Yes, really: Priya Venkatesan, who taught writing this year at Dartmouth College, sent around several emails to former students threatening to sue them under Title VII, the “anti-discrimination” portion of the 1964 Civil Rights act. “Dartlog,” the weblog of the invaluable Dartmouth Review, published the text of her email, which is a classic in the annals of politically correctness fatuousness.

Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:56:35 -0400 (EDT) From: Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU To: “WRIT.005.17.18-WI08″:;, Priya.Venkatesan@Dartmouth.EDU

Subject: WRIT.005.17.18-WI08: Possible lawsuit

Dear former class members of Science, Technology and Society: I tried to send an email through my server but got undelivered messages. I regret to inform you that I am pursuing a lawsuit in which I am accusing some of you (whom shall go unmentioned in this email) of violating Title VII of anti-federal [SIC] discrimination laws. The feeling that I am getting from the outside world is that Dartmouth is considered a bigoted place, so this may not be news and I may be successful in this lawsuit. I am also writing a book detailing my experiences as your instructor, which will “name names” so to speak. I have all of your evaluations and these will be reproduced in the book.

Have a nice day.

Priya

It is not clear exactly what sort of “harassment” poor Priya Venkatesan Ph.D. (as she generally signed herself) was subject to. I don’t imagine that student evaluations such as this did much to help matters:

Aside from the fact that I learnt nothing of value in this class besides the repeated use of the word “postmodernism” in all contexts (whether appropriate or not) and the fact that Professor Venkatesan is the most confusing/nonsensical lecturer ever, the main problem with this class is the personal attacks launched in class. Almost every member of the class was personally attacked in some form in the class by either intimidation or ignoring your questions/comments/concerns. If you decide to take this class, prepare to NOT be allowed to express your own opinions in class because you have “yet to obtain your Ph.D/masters/bachelors degree”. We were forced to write an in-class essay on “respect” (and how we lacked it) because we expressed our views on controversial topics and some did not agree with the views of “established scholars” who have their degrees.

If you wonder what Dr. Venkatesan’s “scholarly” work is like, Dartlog conveniently links to a sample. Here’s an excerpt:

In many ways, social constructivism has been reframed as postmodernism, since both movements question the scientific realm’s theory of truth — that is, that scientific facts mirror an external reality which does indeed exist. However, this reframing is unnecessary, since clear distinctions exist between social constructivism and postmodernism. Through my experience in the laboratory, I have found that postmodernism offers a constructive critique of science in ways that social constructivism cannot, due to postmodernism’s emphasis on openly addressing the presupposed moral aims of science. In other words, I find that while an individual ethic of motivation exists, and indeed guides the conduct of laboratory routine, I have also observed that a moral framework — one in which the social implications of science and technology are addressed — is clearly absent in scientific settings. Yet I believe such a framework is necessary. Postmodernism maintains that it is within the rhetorical apparatus of science — how scientists talk about their work

I used to think higher education could be reformed–you know, a few tweaks here and there, hire some good teachers, insist on a back-to-basics program and, presto, American higher education would once again be an ally instead of an enemy of civilization. The story of Priya Venkatesan reminds me of how utopian that belief was. Unlike so many other academic mountebanks, however, Prof. Venkatesan has at least provided some entertainment along with her absurdity.

Update: Ivygateblog has rounded up more student evaluations. There is a lot to be said against the institution of student evaluations, but Prof. Venkatesan clearly deserves all the evaluations that can be mustered:

* Worst teacher I have ever had - Written by a 2011
* Interesting - Written by a 2011
* WORST PROFESSOR EVER DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS - Written by a 2011
* save yourself now - Written by a 2011
* a tad ridiculous - Written by a 2011
* Interesting Material but Prof. is hard to follow - Written by a 2011
* Terrible class, terrible prof - Written by a 2011
* Interesting Material, Bad Prof. - Written by a 2011
* If she teaches here… - Written by a 2011
* WORST CLASS EVER - Written by a 2011
* interesting topic, boring prof - Written by a 2011
* Do NOT take this course - Written by a 2011
* HORRIBLE - Written by a 2011
* insecurity, ego, and more - Written by a 2011

Excerpts from the above evals:

Professor Venkatesan refuses to answer questions, does not respond to questions, and lectures by reading off her notes in front of her. She did not make me a better writer, she did not explain the concepts well, but she did manage to make my life a living hell.

She offered no help in class or in office hours for papers. When handed a hard copy she read the paper, said it was great, but then gave terrible grades to many students. Later on she began refusing to grade papers and gave the reason that judging by our peer editing abilities we didn’t need her help on papers. She missed/cancelled 5 or 6 classes and as a result the syllabus was squished into 3 weeks and she changed the final project about 4 times. A TERRIBLE CLASS.

What, if anything, was objectionable about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s performance at the National Press Club yesterday? If you learned about the event exclusively from reading The New York Times, you would probably believe that the only real issue was the damage it did to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In an op-ed column today, Bob Herbert complained that Wright went to Washington “not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.” How’s that? You won’t find out from Herbert’s column. Indeed, you will sift in vain through our paper of record for some record of what Rev. Wright actually said. Alessandra Stanley seems to regard Obama’s former pastor as a charming eccentric, “cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous,” as she put it in her news report, a born performer who “revealed himself to be the compelling but slightly wacky uncle who unsettles strangers but really just craves attention.”

Aw, shucks. But before you run to fetch the old chap’s slippers, take a look at today’s Washington Post. There you’ll be reminded that Rev. Wright thinks that HIV was invented by the U.S. government to cull minorities. You’ll also learn that he admires Louis Farrakhan, the leader of Nation of Islam, and that he believes the United States is a “terrorist” state that got what it deserved on 9/11 (”America’s chickens are coming home to roost”). The Post, unlike the Times, quoted from some of Rev. Wright’s more incendiary sermons, e.g., the one in which he said that blacks, because of the legacy of slavery, should sing “God damn America” instead of “God Bless America.”

Pace Ms Stanley, this is more wacko than wacky. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Times’s new memory-hole approach to the news is what it tells us about its approach to basic reporting of the facts. It’s no longer “all the news that fits” but “only news that sits well with our editorial line.”

Bruce Bawer has a good piece in the current City Journal reinforcing the alarm against the progress of soft jihad–jihad, as I’ve written, that eschews “scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s” and instead “uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance.”

Bawer’s piece, starkly but accurately titled, “An Anatomy of Surrender,” shows how a combination fanaticism, on the part of jihadists, and spineless multiculturalism, on the part of Western elites, conspire to form a culture of capitulation. The phenomenon of libel tourism. The murder of Theo van Gogh, of Pim Fortuyn. The hysteria and mayhem that followed publication of some caricatures of Mohammed. The arrest of an English school teacher in the Sudan because her students named a teddy bear “Mohammad.”The trials of Oriana Fallaci and Brigitte Bardot for “slurring Islam.”
Where will it end? That is up to us. “We need,” Bawer writes in his peroration,

to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.

The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.

But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.

“Suicide,” as the political philosopher James Burnham observed in his book Suicide of the West, “is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” And civilizational suicide, as Burnham knew, can take many forms and is always a more or less protracted affair. What Burnham warned about, and what we are still conjuring with, is the seductive toxin of unanchored liberalism. Burnham subtitled his book “The Definitive Analysis of the Pathology of Liberalism.” At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of “the will to survive.” Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is “an ideology of suicide.” He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. ” ‘Suicide,’ it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’ ” But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are “most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.”

It is time–far past time–that we get back to the task of building it back up. The first steps in that process are 1) jettisoning the rancid, self-hating pieties of multiculturalism and 2) recognizing and celebrating what is valuable in our own civilization. Like what? Bawer stresses freedom. It is often said, and rightly, that the West is the cradle of political freedom. When asked what we are fighting for in the war against terrorism, we say that we are fighting to preserve freedom. This is true, but it is not the whole story. As the philosopher Roger Scruton observed in his book The West and The Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, it is not enough to say we are fighting for “freedom” because civilization requires the restraints as well as the exercise of freedom. Hence the familiar paradox that freedom, if it is to flourish, requires definition, which means limitation and direction–unfreedom, if you will. This is not to deny the great, the inestimable value of freedom. It is simply to say that freedom cannot be rightly pursued in isolation from the ends that ennoble it. As Scruton puts it, “If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilization bent on its own destruction.”

It is part of the genius of the West–part of what distinguishes the West from the rest–that it has, almost from the beginning, tempered the binding claims of religion by acknowledging the legitimacy of secular institutions. This acknowledgment is not only a political decision, it is an existential dispensation, clearing a space for freedom and the claims of individual liberty. Islam, in principle and as a matter of historical fact, refuses to acknowledge any separate place for civil society or the exercise of individual liberty. It’s byword is not “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” but rather submission of everything to the will of Allah. “Like the Communist Party in its Leninist construction,” Scruton observes, “Islam aims to control the state without being a subject of the state.” If you want to know what that looks like in practice, contemplate the behavior of the Taliban, the Iranian Mullahs, or the followers of al Qaeda and its offshoots.

This is getting embarrassing. Remember the front-page story The New York Times ran about John McCain’s non-affair with a lobbyist? That was the long-held piece of non-news that the Times subtly dropped like a barbell at midnight shortly after it became clear that McCain would be the Republican nominee for President. The point of the piece was to knock Mr. McCain off his high horse and tarnish his reputation. But the effect was to further diminish the Times in the eyes of its readers. If such mean-spirited and slightly hysterical rumor-mongering is news, who needs it?

Well, they never learn. At least, that’s what I conclude from today’s non-story about Mr. McCain’s use of a corporate jet owned by a company run by his wife. “McCain Frequently Used Wife’s Jet for Little Cost” screams the headline.

“Yeah, so?” you might be asking, and you would be right. Here’s how the Times structures its non-stories about John McCain:

1. Prissy introductory sentence or two noting that Mr. McCain has a reputation [read “unearned reputation”] for taking the ethical high road on issues like campaign finance reform.

2. “The-Times-has-learned” sentence intimating some tort or misbehavior.

3. A paragraph or two of exposition that simultaneously reveals that a) Mr. McCain actually didn’t do anything wrong but b) he would have if only the law had been different and besides everyone knows he is guilty in spirit.

It’s really easy once you get the hang of it. Here’s how it looks in practice:

1. The Setup: “Given Senator John McCain’s signature stance on campaign finance reform, it was not surprising that he backed legislation last year requiring presidential candidates to pay the actual cost of flying on corporate jets. The law, which requires campaigns to pay charter rates when using such jets rather than cheaper first-class fares, was intended to reduce the influence of lobbyists and create a level financial playing field.”

The “Times-Touch” © here is in the opposition of Mr. McCain’s “signature stance” campaign finance reform and the ominous but as-yet-unstated malfeasance: Mr. McCain claims to be a reformer, but really . . . . The suggestion of hypocrisy is all the more potent for being left in the realm of innuendo.

2. The Execution: “But over a seven-month period beginning last summer, Mr. McCain’s cash-short campaign gave itself an advantage by using a corporate jet owned by a company headed by his wife, Cindy McCain, according to public records. For five of those months, the plane was used almost exclusively for campaign-related purposes, those records show.”

Oh dear. That’s bad, right? I mean, using your wife’s jet doesn’t sound too bad, really. Perfectly normal, in fact. Convenient that she has a spare jet he could use. But it must somehow be against the law, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be news, would it? And if it wasn’t news, it wouldn’t be worth reporting. Right?

If you believe that, you don’t know the Times. Pay attention now:

3. The Obfuscation: Part one: “The senator was able to fly so inexpensively because the law specifically exempts aircraft owned by a candidate or his family or by a privately held company they control.”

Oh. Case closed, what? Not quite:

Part two: “The Federal Election Commission adopted rules in December to close the loophole — rules that would have required substantial payments by candidates using family-owned planes — but the agency soon lost the requisite number of commissioners needed to complete the rule making.

Because that exemption remains, Mr. McCain’s campaign was able to use his wife’s corporate plane like a charter jet while paying first-class rates, several campaign finance experts said. Several of those experts, however, added that his campaign’s actions, while keeping with the letter of law, did not reflect its spirit.”

Let’s summarize. McCain used his wife’s company’s jet. It was perfectly legal for him to do so. But some people the Times reporter talked to think it shouldn’t be legal. Therefore . . .

“Therefore” what? Therefore you run another several hundred words telling readers how many flights the plane made over a 7-month period, how much it costs per hour to fly the plane, what the F.E.C. rules are for “deadhead” flights, likely tax-consequences for Mrs. McCain’s company, ending with an all purpose disclaimer: “The Times analysis may be inexact for a variety of reasons.” Why? “For one, the Times suffers from crippling ideological bias that requires it to publish stories that are nothing more than a tissue of groundless insinuation and thinly veiled editorializing designed to discredit a candidate we don’t like but against whom we have no dirt, though we are digging as fast as we can . . .” Oops, wrong sentence: the reason the Times actually gave for its possible inexactness was “flight records do not show how many, if any, campaign travelers were aboard a plane on a given flight.” Good to know.

Update: A reader adds two additional observations:

[R]egarding the non-violation of FEC rules: the article itself states that the FEC didn’t even begin not-adopting this new non-rule until December - and the travel in question took place from August through February. Not in any conceivable universe would McCain ever to have been held to have violated in August a rule that didn’t exist before December. And presumably if the FEC had had enough members to pass this rule in December, the McCain campaign would have then stopped doing whatever it is that the Times is so indignant about.

And WHY does the commission not have enough members to conduct business as usual? The Times is unusually reticent on that point. That’s because the reason the FEC doesn’t have enough members is that Barack Obama has blocked President Bush’s nominee from being confirmed.

Instapundit links to a thoughtful, and disturbing, piece on the government’s real priorities in handing down the maximum sentence to Wesley Snipes. The key sentence: “there is no greater threat to freedom in a capitalist society than that of the government to tax and regulate activity.”

What is it about Dartmouth College that arouses the acquisitive instinct of bureaucrats? Back in the early 19th century, the legislature of New Hampshire attempted to take over the college, replacing its board of trustees with their own chaps and so converting a private college into a public entity. Daniel Webster argued the case for Dartmouth before the Supreme Court, accurately noting that “The question is simply this, ‘Shall our State Legislatures be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn it from its original use, and apply it to such ends and purposes as they in their discretion shall see fit!’ ” His famous peroration, which brought tears to the eyes of the Chief Justice John Marshall, acknowledged that Dartmouth was but “a small college. And yet,” said Webster, “there are those who love it!”

Webster won the day, but the threat to Dartmouth’s independence keeps recurring. Since 1891 until early last September, nearly half of Dartmouth’s eighteen trustees were elected from a slate of alumni candidates. The other half, apart from a couple of ex officio slots, were appointed by the board itself. In practice, since the administration vetted elected as well as appointed candidates, the board of trustees controlled all the seats.

In 2004, however, something unexpected happened. T. J. Rodgers, someone not sanctioned by the Dartmouth board, ran–and won–as an independent or “petition” candidate. His victory was followed in short order by the election of two more independents, Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki. Panicked, the Dartmouth administration tried to change the rules and proposed a new constitution governing the way trustees were to be elected. The administration went all out to get the alumni to vote for the new constitution, hiring a Washington, D.C. public relations firm and inundating alumni with promotional material. Nevertheless, the proposed constitution was soundly defeated. The last straw came in May when Stephen Smith, a University of Virginia law professor, ran and won as an independent candidate. Now nearly a quarter of Dartmouth’s trustees were elected by the larger Dartmouth community, not appointed by the Board. Many important issues were on the table, from the question of class size and growth of the administrative bureaucracy to speech codes and preserving Dartmouth’s character as a college, not an embryo university. What to do?

Well, the people running Dartmouth–president James Wright and Chairman of the Board Charles “Ed” Haldeman, who is also President and CEO of Boston-based Putnam Investments–had tried democracy. They put things to a vote. That didn’t work. They tried again. Still no luck. So they employed executive fiat instead. Early in September (a moment between semesters at Dartmouth), the Governance Committee–the five-man board-within-the-board that wields the real power–issued the diktat that henceforth Dartmouth’s board would be expanded by eight more appointed trustees. Net effect? The power of the independent trustees would be severely circumscribed. The status quo would prevail. The growing threat of reform was quashed, but concerned alumni have taken the college to court.

Now there is a new storm brewing for Chairman Ed. When he took over at Putnam Investments in 2003, the firm was reeling from a maze of financial scandals. Chairman Ed was brought in to clean things up. Did he? A long and revelatory story in the current issue of The Dartmouth Review reveals that there are some doubts about that.

Like the Dartmouth board packing controversy, the Putnam scandal will be judged in a court of law. Putnam is being sued in a US District court in Maryland according to the case’s consolidated federal complaint, filed in September 2004. Both lawsuits­—Putnam’s and Dartmouth’s—are currently in discovery periods, and in both cases, a picture is emerging that cuts into Haldeman’s image as the ethical reformer. The Dartmouth Review has received information that the scandal surrounding the Putnam class action lawsuit­­—involving market timing and fraud—allegedly continued under the watchful eye of Haldeman, the same man who is leading the controversial reforms at Dartmouth.

Peter Scannell, a resident of Weymouth, Massachusetts, recently contacted The Dartmouth Review about Haldeman’s alleged contemporaneous knowledge of Putnam’s market timing scandal. . . .

As part of his ongoing investigation of Putnam, Scannell now alleges that Haldeman was aware or should have been aware of the market timing by mutual fund managers which, for a space of time, occurred under his command as the company’s CIO. This is the first time that some of these charges are being made public.

Oh dear, Oh dear. Emily Esfahani-Smith, the author of the article, asks the 64-dollar question: “Is Haldeman now reforming Dartmouth in the same way he governed and ‘reformed’ Putnam?” Anyone concerned about academic governance will want to follow this case. How it turns out will affect not only a small college in New Hampshire but also the prospects for genuine reform at colleges and universities across the country.

Many of my readers, being sensible souls, will be innocent of the name Homi K. Bhabha. The former Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago is now the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. Pretty impressive, eh? Professor Bhabha made his name as an exponent of “post-colonial studies,” i.e., a reader-proof species of anti-Western multicultural claptrap that even now makes many graduate students salivate. In case you believe that “reader-proof” is unkind, allow me to introduce you to this snippet from his much-admired essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”:

Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination–the demand for identity, stasis–and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history–change, difference–mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, . . .

Well, let’s draw a veil over Mr. Weber’s “marginalizing vision.” You get the drift. And the amazing thing is that Professor Bhahba can keep it up over the long haul. The whole essay is just like that. Here, for example, are his concluding observations

In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white,” on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse–the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose [sic] their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

I first read those words back in the 1980s and knew instantly that its author was destined for academic stardom. And so it has come to pass. Homi K. Bhabaha has it all: exotic name, correct ethnic background, impeccable left-wing political opinions, and a prose style that you’d need dynamite to penetrate. Professor Bhabha spends most of his time emitting anti-Western and especially anti-American sentiments for his admiring colleagues and students. What better place to dispense wisdom about the depredations of the West than Harvard University, that great friend of the wretched of the earth? But even Marxoid professors of post-colonial studies must occasionally relax. What do you suppose Homi K. Bhabha does in his spare time? The Harvard Alumni magazine has part of the story. Last year’s May-June issue, which I am only now seeing for the first time, has a two-page color spread advertising a number of Harvard Alumni cruises. One that we just missed–it was scheduled for February 22 - March 9, 2008–invited Harvard alums to “Experience Rajasthan as the royal families did. Your journey traces the battles of medieval Rajput kingdoms with the Mughals, and highlights the resulting diversity of art, architecture, and culture,” etc., etc. And the best part? Your guides for the 17-day trip were Homi and Jackie Bhabha. What a missed opportunity! Check out this site for updated information: who knows where they might be going next!!

Why do politicians of whatever party love a crisis?

John Stossel gets it in one: “Because ‘crisis’ justifies making big government bigger.”

Nearly all politicians these days are speaking of an economic “crisis” when they aren’t warning about “meltdown,” the worst situation since the Great Depression, etc., etc. Stossel provides some salutary and calming counterwisdom:

Sure, some lenders are skittish while things play out. Some investment banks and brokerage houses are sitting on shaky mortgage-backed securities. But why call that a “crisis”?

Do we have 25 percent unemployment, as we did during the Depression? Do we even have 7.5 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates, as we did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency?

There’s a been a loss of jobs in the past two months, but that comes after years of strong job creation — 25 million net jobs in the last 15 years . At 5.1 percent, unemployment is low by historical standards.

And are we really experiencing a mortgage-default “crisis”? No. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s 2007 fourth-quarter survey reports that foreclosures came to 2.04 percent of all mortgages. Many of those were speculators seeking flip profits rather than homeowners losing a dream house. During the quarter, only 0.83 percent of homes entered the foreclosure process. It may get worse — in March, “foreclosure filings, default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions rose 5 percent,” Reuters reports. But let’s keep things in perspective: Ninety-eight percent of borrowers are not in foreclosure. Only a small percentage of them are even late in payments.

Read the whole, eminently sane piece here.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s classic exposé of Soviet tyranny. Conquest reflects on the book’s history and continuing relevance in an essay posted at the Hoover Institution website.

One of the strangest notions put forward about Stalinism is that in the interests of “objectivity” we must be—wait for it—“nonjudgmental.” But to ignore, or downplay, the realities of Soviet history is itself a judgment, and a very misleading one.

Indeed. Read the whole thing here.

Who are Obama’s friends? As Andrew C. McCarthy put it a few days ago, they are “the same old America-hating Left.” We all know about the Rev. Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright, to whose church the Obamas contributed $20,000 in 2006. Then there are Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentent 60s radicals and, in Andy’s tart but accurate term, terrorists.

Ayers didn’t just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it. As his memoir gleefully recalled, “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”

Whether Pentagon bombing day was more or less ideal than other days, when he, Dohrn and their Weathermen comrades bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and sundry banks, police stations and courthouses, Ayers does not say. But on each occasion, there was surely optimism that the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.

There were lots of bombs. There is no remorse. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the New York Times in 2001, sorry only that he and the others “didn’t do enough.”

Well, perhaps some of Obama’s new fans will be able to help out in that department. On Sunday, the Senator picked up a ringing endorsement from Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization. As the folks at Powerline report, in an interview with Aaron Klein and John Batchelor on WABC radio,

Yousef said, “We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election.” Why? “He has a vision to change America.” Maybe Yousef has some insight into what Obama means by all these vague references to “change.”

Rev. Wright. Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn. Now Hamas. I think we are beginning to know just where American stands with Barrack Obama.