McPhee: Obama links more than 'troubling'

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis calls Barack Obama’s connection to William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist who was part of the Weather Underground — an anti-war group that planted bombs and killed cops — “troubling.” I say it is outrageous.

The Weather Underground did damage right here in Boston. On Sept. 23, 1970, BPD Officer Walter Schroeder was gunned down outside a Brighton bank that had just been robbed by five members of the Weather Underground. One of the terrorists opened fire on the cop. With bullets from a machine gun the group ripped off from a National Guard armory in Newburyport just weeks earlier, Schroeder was shot in the back and killed.

Schroeder left behind a wife and nine children, aged 17, 15, 13, 10, 9, 7, 6, 2 and 11 months. The gunman, William “Lefty” Gilday, was captured along with three accomplices. The armed getaway driver, Katherine Powers, fled and remained on the lam for 23 years. When she was finally caught, Powers was treated with the same despicable reverence that Obama’s friend Ayers has been given by the media. Like Ayers, Powers was profiled as a hapless revolutionary caught up in the tumult of the Vietnam War rather than what she truly is: a cop-killing lowlife.

That fact was not lost on Schroeder’s daughter, Clare, who delivered a powerful victim impact statement at Powers’ sentencing in 1993. “Powers’ crimes, her flight from justice and her decision to turn herself in have been romanticized utterly beyond belief,” Schroeder said. “My father’s life was cut short for no reason, shot in the back with a bullet of a coward while Ms. Powers waited to drive that coward to safety.” The Weather Underground was also involved in a Brinks robbery in Nyack, N.Y., that left two cops and a Brinks security guard dead. Those murders also left nine children fatherless.

So for Obama to think it is OK to launch his political career in the living room of two Weather Underground members, Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn — the couple, like Powers, went underground as fugitives after a bomb-making factory blew up on a residential Manhattan block, killing three people — and then explain the association away by saying, “I was 8,” is outrageous. People need to wake up and realize that Obama’s anti-American pals, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, are not just “troubling.” The associations are frightening.