The Pink Flamingo :: A Pink Flamingo Special Guest Report

We have Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago to thank for the reinvention and legitimization of the vile human being known as William Ayers. Daley magnanimously forgave and waved his royal hand over the head of extreme leftist/terrorist Bill Ayers, giving him more influence on America than we can fathom -- it is very likely Ayers has directly influenced your own children or those in your neighborhood. Mayor Daley hired Ayers to do the one job where he could spread his neo-marxist poison in the largest, surest measure -- training teachers. It wasn't bad enough that Ayers and the charming Bernardine Dohrn had 3 of their own children (one adopted from a pair of imprisoned fellow terrorists) to indoctrinate... why not turn the guy loose on the entire teaching establishment where he could literally become a weapon of mass destruction? What a fabulously enlightened idea, mayor. [See article by Sol Stern at bottom for the whole story]

Don't think it's quite that bad? Well let's take a look at the speech Ayers gave in Venezuela (that bastion of freedom, capitalism, and innovation) less than two years ago, in November 2006. Among those Ayers was addressing was Hugo Chavez. Ayers opened with these remarks:

President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests, comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!

This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez.

[...] I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

[...last paragraph...] Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.

Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

 [END EXCERPT]

Do you feel a little hammer & sicklish yet?

None of this is hidden. The entire meglomaniacal speech is proudly published at Ayers' own blog. Read it for yourself, here: Check out the artwork on Monster Bill's other site, BillAyers.org. Do you detect a distinct aversion to the colors red, white, blue? I don't know, maybe it's just me. Oh, that's right... the only place Bill Ayers likes to see the patriotic colors of America is on the ground, under his dirty boots, probably a moment after he relieved himself and zipped up:

"Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country."

Here is what International Man of Education Bill Ayers has been up to just in the past couple months: Here is what the supremely misguided, marxist-enabling mayor of Chicago published in defense of Barack Obama's "relationship" with Bill Ayers. I'll give the mayor one thing. He is loyal to his hand picked prodigy. But afterall, Dick stood by Ayers for decades while the monster churned out God knows how many Che Guevarian rebels. Mayor Daley Speaks Out
STATEMENT OF MAYOR RICHARD M. DALEY  REGARDING SENATOR BARACK OBAMA’S  RELATIONSHIP WITH BILL AYERS:

"...There are a lot of reasons that Americans are angry about Washington politics. And one more example is the way Senator Obama’s opponents are playing guilt-by-association, tarring him because he happens to know Bill Ayers. I also know Bill Ayers. He worked with me in shaping our now nationally-renowned school reform program. He is a nationally-recognized distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois/Chicago and a valued member of the Chicago community. I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over. I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep re-fighting 40 year old battles...."

Here is a definitive, must read article by Sol Stern published April 2008. It is brief and to the point. If it doesn't send chills up your spine, you may be a product of one of Ayers' educational indoctrination camps.

Sol Stern Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
The ex-Weatherman is now a radical educator with influence.
23 April 2008

"...Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. 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.
A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the “Days of Rage” in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city’s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago’s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Obama’s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree. Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that.

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.

The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it’s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates..."

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

 THERE IS MUCH MORE TO COME.... STAY TUNED.