OBAMA'S TRUTH DEFICIT
When John Murtagh was 9 years old, Bill Ayers' friends tried
to kill him.
"I remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets
and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the
large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the
bright glow of flames below. We didn't leave our burning house
for fear of who might be waiting outside," wrote Murtagh in the
April 2008 issue of the City Journal.
It wasn't personal. John's dad was a judge presiding over a
trial of the Black Panthers. The next morning, after the bombs
exploded, John still remembers the red graffiti on the sidewalk:
"FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS."
To the best of John's recollection, Bernardine Dohrn, who is
now Bill Ayers' wife, first claimed credit for bombing John's
home -- along with other targets -- in November of 1970.
Today John Murtagh is a lawyer and Yonkers' city councilman
who is running for the New York state Senate on the GOP ticket
this November. I reached him this week through his state Senate
campaign.
It wasn't hard.
Has Barack Obama ever tried?
Barack Obama was only 8 years old when Murtagh's house was
bombed. Obama has nothing to do with the terror and the trauma
John Murtagh and his family went through.
"It's a sensitive issue for us. My mom is still alive -- she's
83. She literally had to snatch her children out of the house in
the middle of the night because her house was on fire," John told
me.
But Barack Obama was not a child -- he was a grown man -- when
he decided his personal path to power and influence lay through
Bill Ayers' connections.
In the Chicago establishment, which unfortunately embraced
former domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and his wife, Barack
Obama was encouraged to look beyond the obvious -- John Murtagh,
his family, their terror, the lawlessness, the attacks on
policemen, judges, army outposts -- to embrace larger goals.
What were these goals? How does Barack Obama come to continue
to associate with a man who cannot bring himself to say to John
Murtagh or to John's mother or any other kin of the attacked:
"I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was a terrible thing to do."
Obama's campaign is busy fudging. That's a polite word for
"lying." Barack Obama's top political adviser is claiming Obama
simply didn't know Ayers' history when they first met. Bomber?
What bomber?
Right.
"If that's true, Obama has to be the dumbest man who ever
graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School,"
snorts Murtagh. "I don't buy that at all."
Murtagh believes the relationships between Barack, his wife,
Michelle, Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine, goes back 30
years, to Michelle's time at Sidley Austin, the famous
Washington, D.C., law firm that also employed Bernardine
Dohrn.
Murtagh doesn't blame Obama for what Bill Ayers and his
friends did and supported. He blames Obama for picking a man like
Ayers as a friend and mentor -- and then covering up the
friendship.
In politics things get complicated. Truth becomes hard to
find.
But when you are about to elect someone commander in chief, it
would be good to know he can lay his hands on some of the stuff,
in case he ever needs it.
"The night they attacked our home, they also firebombed an
army recruiting station out in Brooklyn and police patrol cars
outside of Greenwich Village," notes Murtagh. "Three weeks later
they accidentally blew themselves up. They intended to attack the
officer's club at Fort Dix."
Lay your cards on the table, Murtagh wants to tell the man who
would be president. "Obama's free to associate with Dohrn and
Ayers; that's his right," he tells me. "But don't hide the
relationship, and be forthcoming and let people decide the
significance of it for themselves."