The RightWing 'Intellectuals' are in a frothy, mouth-foaming frenzy about Bill Ayers...AGAIN. This is largely because they realize their man Johnny Mac is losing big, so it's time for the good old tried and true RightWing electoral strategy: ignore any policy discussion and simply try to characterize your opponent as a friend of Evil with a capital E. In this case, they think that's Bill Ayers.
Jonah "I want everyone to think I'm a serious intellectual, even though all serious scholars of fascism recognize that my book on the topic is of absolutely no value whatsoever" Goldberg sums up the RightWing Knucklehead position thus:
But I think it is absurd to argue — as the NY Times implicitly does — that this is all meaningless because Obama and Ayers were allegedly less than soulmates.
Again imagine a similar relationship between McCain and an abortion clinic bomber and the Times running a story a month before the election reassuring that it's no big deal because McCain and Mr. Planned Parenthood Bomber weren't "close."
http://corner.nationalreview.com/...
Funny thing. In the midst of all the discussion of how awful it would be if Obama had a relationship of anything exceeding five seconds with Ayers, little information is ever actually provided about what Ayers thinks/thought and DID. Doughy Pantload here simply equates Ayers with the abortion extremists who have been blowing up and burning down clinics over the past few decades, frequently hurting and killing people unfortunate enough to be inside at the time, indeed even explicitly targeting doctors and workers in the clinics for murder.
It is enough, the RightWing Knuckleheads know, to call Ayers a terrorist, when Doughy's image of the terrorist (the abortion doctor assassin) is one of the images most of us will quickly bring to mind. Of course, there are also other such images they know will be implictly drawn on by the mere use of the 't' word. "Right, Ayers is a terrorist--that means he's just like Osama bin Laden. Got it. Evil with capital E."
I'm not big into catch-all terminology when the nuances are meaningful, as they are here (and as the RightWing Knuckleheads would like no one who doesn't already think so to realize). In the vernacular, "terrorist" carries the implicit connotation of "killer and wounder of people." This is what terrorists do, right? Al-Qaeda does this. Abortion doctor assassins do this. And that's terrorism par excellence, right?
Hence, Ayers is a killer or at least someone who WANTED to kill people.
There's a problem. Ayers never killed anyone, nor did he ever try to kill anyone. He never even injured anyone, nor is there any evidence whatsoever that he even ever WANTED to injure anyone. The Weatherman organization that he was involved in during the late 1960s and early 1970s carried out bomb attacks on symbolic SITES inside the US in order to make the strongest possible statement against the massive killing of real live people that our government was at the time involved in prosecuting over in Vietnam. BUT THEY NEVER KILLED OR INJURED ANYONE.
Indeed, they had a rigorous method to ensure that they wouldn't kill or injure anyone. They consistently phoned authorities well in advance of all their attacks to notify them of the coming explosion, precisely so people could be evacuated from the relevant building or location.
Ayers was never convicted, nor even CHARGED, for any deaths or injuries to actual persons. He attacked PROPERTY. The one event that involved any harm to human beings that the Weathermen were connected to had to do with inexperienced bomb-making Weathermen blowing themselves up accidentally. Law enforcement briefly, in 2003 or so, tried to accuse Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, of involvement in the February 1970 bombing of a San Francisco police station that killed an officer and wounded another, but they had absolutely no evidence and no charges were ever brought.
I repeat: Ayers attacked PROPERTY, not people.
You still may think this is unacceptable and that he merits condemnation, of course. You may even still want to use the 't' word on him.
In my view, though, it makes all the difference in the world when we know what Ayers was actually up to. He was, in effect, responding to an actual genocidal attack by his own government on another people (dropping megaton after megaton of explosive stuff on the heads of peasants in another part of the world) by attacking symbolic property of that government to try to get them to STOP THAT KILLING.
Meanwhile, at just about the same time, what was our friend old Johnny McCain up to? Well, he was doing his part to help the US government kill as many Vietnamese civilians as possible; he was flying sorties over non-military sites in North Vietnam when he was shot down.
So why does only one of them get the 't' word?