Radical Chic: The Next Generation

“Halle-frickin’-lujah”, writes Mark Hemingway, “Someone in the mainstream media finally mentions the William Ayers connection” during the Democrat debate Wednesday night:

Obama knows the unrepentant domestic terrorist much better than he’s letting on, and Hillary calls him on it. Obama worked with him for years and was even serving on the board of directors of the Woods Fund with him at the time he made his infamous remark in the New York Times about not regretting setting the bombs.

Mr. Cool actually looks angry and flustered. How flustered? At one point, he refers to Ayers’ actions “four years ago” when he meant to say forty. Then Obama points out that (Bill) Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground. That little bit of info doesn’t help either of them. It is a good night to be Republican.

Speaking of Radical Chic: The Next Generation, as Tom Wolfe has noted in innumerable interviews, when he showed up at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s infamous 1970 Park Avenue fund raising cocktail party for the Black Panthers, he had his reporter’s notebook out and was openly taking notes and jotting down the conversation in plain view for all to see. (Wolfe wrote for New York magazine back then, in that publication’s long-bygone era.)

It was only when his article hit the streets that the Bernsteins hit the fan, as they apparently never realized the backlash that would result from their fund raiser amongst people who didn’t share their punitive far left politics–which would soon have a name, thanks to Wolfe’s article and subsequent book.

Which is very reminiscent to the way that a Huffington Post blogger observed firsthand and recorded the audio that would become known as Barack Obama’s Bittergate, as Betsy Newmark writes–and rather than pasting in virtually her entire post, go over and read the whole thing.