The truth about Barack Obama's association with William Ayers slowly emerges, but will the news media have the courage to examine it?

"You know when folks are reaching when the big attack on me is I’m not wearing a flag pin or that I served on a board with a guy who was a member of the Weathermen back in the 1960's, they're reaching, you know that was the best they could do."
-- Barack Obama, May 2008

"[T]he debate emerging now about the relationship between Ayers, Dohrn and Obama is not just about the activities of Ayers and Dohrn when Obama was a child. It is about the authoritarian politics that Ayers and Dohrn still espouse today. Ayers, for example, travels regularly to Venezuela, most recently speaking in front of an audience that included Hugo Chavez in late 2006 where he proclaimed that "education is revolution."
[...]
"Ayers - today - advocates what I consider to be an authoritarian and sectarian approach to education. His work with Obama stretches back to their joint efforts in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in 1994 and 1995, which was an effort to support the problematic "local schools council" reforms under siege there.
[...]
"The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization.

"In fact, at the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that government or right wing elements helped create them.
[...]
"Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular the pro-China Maoist elements of that era and are now playing a role in the labor movement and elsewhere. And yet this question of Obama's links to people from this milieu has not been thoroughly explored by any of the many thousands of journalists, bloggers and political operatives looking so closely at Obama."
-- Steve Diamond, April 22, May 4

On May 2 the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The writer, Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, concluded her magical mystery review of US radical 1960s politics by observing

By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know. Mr. Obama expects us all to understand this, because we understand everything else. He is doing something most unusual: He's acting as if the American people are thinking with their brains. He's giving all of us a lot of credit. Could it be that we deserve it?

Steve Diamond -- native Chicagoan, law professor, political scientist, and international labor movement specialist -- begged to disagree. His reply to Wurtzel exposed her naivete about Leftist politics, 1960s activism, and Senator Obama:

[I]n spite of what Ms. Wurtzel might have heard in the 80s, Ayers and Dohrn were not representative of the activist politics of the 60s, only of the most destructive, sectarian and authoritarian dimensions of the antiwar movement.

Their activities did more damage to the antiwar movement than is widely understood today. Contrast the effect of their violent actions on American politics with the relationship that emerged in Poland in the same period between left wing intellectuals and students and a democratic labor movement - it led to the downfall of the Stalinist regime.

There were, of course, many thousands of non-authoritarian left wing activists in the 60s and 70s who had to work under the impact of attempts by the right to smear the entire left and antiwar movement with the criminal, desperate and pathetic actions of the Weather Underground.

Diamond's reply, coupled with his explanation of why Chicago mayor Richard Daley fawned over William Ayers and his examination of Obama's close ties with Ayers and Dohrn going back to the 1980s, also reads like a primer on the failings of the media to properly examine Barack Obama.

By the time you're finished studying all that Steve Diamond has to say on the matter of Barack Obama, it will be clear that Obama has been betting on just the opposite of Elizabeth Wurtzel's assumption. He's been acting as if the American public does not have the brains to figure out what he stands for.

However, intelligence is not quite the issue. You cannot read Diamond's analyses without realizing that truth has taken an awful beating in the media coverage of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Diamond's analyses throw light on why this happened. A close examination of Barack Obama's associations means opening a window on the American Left and observing the deep divisions in the movement.

So far, no one in the American media has been willing to engaqe in this discussion during a presidential campaign because both the Left and the Right lose from the discussion. Barack Obama has bet his campaign on this cynical political decision and the US media's extreme politicization.

Yet looking beyond his connections to an entire network of hard-core Maoists -- looking to his connection to a Kenyan warlord, to a pastor who as much advocates the violent overthrow of the US government, to a Chicago political fixer with ties to the Baathists -- the true picture of Barack Obama slowly emerges.

Throughout his adult life, Obama has been drawn to people who are essentially fascist in their outlook, people who find the democratic process too messy and slow to bring about change, people who believe in manipulating the system of democracy to undermine its principles in order to grab power.

To call this "guilt by association" is to ignore that the associations were Barack Obama's choices, and that the choices guided his career as both a political organizer and politician.

A correction: my May 4 post assumed that Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog hadn't discussed until May 3 the details of Obama's work for William Ayers. I was wrong; on April 26 Larry published an extensive discussion on the topic. And it's from the discussion that I learned about Steve Diamond's writings. So I owe Larry not only an apology but also a big thanks.
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3:15 PM ET Update
B Merry's entry today at Rezko Watch makes a good companion read to this post.
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10:00 PM Update
Attention reseachers: Merry at Rezko Watch has tweaked an old post and made it a resource list of articles related to domestic terrorists William ("Bill") C. Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, leaders in the 1960s Weather Underground. Articles are classified by year (starting in 2001) and for 2008, by month. Great reference tool.