Weatherman terrorists: Obama's centrism a 'smokescreen'

Former Weathermen member Mark Rudd

President-elect Barack Obama is "feigning" a centrist position on some issues so he can ultimately push through a radical agenda, including universal health care and trimming the military, according to analysis by a founder of the Weathermen terror group, Mark Rudd, who has ties to Obama mentors.

Another top former Weathermen terrorist with ties to Obama mentors, Jeff Jones, concurred the president-elect will attempt major change, including "redistributing financial resources downward." He called Obama's "centrist" appointments a "smokescreen" to "co-opt the moderate center," declaring, "even Lenin would be impressed!"

In an article on the radical leftist Rag Blog, Rudd commented, "Obama plays basketball. I'm not much of an athlete, barely know the game, but one thing I do know is that you have to be able to look like you're doing one thing but do another. That's why all these conservative appointments are important: the strategy is feint to the right, move left. Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment."

Rudd stressed what he called Obama's second-tier appointments to various agencies, claiming those individuals are far more "progressive."

"Cheney was extremely effective at controlling policy by putting his people in at second-level positions," noted Rudd.

The terror group founder outlined what he believes is Obama's domestic agenda:

"What he's doing now is moving on the most popular issues – the environment, health care and the economy. He'll be progressive on the environment because that has broad popular support; health care will be extended to children, then made universal, but the medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance corporations will stay in place. ... The economic agenda will stress stimulation from the bottom sometimes and handouts to the top at other times. It will be pragmatic."

He said Obama ultimately seeks to shrink the military but cannot make that goal public for some time.

Find out all about Barack Obama's links to Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers and his entire agenda for "change" in Brad O'Leary's "The Audacity of Deceit," the virtual blueprint for the next administration's radical prescriptions.

"Leave the military alone because they're way too powerful," writes Rudd. "For now, until enough momentum is raised. By the second or third year of this recession, when stimulus is needed at the bottom, people may begin to discuss cutting the military budget if security is being increased through diplomacy and application of nascent international law."

On the same blog, former Weatherman terrorist Jones wrote Obama is "really SMART."

"His centrist appointments are a smokescreen; they co-opt the moderate center, but he's still the commander in chief. Even Lenin would be impressed!" he declared.

Jones wrote that Obama's various initiatives, "which will collectively set the nation on a path towards energy independence, ending the war and redistributing financial resources downward, are presented as unconnected pieces of legislation, but actually they are interlocking components of Obama's coherent multi-layered agenda."

Both Jones and Rudd were active in Progressives for Obama, an independent organization acting to ensure the Illinois senator's election. The group includes among its ranks many former members of the 1960s radical organization Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from which the Weathermen splintered, as well as current and former members of other radical organizations, such as the Communist Party USA and the Black Radical Congress.

Jones, according to his own website, was "elected, along with (Weathermen terrorist) Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, to the SDS national office. Then, in the spring of 1970, he disappeared. As a leader of the Weather Underground, Jeff evaded an intense FBI manhunt for more than a decade. In 1981, they finally got him. Twenty special agents battered down the door of the Bronx apartment where he was living with his wife and four-year-old son."

Jones' site says he traveled to Cambodia in 1966 to meet with high-level leaders of the anti-American National Liberation Front. In 1967 and 1968 he served as an SDS regional organizer for New York City.

Rudd, a petition supporter as well as a main signatory to the Progressives for Obama group, was one of the main founders of the Weathermen terrorist organization. A biography published on his website explains Rudd worked to form the Weathermen as a radical alternative to the SDS and for white Americans to eject their "white skin privilege" and begin "armed struggle" against the U.S. government.

Rudd went underground in 1970 when a bomb exploded in a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York City, killing three of his comrades. He lived for seven and a half years in hiding as a fugitive, finally surrendering in 1977 and facing only low-level state charges after federal charges against Weathermen leaders had been dropped. He resurfaced as a teacher in New Mexico.

As late as 2005, Rudd wrote an editorial in the Los Angeles Times lamenting the state of the anti-war movement in the U.S.

"What's hard to understand – given the revelations about the rush to war, the use of torture and the loss of more than 2,000 soldiers – is why the antiwar movement isn't further along than it is," he wrote. "Given that President Bush is now talking about Iraq as only one skirmish in an unlimited struggle against a global Islamic enemy, a struggle comparable to the titanic, 40-year Cold War against communism, shouldn't a massive critique of the global war on terrorism already be under way?"

In the piece, Rudd condemned the Weathermen's decision to embark on an "armed-struggle," calling it "stupid" since the violent acts led to the group's demise. But he didn't condemn the terrorism itself, only its contribution to the downfall of the Weathermen.

The New Zeal blog noted both Rudd and Jones have connections to Obama through the radical Movement for a Democratic Society, where the two serve on the board alongside former Weathermen Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, whose deep connections to Obama sparked controversy during the presidential campaign.