The Times has a telling piece on the anniversary of the left-wing domestic terror campaign in New York City 40 years ago this year. I thought this quote was particularly revealing:

Prof. Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School and the author of “Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies” (University of California Press, 2004), said that “1969 was the high watermark of anger and frustration in the Vietnam war.”
He added: “The bombings that year were an expression, an act of, if not foolhardy, optimism. They were desperadoes. They had the belief that they could bomb old ideologies out of existence.”

Ah, of course, the old “their hearts were in the right place riff.” And, later:

“Forty years later, however, there’s little if any public tolerance for the rationalization that radicals once employed in trying to justify their means to an end,” the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said in an e-mail message in response to questions about the bombings.
Professor Varon said that the movements out of which groups like Mr. Melville’s emerged will always have a degree of romantic resonance with young activists. “It’s the nature of young people,” he said. “They will always be inspired by people of intense principles. The bombers represent the extreme edge of the commitment. They will for a long time be regarded for their generational mobilization. It’s impressive to most people.”

Um, no, no it’s really not “impressive to most people.” And the “romantic resonance” is overwhelmingly with young left-wing and liberal activists, despite the fact I keep hearing how mainstream liberals and Democrats don’t have any affinity whatsoever with the Weather Underground and similar groups. When conservatives say (as I did in my book) that liberals, broadly speaking, have a romantic attachment to this stuff it’s an outrageous slander. But when the New York Times essentially reports it as fact, it’s interesting social commentary.

Oh and on that point, bonus prize for anyone who can guess whose name does not appear in the article. I’ll give you a hint, he worked with the man who’s currently the president of the United States.

Meanwhile, let’s get back to talking about how protestors at town-hall meetings are “political terrorists.”

This stuff is nauseating.