Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller is a, well, daily must-read for me. Full of news, commentary, wit and, until he chucked it after getting into a fracas with an airline employee, Alec Baldwin’s Twitter feeds, DC is go to. And Carlson’s not above making a little tongue-in-cheek news himself – just ask unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists and friends of President Obama, Bill Ayers and better-half Bernardine Dohrn, who soon will be looking across their dinner table at him and several of his closest, and probably sharpest-tongued, friends.
I interviewedCarlson sometime back when I was with the Freedom Foundation. Notorious at one time for wearing bow ties – me too – we talked about how he had eschewed them in favor of traditional neckwear. Ever eager to create an opportunity for myself, I slyly tried to glom a bow tie off him, but my effort was to no avail. He said they were securely tucked away in an old ammo box in his closet, and there they would stay. I was no winner that day.
But Carlson was himself a recent winner in an auction to have dinner with Bill and Bernie. Benefiting the Illinois Humanities Council, he bid $2,500 to have a home-cooked meal at their place. Were I him, I’d make certain one of the friends he takes – it’s dinner for up to a party of six – is a designated food taster. You see, I’ve interviewedAyers as well, and a nastier guy you’ll never meet.
It was at Seattle’s June 2010 Green Festival where Ayers and Dohrn were featured speakers. After sitting through their insufferable and arrogant justification of terrorist activities in the 60s and 70s before an adoring audience – I wanted to smack one guy who demanded publicly funded elections because his candidates always lost due to lack of campaign contributions – I grabbed Ayers before he went to his very capitalistic book signing and asked him a few questions. It started off badly and went downhill from there. Suffice to say he quickly turned his back on me to trot off to make more filthy lucre.
Looking chic as only well-heeled urban radicals who’ve made a tidy living off disparaging those who also make tidy livings, Ayers was fit and hip, piercings and all. Dohrn not so much – she’s living proof that getting a lot of ink in your cleavage area and lying in the sun for hours and years doesn’t help a woman age well. I’ve tossed better looking worn out shoes.
Ayers and Dohrn are mostly unapologetic about their radical terrorist past. While he concedes the Students for a Democratic Society and Weather Underground were narcissistic, he doesn’t back down from his own part in their illegal activities. The only thing that kept him out of prison was the illegal nature in which the federal government kept tabs on him back in the day. Getting a warrant was considered a nuisance in those days.
Carlson has until October 2012 to avail himself of the dinner. Consider this another glom attempt – my public appeal to him to count me among the coterie he’ll take to the shindig – because I still want straight answers to questions Ayers didn’t give me. I’ll even volunteer to do the dishes.
Scott St. Clair is a former investigative journalist with Washington State’s Freedom Foundation. He blogs for the Victoria Taft blog from his hideout in New Jersey.
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