I can understand the need for Obama to take simplistic stands against Bill Ayers and Weathermen. The campaign was too important to be bogged down by any distractions. It's harder for me to justify the similar stands coming from most of the current liberal intelligentsia and progressive arenas like dailykos.
The prevalent wisdom might be that we should care about the present/future - not the past. But what better guide to this world do we have than our history? How can we change the future without knowing the past?
Watch Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn talk to Amy Goodman (Democracy Now! Nov 14 2008) on the Weather Underground, the McCain campaign attacks, President-Elect Obama and the antiwar movement today.
PBS - Free History Project - 2003
Part - 1/9
Watch whole documentary
It must be understood that their fight was during a very violent period of our history, the murder of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, JFK, Bobby Kennedy and the imprisonment of hundreds of black men on questionable charges of affiliation with the Black Panthers. All this in the background of massacre in Vietnam.
The Weathermen were better than our government which had killed American dissidents and millions of Vietnamese. They did not kill a single person in their bombing campaign. It's easy to take moralistic positions, but judging people/actions without considering the historical context is meaningless. Look up different influential people of those times and then ask - Where should we place the Weathermen on the 1960/70s rating scale?
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.