Obama is speaking this afternoon at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. This mouthful is known more commonly as Fort Dix.
Obama has an unusual connection to this place, which makes his appearance there eerie, to say the least.
Obama began his first Illinois state senate bid with a meet-and-greet in the Chicago home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Obama could not have picked a harder-Left living room in America in which to stage his first campaign reception. Ayers and Dohrn were co-founders of the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground.
Ayers has described himself as follows:
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”
In 1970, Ayers summarized the Weathermen’s philosophy: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.”
For her part, Dohrn was hardly a typical, midwestern housewife.
“There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violent society that history’s ever created,” Dohrn declared in 1969. “I am not committed to non-violence in any way.”
Ayers, Dohrn, and the Weathermen went on a bombing campaign that blasted the Pentagon, the State Department, Gulf Oil’s Pittsburgh headquarters, San Francisco’s Presidio military base, and New York’s Queens Courthouse.
One of the Weather Underground’s bombs went off early, thank God.
Weathermen (Weatherpersons?) Ted Gold, Diana Oughton (Ayers’s then-girlfriend), and Terry Robbins, fatally detonated themselves on March 6, 1970. They were constructing a bomb inside a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village. Within the debris, cops discovered an anti-tank shell and 60 sticks of dynamite.
What was their target?
Were they better bomb makers, Ayers’s comrades would have set off a nail-filled bomb at a dance for non-commissioned officers and their dates and spouses at Fort Dix. As Ayers has observed, the bomb would have ripped “through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”
That bomb never went off, fortunately enough.
And today, one of Bill Ayers’s protégés is America’s commander-in-chief, addressing GIs at the same military facility that Ayers & Co. tried to blast to bits.
The circle of radicalism is complete.