Know Nothings

Are you feeling Bill's pain?

“It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.”

Poor Bill - life as the former bomber friend of a candidate for president was not easy!

Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.

Yup. He was cut off after he became Kryptonite to the campaign. Which means that until his name became part of the conversation they were in regular contact?

One night, Ayers recalled, he and Dohrn were watching Bill O’Reilly, who was going on about “discovering” Ayers’s 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire.” “I had to laugh,” Ayers said. “No one read it when it was first issued!” He said that he laughed, too, when he listened to Sarah Palin’s descriptions of Obama “palling around with terrorists.” In fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”

Oh, I see. When you gave Barack the job of his career, and had an office on the same floor of a small office building, and when you served on the board of the Woods Foundation, your relationship with Barack was like thousands of others in Chicago???

As we were getting ready to go, after an hour of front-stoop conversation, a neighbor came by and ironically reminded Ayers of the event that he and his wife held for Obama in 1995 when Obama was making his run for the Illinois state senate. "Everyone, including you, wants to have a coffee here," he joked to the neighbor. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do!”

That's right - I forgot about that fundraiser.