Dear Smiley-face Doll from Alaska, listen please:
You've accused Barack Obama of "pallin' around with terrorists." You were speaking of a professor named William Ayers, who got way too angry in his youth.
When Ayers was an alleged "terrorist" Obama was a 7-year-old boy who didn't know him. Ayers was violently opposed to the Vietnam War, as was a large proportion of the American public at the time. The Pentagon was a target because that's who was running that misbegotten war. Millions of Americans opposed that war because the United States was bombing and strafing Vietnamese cities and villages, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Our bombings were terrorist acts on a huge scale.
The silver-haired old gent beside you now, the one who picked you to be his running mate in the presidential campaign, was one of those people who flew fighter-bomber planes over Vietnamese cities and killed innocent people in their own country. To them, such pilots were genuine terrorists.
"You have a pretty mouth, but some awfully ugly stuff comes out of it."
He had conscious thoughts about the murderous mayhem he was inflicting, but he kept doing it anyway.
The "terrorist" Ayers, whom Obama met long after he had stopped plotting bombings, never killed women and children. He hasn't advocated bombing of any kind for 40 years or so.
Your Sen. McCain, on the other hand, did kill women and children, and ever since 2003 has been a big, staunch advocate of bombing, invading and occupying Iraq.
If you don't think that the Iraq War is "terrorism," you need to listen to a few million people other than your hero McCain.
You have a pretty mouth, but some awfully ugly stuff comes out of it. Please, think before you say anything else. And take a hard look at that old warhead you're pallin' around with, okay?
James Alexander Thom can be reached at editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com.
Comments
The One That Got Away
"William Ayers, who got way too angry in his youth."
Really. He must be doing just fine today as a distinguished professor in 2001 after 9/11 that he wished he could have done more (kill) or at a 2007 reunion with former members of the Weather Underground:
"This is a time not only of great stress and oppression and authoritarianism, and a kind of rising incipient American form of fascism, and what the government counts on, what the powerful count on, is that we will stay quiet. It's the idea that we can tolerate these intolerable things without screaming, without somehow coming out, joining up and coming out and saying something. It's what they count on in terms of keeping things under control."
"Empire resurrected and unapologetic, war without end, an undefined enemy that's supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy changing its form, but essentially intact, attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on, the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture to keep our minds off of what's really happening."
And as comrades of a day gone by:
"Even though we think of ourselves as political, we weren't politicians. We were people who had a moral vision of what was possible. And when we talk, for example, about health care, about peace, we're talking a language of ethics, not a language of instrumentalism or opportunism, or what we might get. So we have to speak in a language that's large and generous and encompassing. And then we have to act."
Makes you want to blush with pride doesn't it.