And were never caught or charged. I still suspect they were plants of some type, maybe just ‘supported’ and left alone because the damage they caused was beneficial to the authorities.

I’m simply presenting Lindorff’s arguments and my own to battle with the narrative given forward by those who bait him. Your views are shared by most older comrades I know of, though I’ve heard other compelling accounts of what became of RYMII. Be that as it may, I’m in no way stating that Weather did anything right. I’m stating that the real criminals were in power.

That would be more ironic if it weren’t also the trajectory of the Chinese Communist Party.

As for the Weatherman, you’ve pretty much said it all. I knew quite a few of them in passing and it’s just damned sad to reflect on the stupidity of it all. One I talked with years later admitted that they had a sense of being the revolutionary elite that was not, uh, inconsistent with the presumptions of the elite universities and in many cases the upper class backgrounds that shaped their worldview. They did a lot of damage to the movement…and in some tragic cases to themselves. A couple of folks who I remember early on as “nice kids” are still rotting in jail – and frankly they deserved what they got. The road to hell, etc. etc.

How you ans some pathetic, mumbling fossil like Lindorff can celebrate a tiny crew of rich kids who — feeding on the goodwill of tens of thousands of nameless student activists at the time– would hold a national convention (as Weather did) and salute Charlie Manson as a hero, sort of undercuts your posture as some great reflective intellectual. Are these your heroes Cummings? Creamy puffs from Columbia and Yale holding three fingers up in the air as a salute to Manson who stuck forks into the “pigs?” Excuse me while I wretch.

I am happy to say that when the Weather madness broke out, I as a green 19 year old — and tens of thousands of others just like me in my age group involved in the anti-war movement, immediately recognized these folks as the dangerous and delusional clowns they were. They were never more than a few dozen and never had the support of more than a few hundred. I dont see any reason 40 years later to give them any more credence.

Next month, as we do every year or two, and as we have done regularly for decades, about 15 of us from our local SDS chapter will go out to dinner and chat and talk. All of these folks, now in their late 50s and early 60s have held to their ideals: they are public defenders, social justice lawyers, union organizers, nurses, teachers etc etc. Only one (the Maoist!) became a rich businessman.

Not once in any of these encounters have we ever discussed how CIA agents or government programs broke up SDS — we dont because it didnt happen that way.

SDS fell apart because the anti-war movement hit an historical impasse and lacking any real mature leadership fell victim to a depressing fight between a few hundred self-appointed leaders — divided between robot Maoists in what was called RYMII and the Weather wackos in RYM1. I know this story initmately because the founder and leader of the RYMII faction came from my same campus — though we were not hooked up with them I am proud to say. When the at fight broke out between these two tragically dogmatic and elite groups, most of use just walked away from SDS which by then had lost most pretense of any national organization.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had all the Marxist understanding of a pair of fleas. Ditto for Mark Rudd. They were guilt-ridden kids.

They performed no courageous or honorbale acts and only served to further discredit, dishonor and further confuse and fragment an anti-war movement already in decline.

That their incompetence led to the murder of only their own comrades in the New York Townhouse bombing is no excuse for some artificial principle of bombing only property not people. The three people who died in that botched were ….people. Stupid (rich) young people who had the whole world before them and blew themselves up in a fetid fantasy of world revolution. I know the sister of one of those victims and 40 years alter she still cannot explain to herself why such insanity took grip.

To argue that the same group who was so painfully amateurish that it couldnt prevent itself from killing its own was somehow going to guarantee that their idealistic bombs would damage only bldgs and not harm the innocent is really an argument for idiots — intellectual and moral idiots.

The Weathermen were a plague on the anti-war movement. Those of us who are veterans of it and who willingly invested our energies and lives in it would appreciate it if little, clueless armchair wankers like yourself wouldnt venerate those who helped fuck the whole thing up. Thanks for your cooperation.

Odd as it may seem to hyperpartisans of various persuasions, it is entirely possible for someone of above room temperature IQ to come up with his/her own conclusions.

Hillary is not long for this political world. And to the extent that she, her husband, and their associated minions imagine that they might be furthering her future in presidential politics, they are entirely illusory. Her presidential future is over. As well as out.

I don’t know if it’s “simply nuts”; he’s at least careful enough to use median rather than average income.

Comment 8 on “Clinging to the data” (the blog version, predating Krugman’s column): “Consistently not mentioned in the non-stop praising of middle-class income growth during the 90’s (lovingly referred to as the Clinton years) is the fact the the Wintel/internet productivity boom produced most if not all of the economic roar of that period. Hiring was robust and capital gains fueled any number of follow-on entrepreneurial, job creating private sector investments, including many in the Midwest.”

This is actually where I part ways with Krugman — on the one hand, he often talks about how IT hasn’t really made a significant economic difference. On the other, the very same New Economy bubble he decried as having so little foundation seems to come in handy whenever he wants to praise the Clinton administration’s economic record. I never seen him explain this.

Pittsburgh is a significant high-tech hub, probably because of its proximity to Carnegie Mellon. Philadelphia has been called an out-of-state borough of NYC. A kind of bubbly yuppification might have masked some wage stagnation or increasing unemploymnet at the lower end.

===
What has them in a lather is Ayer’s comment, made a few years ago, that he has no regrets for the organization’s having set off several bombs back in the early 1970s, and that in fact they “should have set of more.”
===

Look at that (supposed) quote. Besides a typo that suggests a certain other affinity with the ever-sloppy JC …. well, I can’t find any record of Ayers saying he “should have set off more” bombs. Or even that the Weathermen should’ve. The most you’ll find is “could’ve done more” (exactly what, is left unstated) or “we didn’t do enough” (in a context that might suggest bombings, but leaves it ambiguous). “Didn’t do enough” was in the NY Times, but not “a few years ago” — it was in 2001. HE DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO ACCURATELY QUOTE THE VERY GUY HE WAS TRYING TO DEFEND.

And here’s this star journalist at CounterPunch screwing up again, in the VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH:

===
(Incidentally, as Robert Parry notes, those comments were made before 9-11, not, as Hillary Clinton charged duplicitously in the April 16 Philadelphia debate, right after 9-11.)
===

You click on Robert Parry and it takes you to an article where Parry does NOT say that Clinton charged Ayers with making “those comments” (which Lindorff can’t even quote correctly). Parry points out correctly that Clinton phrased it so as to suggest something like that to someone not listening carefully. He doesn’t mention the one good point that Clinton made in all that: that this is how the GOP will play the whole thing against Obama.

No wonder you love this article, JC. It makes you feel that your fuzziness and sloppiness is somehow OK, because … well, *other* kids are doing it! Kids getting *paid* for what they write! No surprise that Lindorff has a Mumia fixation. How infantile. He’s just a propagandist. I guess that’s OK with you, in “context”, though.

So many candidates, so little time, and … so little relevance to today.

I hadn’t heard of Operation Chaos. The Wikipedia page was unhelpful, as it seemed to have been salted with contributions from wacko conspiracy theorists. However, Covert Action Information Bulletin is a fairly reliable source.

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/lyon.html

If Operation Chaos actually had infiltrated SDS enough to cause it to descend into “wacko cultism”, well … it certainly seems that Bernardine Dohrn must have been CIA Agent Number One. I guess not.

I love the WaPo headline here:

http://www.serendipity.li/cia.html#mind_control

“CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD”

Whoa, CIA handed out doses to all 17 groups? Oh, wait, it turns out that these are really two separate stories, one about infiltration, the other about LSD experiments.

Still, it hardly matters. Because I *know*, for a *fact*, that out of my 172 acid trips, at least 35 were freebies from my local SDS chapter’s resident CIA agent. I remember it *clearly*. (Those memory-enhancement treatments I got when I was abducted by aliens make it seem like it was yesterday. And it was also confirmed in my most recent seance with Frank Zappa; official transcript forthcoming.)

But is you believe that world is controlled by the machinations of “Capital,” how different are you from Jim Jones?

Boy are you reaching for it. The only thing Jim Jones was in favor of was Jim Jones. His ability to find vulnerable members of society to manipulate for his own ends hardly makes the People’s Temple “the quintessential Left Cult” any more than David Koresh’s hatred of the Federal Government, stockpiling of weapons and subsequent martyrdom – the latter from the viewpoint of some among the right wing – makes the Branch Davidians the quintessential Right Cult.

In case you were wondering why I don’t think you’re a serious commenter, that comment is one example as to why.

The quintessential Left Cult, the People’s Temple, thought the Carter Adninistration [!] was going to drop the Airborne on their Guyana paradise.

But is you believe that world is controlled by the machinations of “Capital,” how different are you from Jim Jones?

How you ans some pathetic, mumbling fossil like Lindorff can celebrate a tiny crew of rich kids who — feeding on the goodwill of tens of thousands of nameless student activists at the time– would hold a national convention (as Weather did) and salute Charlie Manson as a hero, sort of undercuts your posture as some great reflective intellectual. Are these your heroes Cummings? Creamy puffs from Columbia and Yale holding three fingers up in the air as a salute to Manson who stuck forks into the “pigs?” Excuse me while I wretch.

I am happy to say that when the Weather madness broke out, I as a green 19 year old — and tens of thousands of others just like me in my age group involved in the anti-war movement, immediately recognized these folks as the dangerous and delusional clowns they were. They were never more than a few dozen and never had the support of more than a few hundred. I dont see any reason 40 years later to give them any more credence.

Next month, as we do every year or two, and as we have done regularly for decades, about 15 of us from our local SDS chapter will go out to dinner and chat and talk. All of these folks, now in their late 50s and early 60s have held to their ideals: they are public defenders, social justice lawyers, union organizers, nurses, teachers etc etc. Only one (the Maoist!) became a rich businessman.

Not once in any of these encounters have we ever discussed how CIA agents or government programs broke up SDS — we dont because it didnt happen that way.

SDS fell apart because the anti-war movement hit an historical impasse and lacking any real mature leadership fell victim to a depressing fight between a few hundred self-appointed leaders — divided between robot Maoists in what was called RYMII and the Weather wackos in RYM1. I know this story initmately because the founder and leader of the RYMII faction came from my same campus — though we were not hooked up with them I am proud to say. When the at fight broke out between these two tragically dogmatic and elite groups, most of use just walked away from SDS which by then had lost most pretense of any national organization.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had all the Marxist understanding of a pair of fleas. Ditto for Mark Rudd. They were guilt-ridden kids.

They performed no courageous or honorbale acts and only served to further discredit, dishonor and further confuse and fragment an anti-war movement already in decline.

That their incompetence led to the murder of only their own comrades in the New York Townhouse bombing is no excuse for some artificial principle of bombing only property not people. The three people who died in that botched were ….people. Stupid (rich) young people who had the whole world before them and blew themselves up in a fetid fantasy of world revolution. I know the sister of one of those victims and 40 years alter she still cannot explain to herself why such insanity took grip.

To argue that the same group who was so painfully amateurish that it couldnt prevent itself from killing its own was somehow going to guarantee that their idealistic bombs would damage only bldgs and not harm the innocent is really an argument for idiots — intellectual and moral idiots.

The Weathermen were a plague on the anti-war movement. Those of us who are veterans of it and who willingly invested our energies and lives in it would appreciate it if little, clueless armchair wankers like yourself wouldnt venerate those who helped fuck the whole thing up. Thanks for your cooperation.