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Incompetence Is No Defense
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — By Patrick Appel Hilzoy wants Ayers to go away: Ayers may think that there's still a debate about the Weather Underground's effectiveness. And he might also think that he "acted appropriately in the context of those times." To me, though, he's just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole. ...

"The Underpants Gnome Theory of Political Activism"
Lawyers, Guns and Money — Hilzoy doesn't leave much unsaid here. I'm not sure why the Times chose to give editorial space to Ayers, either; the failure of the "palling-around-with-terrorists" narrative proved sufficiently enough that his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s was irrelevant to the outcome of the campaign. Idiots like Bob Owens and Sarah Palin tried to give Weatherman/Weather Underground an undeserved centrality in the debate about whether Obama was qualified to succeed the worst two-term president in the history of the republic. As for why his tangential ties to ...

The Real Bill Ayers Kind Of Sucks
Matthew Yglesias — ... only re-enforces one’s sense that unfair criticism can certainly be directed at a guy who very much deserves to be the target of criticism. An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp. ...

Sunday reading: Teddy
Ben Smith's Blog — Ted Kennedy lobbies for Caroline. Frank Rich sounds a note of alarm. Matthews is re-signing with NBC. Stephanopolous hazes Gregory. Hilzoy hammers Ayers. Richard Winger, obscurely but interestingly, raises a procedural objection to the fringe Obama lawsuits. And 'Dollar Bill' Jefferson is upset, a boost for Mike Duncan's reelection hopes.

Ayers Redux
The Moderate Voice — Hilzoy forces me to rethink my soliloquy on Bill Ayers. Perhaps I was too quick to gloss over history, to whitewash, to forgive and forget.

Things Heard: e44v1
Stones Cry Out — ... Ayer’s viewed from the left … post-election, when that family friend of Mr Obama’s no longer needs to be defended. ...

Today in The Nation: Whitewashing History
The Nation: Top Stories — ... protests had failed to stop the war," Ayers writes. " 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." I'm not so sure that terrorism necessarily involves intentional attacks on people, but okay, let's say Ayers wasn't a terrorist. How about thuggish? Vainglorious? Egomaniacal? Staggeringly irresponsible? And illogical, don't forget illogical: as Hilzoy points out, the idea that because "peaceful protest" hadn't ended the war, bombs would ...