[speechlesstx]

Well, sort of... the Weather Underground didn't engage in terrorism, like setting bombs, shooting to death two cops and an armored car guard or attacking Fort Dix, it was just “extreme vandalism.”

IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.

Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close.

Indeed, Ayers was a victim here so he nobly "sat it out."

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

None of it was terrorism, Sam Sedaei at Huffpo went so far as to claim "throughout its entire time of activities, Weathermen did not hurt a single citizen." And since they didn't mean to hurt anyone it's all just harmless protesting.

But he repents nonetheless:

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

The real cause for regret isn't for what he did, but that he didn't do enough.

And of course he has a lesson for us all:

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

I beg to differ, "demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear" did triumph. The entire Hopenchange campaign from the top down was demonizing McCain and Palin, associating McCain with Bush (as in "It's frightening how much George Bush likes John McCain, and it should tell you all you need to know." -Tom McMahon, DNC Executive Director), and stoking fears of a "third Bush term."

No?

[Skell]

Linking McCain and Bush wasn't fear mongering. It was just the truth and good politics.

Your argument will be that linking Obama and Ayers wasn't fear mongering either. Just the truth and good politics. You may be right too. So we'll just all agree that there was no fear mongering by either party, just the truth, and at the end of the day the best man won?

Agree?

Cause you won't. Your just pi$$ed because your fear mongering wasn't good enough this time. Oh well... You'll get another go in four years time.

[speechlesstx]

No Skell, my argument is linking McCain with Bush’s “failed policies” was "guilt by association.” Calling McCain a hypocrite, liar, ethically challenged, etc. was “demonization.” Claiming McCain wanted to stay in Iraq for 100 years, would cut benefits for seniors, and as McMahon said “frightening how much George Bush likes McCain,” etc. was “politics of fear.”

I’ll grant there was plenty of nonsense on both sides, but I’ve had more than my fill of Obama supporters playing innocent in feeding everyone that “hope won over fear” crap since the election... and I’m darn sure not buying this “extreme vandalism” garbage. But I’m not pi$$ed. Disappointed - but not pi$$ed.

[Galveston1]

And after all that money spent, charges and counter charges made, a tiring campaign, what have we gotten out of it?

Another black family moving into government housing.

(Sorry, it was just too good not to pass on)

[tomder55]

Where I live they honor the memory of the Brinks Truck victims annually .

Figures the NY Slimes would give this terrorist slimeball a platform. During the campaign they denied McCain an editorial slot but Ayers whitewash and rewrite of history is perfectly acceptable use of their ink.

You got to remember ;it is a matter of degree . They were only small bombs that he was directly involved with .
Meanwhile his rhetoric at the time called for his drones to kill their parents. He takes no responsibility in the bomb he designed that blew up during construction killing 3 of his co-terrorists . It was a nail bomb intended to use at Ft. Dix for the possible killing and maiming of hundreds of soldiers.

I guess the difference between him and Tim McVeigh is the size of the bomb and the body count. Or even better... Charles Manson never actually killed anyone... OBL never actually flew any planes or strapped homicide belts on himself.

He claims more credit than reality . Katha Pollit at the left of center 'The Nation' writes :

While Ayers and Dohrn were conveying their outrage, other people were doing the kind of organizing work that the Weather Underground despised as wimpy. Today Ayers blends himself into that broader movement, the "we-- the broad we" that "wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at inductions centers" etc. but at the time, Weatherpeople had nothing but contempt for the rest of the antiwar left. Writing letters? Off the pig! You might as well... become a community organizer!


Of all the sectarian groups from that era , Weather, in all its permutations, was the least effective and the most destructive to the movement. It was all about the romance of itself. And it still is.

Bill Ayers Whitewashes History, Again

And that's the point that Ayers misses. His impact and influence on the Vietnam war policy was zero . It was the legitimate peaceful protesting that eventually convinced the middle class and the politicians that the war had to end.

All the Weather Undergrond did was terrorize. His romantic rewrite of history will not change that .

[twinkiedooter]

Another black family moving into government housing

Galveston - you know, I never really thought of it like that. The laugh is on the American public, that's for sure.