debating Ayers
The Ayers exchange during the final presidential debate was less combative than I had hoped it would be, but that is a tribute to Obama's demeanor. McCain opened with a standard attack: "Sen. Obama chooses to associate with a guy who in 2001 said that he wished he had have bombed more, and he had a long association with him." Those words are a reference to the NYT article "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives," (which was published on 11 September 2001), although I suspect many people haven't read past the first sentence:
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''
Ayers responded by noting that "This is not a question of being misunderstood or "taken out of context," but of deliberate distortion:"
I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn't do enough to stop the war.
Here's what Ayers wrote in April of this year:
I'm often quoted saying that I have "no regrets." This is not true. For anyone paying attention--and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways--life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I'm sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say "no, I don't regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government." Sometimes I add, "I don't think I did enough." This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.The illegal, murderous, imperial war against Viet Nam was a catastrophe for the Vietnamese, a disaster for Americans, and a world tragedy. Many of us understood this, and many tried to stop the war. Those of us who tried recognize that our efforts were inadequate: the war dragged on for a decade, thousands were slaughtered every week, and we couldn't stop it. In the end the U.S. military was defeated and the war ended, but we surely didn't do enough.
However his words are parsed, whether one believes in apologies and atonement, the caricatures of Bill Ayers are of no illuminative value.