American Pundit

Hey, you know when it would’ve been nice to know about this? In October. Now that the domestic terrorists’ “family friend” is in the White House, I guess it’s just fine to let loose.

In a new afterword to his 2001 book, Bill Ayers, former leader of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground, describes President-elect Barack Obama as a “family friend” and denies he wished his group had set off more bombs in the 1960s.

Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, adds few new details about his relationship with Obama in the afterword to Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist. The book is being reissued this month.

“We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” he writes.

But right-wing commentators tried to use those connections to smear Obama, he says.

“Obama’s political rivals and enemies apparently saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest narrative about him, that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist, a sympathizer with extremism,” Ayers wrote.

Uh, so, telling the truth that Ayers is a friend of Obama’s — hence, “palling around with terrorists” — is a “smear”? As Ace says, the right tried to establish that Obama was just fine with befriending unrepentant domestic terrorists. Ayers admits that they were family friends and hasn’t repented for his domestic terrorist activities. That would be befriending an unrepentant domestic terrorist.