Bernadine Dohrn, co-host of Obama’s career-launching fundraiser

From attacking "pigs" to attacking an innocent baby in the womb and the mutilation of Sharon Tate. And in 1993 she, the happy little homemaker, child-care expert, was still amazed that people thought so little of her!

"Much like Vladimir Lenin’s ever-widening category of people considered “harmful insects,” destined for death or the gulag, Bernardine’s category of “pigs” was rapidly expanding. In the very recent past, the pigs had been America’s police and boys in Vietnam. Now, Bernardine was about to enrich the brethren at the War Council with her thoughts on the vicious Tate-LaBianca murders executed by the satanic Charles Manson “family.” The victims would get no sympathy from the future childcare advocate, who, here in Flint, was hell-bent on herding their mutilated bodies into her widening “pigs” category.

The girl from the Midwest flew off the hinges, waxing lustfully over the demonic spectacle of the criminally insane mutilation of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her friends by the swastika-tattooed Manson brood. The crime done by the Manson clan is too mortifying to describe here, particularly the ripping open of Tate’s belly, but it wasn’t to Bernardine Dohrn. The future professor of child education at Northwestern saw a kind of deliciousness in these true Manson “revolutionaries.” She imbibed at the image of the cabal’s dehumanization of Tate, gleefully sharing her feelings with the assembled. Dohrn thrilled:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!

It was two days after Christmas, when America was still celebrating the image of the birth of the Christ child. Bernardine, however, was celebrating the image of the slaughter of the Tate child

Guest Post: Tracing the Origins of the Days of Rage Protest « RickMick

Glenn Beck provides the genealogy of Days of Rage

If you don't subscribe to GBTV, you missed Glenn Beck's monologue on the Days of Rage this past week-end (it fizzled miserably), back, back way back to the Weather Underground of 1969. He updated us on Jeff Jones, Mark Rudd, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, and of course, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine, and what they're doing today. Noted that Tom Hayden is teaching at Occidental in California, where the Obama transcripts are being held hostage. Here's a web site that will do about the same--it's a good read.

Guest Post: Tracing the Origins of the Days of Rage Protest « RickMick

However, don't discount the Days of Rage--which ended up on the steps of the Smithsonian instead of Wall Street, I think he said. The Weathermen started small too, and four of them managed to bomb a building of the University of Wisconsin and kill and injure people. And have you ever read a more apologetic marker for violence? If I were the family of that dead grad student, Robert Fassnacht, I'd sue for such a limp, vacuous account of this tragedy.

This article updates what happened to the dead, injured, and perps.

Business Reply University of Illinois Foundation

Faculty Profile

Sexy Criminals

I didn't remember what Bernadine Dohrn looked like, but one of my coffee shop friends who eats a cinnamon roll every day and is a decade younger than me told me she was "hot," 'cause he remembered. He grew up in working class Philly and says that in the 60s when he was in a rock band and would pick a girl up for a date, she would either start taking her clothes off in the car, or start rolling a joint. So I guess he had an eye for "hot." Today she's just another old lady with a past, but does look good in the preview below. Here's a review of The Weather Underground, and I suppose you can get it at your public library, since they really go for that sort of thing. Barack, btw, wasn't 8 years old in 1995 when he sought out Ayers as a mentor for his career in Chicago politics. This review is from NYT which really digs the fun stuff of terrorism and calls it smart and solid, now that 9/11 has faded a bit from memory.

''THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND,'' directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel (unrated, 92 minutes). This documentary tells the story of the Weathermen, a splinter group from Students for a Democratic Society. This terrifically smart and solid piece of filmmaking lets the former members of the Weathermen, now on the downside of their 50's, speak into the camera and reveal a bit of their personal histories as well as what the peace movement meant to them. The documentary is also packed with some of the most powerful images of violence of the period, like a bound Vietnamese being shot in the head at point-blank range and the bloody bed of the Black Panther Fred Hampton after he was killed. Voluble and charismatic, the film's stars -- the members of the group determined to overthrow what they considered to be a criminal United States government that waged the Vietnam War and targeted groups like the Black Panthers -- spent a lot of time in the media spotlight. Young, white and articulate, figures like Bernadette Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan and Naomi Jaffe were clearly very sexy criminals. That exuberance and incentive has been captured by the directors. Mr. Green and Mr. Siegel have made a film of passions, and they establish a context that shows what a turbulent period the late 1960's were, slyly contrasting the peace-and-love vibe with events of the time. The film doesn't let its subjects off the hook, despite apparent sympathies toward their politics (Mitchell). The preview.

Reduced to holding pancake breakfasts?

I checked the website of the Prairie Fire Collective, the Weatherman group created in the late 1970s by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. There was an ad on the page for a pancake breakfast fund raiser, although it was for December 2006. You really don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding, with members facing the criminal charges against them, while the May 19 Coalition continued in hiding. A decisive factor in Dohrn's coming out of hiding were her concerns about her children according to Wikipedia. The Prairie Fire Collective started to surrender to the authorities from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The remaining Weatherman Underground members continued to violently attack US institutions. East coast members favored a commitment to violence and challenged commitments of old leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones.

Here's their statement of purpose. It has Bill and Bernadine written all over it.

We oppose oppression in all its forms including racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and imperialism. We demand liberation and justice for all peoples. We recognize that we live in a capitalist system that favors a select few and oppresses the majority. This system cannot be reformed or voted out of office because reforms and elections do not challenge the fundamental causes of injustice.

Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.

The unrepentent Bill and Bernadine Ayers

Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers turned themselves in on December 3, 1980, in New York. Charges were dropped for Ayers. Dohrn received three years probation and a $15,000 fine. These criminals and others of the anti-war protest groups who tried to destroy the USA in the 1960s and 1970s went scot free and government officials who had violated privacy laws during their investigation were tried during the Carter Administration, receiving stiff fines, prison terms and ruined careers. They were later pardoned by Reagan. [See Wikipedia article which contains citations]

Here's what Bill Ayers, who provided the spring board for Barack Obama's career in leftist politics by including him in the Annenberg Project to radicalize Chicago school children, said in 1970. To my knowledge, he hasn't recanted, but Palin is roundly criticized by the MSM and Obama campaign as "racist" for bringing up his friendship with Obama.

"We were talking the other night and we realized that all our heroes are dead. Wow, what a trip! Ché, Nguyen Van Troi, the Vietnamese who tried to get McNamara. We're running their pictures in our paper with the line 'Live Like Him!' and they've all been killed. Outtasight, man. We've got a new slogan for the people that are going down to help with the sugar harvest: 'Cuba is for the Living!' "

Ayers' remarks typify Weatherman's tendency to define its situation in terms of extremes. Building socialism in Cuba is for the living; overthrowing American imperialism is a death trip. Weatherman, as early as the action in the streets of Chicago, already had begun to live in the shadow of death. Not long after the "Days of Rage," Weatherman would compensate for its death trip mentality with hedonistic orgies. Like a pendulum, moving from one extreme to the other, Weatherman swung from death trips to life trips to death trips … . Bill Ayers is quoted in an article by John Kifner, "Vandals in the Mother Country," New York Times Magazine, January 4, 1970. This quote appears in the publication, Weatherman, by Harold Jacobs, Ramparts Press, 1970. p. 86