with friends like these...

Lets have a little conversation between Obama’s website, where he lets newspaper articles do the talking for him [I quote only his headlines], and an article in the NYT.

Obama: 

REALITY: OBAMA WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD WHEN THE WEATHERMEN WERE ACTIVE
He turned eight on August 4, 1969. The Days of Rage, in which William Ayers participated, occurred in October 1969.

NYT:

Published: September 11, 2001

Obama: 

REALITY: AYERS COMMENTS WERE PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 11; THE INTERVIEW OCCURRED PRIOR TO PUBLICATION

NYT:

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

...He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.

Obama: 

AYERS IS A TENURED PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO AND WAS A “RESPECTED ADVISOR” TO MAYOR DALEY ON SCHOOL REFORM

NYT:

With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America” and “la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.” Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

Obama: 

CHARGES AGAINST AYERS WERE DROPPED AND HE SERVED NO TIME

NYT:

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? “I don’t want to discount the possibility,” he said.

Obama: 

…

NYT:

Even today, he finds ‘’a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’’ he writes.

...In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: “Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”

In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: “It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. ...”

Obama: 

…

NYT:

In 1970 ... the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for “conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

...in 1977… Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined $1,500. ..."I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive,” she said.

Obama: 

CHARGES AGAINST AYERS WERE DROPPED AND HE SERVED NO TIME

NYT:

Mr. Ayers describes watching “Underground,” Emile De Antonio’s 1976 documentary about the Weathermen. He was “embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way,” he writes. “The rigidity and the narcissism.”

Obama: 

REALITY: AYERS CONNECTION IS “PHONY,” TENUOUS,” “A STRETCH”

More on that connection at Just One Minute and American Thinker [Clarice Feldman]

Obama: 

AYERS AND DOHRN BECAME RESPECTABLE FIXTURES OF THE MAINSTREAM IN CHICAGO

NYT:

Ms. Dohrn tried to practice law, taking the bar exam in New York. But she was turned down by the Bar Association’s character committee because of her political activities.