Comments on: as if it were a dream http://prohillary.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/as-if-it-were-a-dream/ Just another WordPress.com weblog Sat, 10 May 2008 22:08:35 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: prohillary http://prohillary.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/as-if-it-were-a-dream/#comment-634 prohillary Sat, 03 May 2008 01:42:01 +0000 http://prohillary.wordpress.com/?p=198#comment-634 We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong have won; Kill the pigs. For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn't have to rent a limo for the senior prom: The NYPD did the driving. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn't fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own 9-year-old John Murtagh into bed. Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family's life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, of all days: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his "politics of change." Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends' and supporters' violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama's own beliefs, his philosophy and the direction he would take our nation. At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of hisupbringing and subsequent radicalization: "I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire." Funny thing, Bill: One night, so did I. John M. Murtagh is an attorney, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies and a member of the city council in Yonkers. A longer version of this appears on www.city-journal.org. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/04/30/2008-04-30_barack_obama_pal_is_an_enemy_too.html We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong have won; Kill the pigs.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: The NYPD did the driving.

In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own 9-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse.

But listen to Ayers interviewed in The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.”

Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country.
It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy and the direction he would take our nation.

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of hisupbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.” Funny thing, Bill: One night, so did I.

John M. Murtagh is an attorney, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies and a member of the city council in Yonkers. A longer version of this appears on http://www.city-journal.org.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/04/30/2008-04-30_barack_obama_pal_is_an_enemy_too.html

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