A complicating factor: Bill Ayers always was—still is—a good and decent educator. Even before he made his disastrous entrance into American left-wing politics, he helped run a hippie-style pre-school center in Manhattan, and his pre-school center was first rate, by all accounts. Left-wing politics of a lunatic variety led him into an underground existence for a while, armed and on the lam. But when he re-emerged, he resumed his educational work, and he became a professor of education. And, again by all accounts, or at least by some respectable accounts, he has applied himself with admirable sincerity and skill to his educational work.
Ayers has got to be, even so, the stupidest man in America, politically speaking. Always was; and is. In the 1960s the big left-wing student organization on campus was called Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. At the beginning of the decade, SDS was an organization with a sturdy social-democratic or democratic-socialist pedigree, roughly in the style of the British Labor Party. Then SDS moved leftward, and kept on moving.
Obama never shared, not even for the briefest second as a kid in high school or college, the political imagination of Bill Ayers.
By the time Ayers became prominent in the organization, SDS could claim 100,000 members. Ayers rose among those 100,000 because he came from an extremely wealthy background, which gave him an aura of command. He was also several years older than most of the members, which allowed him to manipulate his younger followers unscrupulously. By the time he and his faction were done, they had dismantled SDS in favor of their own mini-organization, the Weather Underground, which called itself "revolutionary communist." And Ayers and the Weather Underground launched a Che Guevara-type war in the United States, than which nothing could be more idiotic.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-15/bill-ayers-fan-club/
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