Who Rides the Magic Bus?

Who can forget The Who with their Magic Bus paean to buses taking us to our loved ones. Our friends at LittleGreenFootballs have been keeping track of the Obama campaign web-site. It is apparently a model of Soviet efficiency in eliminating potentially harmful material. The latest bus rider booted out the middle door is Mike Klonsky. Mikey was yet another of the pony-tailed happy crew that made up the Weathermen. Michael Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were also among that meteorological band. Ahh, The Weathermen, the Weather Underground...perhaps a little refresher course is in order...this from Wikipedia:

The name Weatherman was derived from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. Using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of American youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan’s songs. It appears also that the “Weatherman” moniker used by the group may have been meant as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor Party, whose Worker Student Alliance SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many former SDSers to its ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention.

The Weatherman group had long held that militancy was becoming more important than nonviolent forms of anti-war action, and that university-campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military and internal security apparatus. The belief was that these types of urban guerrilla actions would act as a catalyst for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen’s overall assertion that worldwide revolution was imminent, such as the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in China; the 1968 student revolts in France, Mexico City and elsewhere; the Prague Spring; the emergence of the Tupamaros organization in Uruguay; the emergence of the Guinea-Bissauan Revolution and similar Marxist-led independence movements throughout Africa; and within the United States, the prominence of the Black Panther Party together with a series of “ghetto rebellions” throughout poor black neighborhoods across the country.[10]

We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.

The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the analytical concepts that later came to be known as “white privilege” and identity politics.[citation needed] As the unrest in poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”


What is it with Barry O that he keeps finding himself in the same confines as Dohrn, Ayers and Klonsky? It is a frightening mind set if he respects and likes them. While people like this were blowing up buildings in the United States, a half-world away, young men were in battle. Young men who didn't care whether the guy next to him was black or white, who didn't care whether the fellow was poor or rich, who only cared that the two of them would get out alive. I am tearfully reminded of the concluding line in "We Were Soldiers" - the story of the first engagement between regular U.S. Army (7th Cavalry, Custer's Regiment) and the North Vietnamese Regular Army. Outnumbered by almost 10 to 1 (395 versus 3,000), fought for over two days and soundly defeated the NVA. Joe Galloway, a reporter on the scene, who wrote the book upon which the movie is based observed: There were no bands, no flags, no honor guard to welcome them home. They went to war because their country ordered them to. But in the end they fought not for their country or their flag, they fought for each other.

That, my friends, is real unity. And as someone who has served, I can tell you it is an unbreakable bond that someone like Barry O cannot grasp. Such a bond requires humility, trust and love. It does not require ambition or gain. It seeks only mutual reward. Ask the growing crowd under the Magic O Bus how it feels to have friends like Barry..."too much the Magic Bus!"


Post Note: For a quick look at the Bus List, visit Confederate Yankee. He's got Michelle Obama "clinging to the bumper." I've been saying for awhile, that the real reason Barry O is worried about the possibility of a controversial tape about her is he'll have to climb back there and pry her fingernails off the bumper.

Post post note: More on Mike Klonsky from our friends over at the Global Labor Forum:

However, it must be pointed out that a notorious ally of Bill Ayers for many years, Mike Klonsky, is an open member of the Obama campaign. Klonsky runs a blog on the official Obama website here where he claims to be a "professor of education" (the website of the Small Schools Workshop that he directs says only that he teaches some graduate courses, though it appears he was a visiting professor for one year at Nova Southeastern University in Florida in 2006-07) and says he blogs for Obama on "education politics and teaching for social justice."

Who is Mike Klonsky? Well, on one level, he might just appear to be a protege of Bill Ayers in the education world. He received, as I detail below, a $175,000 grant from the Ayers/Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop that he and Ayers started in Chicago to push their school reform agenda.

But that is only half the story. Klonsky was one of the most destructive hardline maoists in the SDS in the late 60's who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese stalinist leadership who, in turn, "hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as 'reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,' effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party." (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).

I know of no indications that Klonsky has ever expressed any regrets about that activity. Perhaps like his SDS comrade, Ayers, he, too, thinks he did not do enough back then. In my view they did more than enough.


Maoist? For some fun make sure you click on the link that says Mikey is a blogger for Obama - you get this subliminal image of an eagle and the Obama rising sun logo and then it flickers away. There are way too many of these moonbats floating in the water near the S.S. Obama to make it all be subliminal.




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