David Tanenhaus: how bad could Bill Ayers be if he made gingerbread-cookie houses with me?

David Tanenhaus - "teaches history and law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the author of Juvenile Justice in the Making" - offers 'Barack, Bill, and Me/The Bill Ayers that Barack Obama and I worked with was no "domestic terrorist"' (link). Summary: it's like something Dean Wheeler would write.

He describes how he met Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while studying at the University of Chicago and they seemed like normal, upstanding members of the Chicago - or at least Hyde Park - establishment. In fact, some of Ayers' ideas have since been adopted by others. But, due to "generational" differences, Tanenhaus had never heard of the Weathermen.

Then, Bill Ayers suddenly revealed (at least to idiots like Tanenhouse) his radical nature by writing 'Fugitive Days'.

But, then things changed back to normal again, as everyone's forgotten about everything (or at least they should). He ends with this even-more-idiotic-than-what-went-before bit:

I now include the Weather Underground in the history surveys I teach to undergraduates. I do my best to place them in the context of the radicalism of the late 1960s. I sometimes find it hard to believe that the Bill and Bernardine that Barack and I met in Hyde Park in the 1990s are the same people that my students are learning about in class. I know them better as the couple that invited me into their home in 2000 to meet their extended family, make gingerbread-cookie houses, and share Christmas dinner. Our conversation that night, as it almost always did, focused on the future, not the past.

Politics · Fri, 10/10/2008 - 09:50 · · Importance: 1