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• Friday, February 27, 2009 04:30 AM

  Let me make the explicit connection, please

  During the presidential campaign last year, there was an entertaining kerfuffle over William Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. (remember Mrs. Palin's deathless phrase "pallin' around with terrorists"?) A Chicago Tribune columnist, Steve Chapman, wrote a critique of Obama, and at that time I wrote the following to the Tribune. It reiterates a couple of the anarchist points O'Hehir explixates in his excellent review. Apparently, I must be a middle-class fellow-traveller.

  We’re all terrorists. Steve Chapman’s column about Barack Obama’s friendship with Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers (”About Obama’s terrorist acquaintance,” Commentary, April 20) was far, far too simplistic. All of us who were adult Americans in the ’70s were complicit in one form or terror or another.

  Yes, police officers were tragically lost in a foolish attempt to attack the U.S. government, but all such casualties were part and parcel of a foolish war instigated by a Democratic president and continued by a Republican.

  The Weather Underground is guilty of terror, as is each Vietnam vet who killed or ordered the killings of civilians. I sat on my 2-S deferment and let it all happen; I’m guilty.

  We’re all ex-terrorists, no matter which side we enabled then or are on now. That’s what wars of aggression do to the instigating nations.

  Obedience and loyalty are never excuses for sins against mankind. Finger-pointing won’t hide that.

  –Chris Deignan

  —Chris Deignan Read Chris Deignan's other letters
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