What price Ayers?

The Illinois Humanities Council is a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; frequent subject Jim Leach presides as chairman of the NEH. The NEH provides almost all the funding for the IHC, but the IHC is looking for more. It has posted the Public Square’s tenth anniversary online fundraising auction with 12 items up for bid. The bidding opened yesterday and runs through December 19.

Item 2 is dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant terrorists and former friends of Barack Obama. You can buy it now for $2,500; so far it has attracted one bid of $350. Consider the priceless opportunity to walk down memory lane with the celebrity couple over dinner, revisiting their life and crimes in the Weather Underground, or to ask the author of Fugititve Days to compare his memoir with “Barack Obama’s” Dreams From My Father. Jack Cashill, get your checkbook out!

But wait. There’s more! Item 6 offers the opportunity to “experience a Cubs game” with Dohrn. So far it has attracted two bids. With a winning bid, you can talk with Dohrn about life on the lam or draw her out on her comments about the murders of actress Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by the Manson gang in 1969. In a speech during the December 1969 War Council meeting organized by the Weathermen, attended by about 400 people in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn famously observed: “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

The IHC has set a high bar for next year’s auction. What next? Breakfast with Umar Abdulmutallab? A moonlight cruise with the Unabomber? You might almost begin to wonder why taxpayers continue supporting the NEH, the IHC et al.

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