complicatedshoes:

jeffmiller:

squashed:

First, Ayers was never a “terrorist” in the sense that we understand terrorism today. His group, The Weathermen, was much closer to the guys in Fight Club, than to an Al Qaeda or even a Hezbollah.

What?

What?

What?

I’m sorry, but one “what” was not enough.

If you want to defend Obama, there are other ways to do it, but downplaying the Weathermen isn’t terribly convincing.  The fact that they were a bumbling, incompetent terrorist group didn’t make them any less a terrorist group, and the fact that they succeeded mostly in killing themselves is a matter of luck, not design.

The Weathermen bombed the home of a New York State Supreme Court Justice,the Capitol, the Department of State, and planned an officers’ dance at Fort Dix (until three of them accidentally blew up themselves).  In 1970, they were credited with bombing the San Francisco Police Department, fatally wounding a police sergeant, and wounding and partially blinding a police officer.  This stuff is bad.  And Ayers was at the center of the group:

An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Bill Ayers, then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn’s husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there.^[30] In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group’s Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.^[31] In 2008, author David Freddoso commented that “Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them”.^[30][32]

Is this really more like Fight Club than an actual terrorist organization?  Maybe, if we consider only the ending of Fight Club, and not the earlier, social fighting stuff:

The narrator also learns that Tyler plans to blow up the Parker-Morris building (the fictional “tallest building in the world”) in the downtown area of the city using homemade bombs created by Project Mayhem. The actual reason for the explosion is to destroy the nearby national museum. During the explosion, Tyler plans to die as a martyr for Project Mayhem, taking the narrator’s life as well. Realizing this, the narrator sets out to stop Tyler, although Tyler is always thinking ahead of him. In his attempts to stop Tyler, he makes peace with Marla (who has always known the narrator as Tyler) and explains to her that he is not Tyler Durden. The narrator is eventually forced to confront Tyler on the roof of the building. The narrator is held captive at gunpoint by Tyler, forced to watch the destruction wrought on the museum by Project Mayhem. Marla comes to the roof with one of the support groups. Tyler vanishes, as “Tyler was his hallucination, not hers.”^[17]

With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bomb to explode and kill him. However, the bomb malfunctions because Tyler mixed paraffin into the explosives, which the narrator says early in the book “has never, ever worked for me.” Still alive and holding the gun that Tyler used to carry on him, the narrator decides to make the first decision that is truly his own: he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots himself. Some time later, he awakens in a hospital, believing that he is dead and has gone to heaven. The book ends with members of Project Mayhem who work at the institution telling the narrator that their plans still continue, and that they are expecting Tyler to come back.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how this is something less than terrifying and awful.

Thanks for replying, Jeff.  I noticed all the reblogs by all the people without brain enough to think it through.  That was just a remarkable argument by Squashed.  Sure he blew people up… but only a couple so that’s not so bad.  Good God!  What is wrong with you people?

Wow.