Today Obama said the word I was looking for regarding Bill Ayers - Rehabilitated.
But apparently the idea that anyone can be rehabilitated, be it a criminal or a former leftist agitator, is a foreign one to many so-called "Christian" Americans. No, they want him to repent and say everything he did was wrong.
Ayers appeared first to Obama as a professor, an academic and a board member for a legitimate body involved in Education reform in Chicago. The Sixties were long gone. Ayers was and is no terrorist, not in the 9/11 sense. He is an American who resisted the Vietnam war and founded a now defunct group which, for a period of time, adopted "armed struggle" or "terrorist" tactics. And that is what "terror" is, a tactic, used by both governments and groups opposing governments. Ayers put down his weapons, rehabilitated himself, but did not repent. In his 2001 memoir he says, I believe, "I wish I had done more" to oppose the War in Vietnam.
By this he means doing something that may have ended American involvement sooner, like a real change of government.
In Europe they German press discovered an old picture of then Green Party Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer beating up a cop at a 70s demonstration. French Prime Minister Jospin, a socialist, was discovered to have been a member of Trotskyist political party earlier in his career. Both men were allowed to keep their posts. But here, guilt and treason by association are assumed by the Right for Barack Obama.
Pres. Ford had allowed draft dodgers and deserters (I believe them too) to recieve an amnesty and come home from Canada in 1975. But this open McCarthyism, centered around one meeting at Ayers home, reminds me of 50s transcripts taking down by FBI agents describing who attended what Communist Party meeting in the 40s (The Oppenheimer loyalty case).
It can't work for McCain and it won't work.
Here in Shanghai I will be delivering an envelope of absentee ballots from my institute of learning for delivery by the US Consulate. It's a heady feeling.