Megyn Kelly vs Bill Ayers

While watching the Megyn Kelly drilling of Bill Ayers, several thoughts popped into my mind. The first is how does a known terrorist and Marxist become an accepted part of the Chicago political establishment? Imagine the outrage from the left if a former right wing militant who conducted a terrorist activity decades earlier suddenly become part of the local Republican establishment? Somehow, a man who still hates his country and has no real remorse about his past activity of violence is not just part of the Chicago establishment, he is a professor at a major university and had or possibly still has a relationship with the President of the United States. And his wife is just as evil, and she too is part of the acceptable Chicago political class. If one wants to see how far the political left and modern day progressive movement has fallen, Bill Ayers' acceptance is just one more piece of proof. A man who should be a leper among his peers is regarded as a misguided brother whose politics mirrors much of the political class that rules much of Illinois.

Kelly, like the lawyer that she is, often used Ayers' past words against him, and it was interesting how often Ayers would simply lie about what he meant when it suited his needs, but yet when the interview was over, one understood that this man simply hates his own country and wonders why he still lives here? One reason is that he is able to exercise so much influence as a college professor, and some suspect that his relationship with President Obama is more pronounced than both men will presently admit.

The other aspect that I caught on to is his lies about his own country or I will simply say, how he misconstrues the past fifty years of history. He kept mentioning the violence the United States committed in Vietnam and elsewhere. America was at fault but what was missing was Kelly's failure to follow up on Ayers' own views. What Ayers failed to mention was that the Vietnam War, whether one felt the war should have been fought or not, was a noble cause as the United States attempted to stop a communist takeover of the south. The failure to do so resulted in massive imprisonments, genocidal wars throughout southeast Asia, and this leaves one wanting to ask Ayers, "What exactly did you find acceptable about the fate of South Vietnam?”

For those who wanted to know what could have been need only to see the history of South Korea, where an impoverished nation is now an economic power within the Pacific region and a working democracy at that while the North still lives in squalor. South Vietnam's fate may have been similar if given a chance to succeed. I would love to have heard Ayers response on why a communist dictator would have been preferable to a different destiny. I suspect we would have seen Ayers support a totalitarian state and that he understood clearly what a United States' defeat would have meant for South Vietnam. He was perfectly willing to applaud the result. David Horowitz interviewed Ayers and noted, "Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: 'Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.'"

Horowitz observed that Ayers was the product of wealth, whose father was a Republican and even in line for a cabinet post in the Nixon Administration. Horowitz added,

“It could be said of Bill Ayers that he was consumed by angers so terrible, they led him to destroy his father’s career. But in the 10 hours I interviewed him I saw none of it. What I saw was a shallowness beyond conception. All the Weather leaders I interviewed shared a similar vacuity. They were living inside a utopian fantasy, a separate reality, and had no idea of what they had done. Nor any way to measure it. Appreciating the nation to which they were born, recognizing the great gifts of freedom and opportunity their parents and communities had given them, distinguishing between right and wrong – it was all above their mental and moral ceiling.”

Ayers and his fellow weathermen did little damage compared to other terrorist groups and much of that was due to their incompetence as they were as likely to blow themselves up in preparing a bomb as actually succeeding in committing actual acts of violence. (I am not minimizing what they attempted and what they did actually accomplish but pointing out that their incompetence led to the failure to commit even more heinous acts. Three of Ayers fellow weathermen, including Ayers girlfriend at the time killed themselves when a bomb they were creating blew up.) Ayers should have spent time in jail and simply relegated to the ash heap of history to be ignored; but instead, he reinvented himself, and the Chicago political class allowed him in their club. That is as much indictment of the left as it is Ayers.