Investor's Business Daily publishes a landmark editorial explaining in detail why we should be very concerned about the long association Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. The problem with Ayers is less his radical past than his radical present, including his alignment with both Cuba and especially with Marxist Venezuelan dictator wannabe, Hugo Chavez.

Obama says he barely knows him, but in the years when he was meeting and serving together on the Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, as well as launching his career with a fundraiser in Ayers' Che Guevara-festooned house, Ayers made at least four Marxist pilgrimages to Caracas to praise Chavez's dictatorial regime.

He sits on the board of a Venezuelan government think tank called Miranda International Center, focused on bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan school children.

Recent polls show this turning of schools toward Marxist indoctrination terrifies average Venezuelans. Venezuelan dissidents also accuse Miranda of rewriting constitutions in South America to grant leftist leaders absolute power, with some saying Ayers had a role in 2007's effort to give Chavez total power inside Venezuela.

It's not surprising. Ayers' violent methods may have influenced Chavez's rise to power in 1998. Like Ayers' terrorists, Chavez's campaign began with Weather Underground-style hijackings of bank trucks. At the same time, captured computer documents show that Chavez took $150,000 from FARC while in prison.

Meanwhile, Ayers' stepson Chesa Boudin has close Venezuelan ties, too. He identified himself as a foreign-policy adviser intern to Venezuela's government in 2005. He had an office next to Chavez's own in the presidential palace. Not surprising, since Boudin's grandfather is Fidel Castro's personal attorney, and his mother is jailed Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin. His family ties give him street cred to communists.

IBD staffer Monica Showalter, who wrote the piece, deserves our gratitude for so lucidly laying it all out, now that the American public is curious about Mr. Ayers.

Update: A picture of an Obama Houston campaign office: (source)



 

Patrick O'Hannigan comments at TAS:

Because it is now impossible to ignore a story that they were never troubled by, Big Media has adopted the fallback position of referring to Ayers as a "former" radical or an "alleged" terrorist. The Associated Press even turns the odometer back to call Ayers a "60s" radical, as though his career ended before the Beatles broke up. "Former" and "alleged" are weasel-word adjectives for a man who called himself "guilty as sin" and has never repudiated the radicalism of his youth. Far from going the way of bell-bottom pants and mutton chop sideburns, that radicalism simply earned academic credentials while morphing from "Kill the pigs" into "Leave the gun. Take the cannolli." [....]

[Sol] Stern wrote [in City Journal]: "But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation's schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today."

Stern had a point. Ayers would be the "distraction from real issues" that Obama supporters make him out to be if he were an aberration in the senator's life, but he's just another angry mentor in a long string of associates whose political views range from Old Left to New Left. Even Obama's chief blogger is an avowed socialist. And the impetus for worrying about this striking lack of diversity, for those who have forgotten, is that socialism depends on coercion.