Dark Star

Unearthing the Weather Underground by Joseph Morrison Skelly

The resolute reporting of National Review Online’s Stanley Kurtz and his colleagues has cast light on the concealed web of connections linking Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. A recent visit by this writer to a local Borders Bookstore has opened a window onto the Weather Underground itself via the pages of a volume found unexpectedly in the store’s political science section. Dan Berger, the author of Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, published in 2005, intends his book to be a chronicle of subtle praise for the terrorist organization, another nostalgic trip through the psychedelic 60s. In the hands of a reader with a sound moral compass, however, it becomes a searing indictment of the group. Read factually, it pierces the purple haze spewed by the radical chic narrative of the anti-war movement. On page after page it paints a picture of the sordid moral wasteland inhabited by the members of the Weather Underground and their terrorist co-conspirators. The unvarnished truth demonstrates that the rationalizations Barack Obama has employed to explain away his links to Bill Ayers are untenable. It also casts doubt on Obama’s suitability to serve as president of the United States.

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