Shocker: NYT Gives Free Pass to Bill Ayers to Dishonestly Spin His Terrorism

"I never killed or injured anyone" ?

Jules Crittendon is similarly baffled that the NYT would let that sort of statement pass without challenge. His source? Previous reports in the NYT:

Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin nand David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.

Annoyingly, a piece of crap blog calling itself "The Moderate Voice" weighs in. "The Moderate Voice" is typical of many self-declared moderates; i.e., it's full-on liberal, but doesn't want to say so. The "Moderate" Voice (linked by Crittendon) boldly predicts that "some people" won't be satisfied with Ayers' "repentance," as it terms it;

Of course, that won’t be enough for some people, who will parse Ayers’ words to build their case anew that he has still not repented. Those “some people” will carefully ignore much of what Ayers writes, including his …

– Unqualified acknowledgment that the Weather Underground’s acts were illegal and improper
– Expressed regrets about “mistakes of excess,” “inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else.”

– Acceptance of “responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions”

– Confession that he “cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today”

– Reminder that, for 40 years, he has been “teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life”

Instead of acknowledging those points, our amorphous group of “some people” will opt to …

– Rage on about Ayers’ characterization of “the Pentagon and the United States Capitol” as “monuments to war and racism”

– Obsess over the equivocation of phrases like “perhaps even of common sense”

– Debate the use of the word “indiscriminately” in Ayers’ definition of terrorism, suggesting it is evidence he intended to kill and injure people, albeit on a targeted basis.

Mark my words, these and similar arguments will be made by “some people.” Maybe not today, but eventually — suggesting that Ayers might have been most accurate when wrote:

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.

Wow, bold predictions on how "some people" will react.

Incidentally, if that post sounds like parody -- yeah, it sorta does, but his opening paragraph makes it clear he's not offering satire, merely stupidity:

During the run up to the election, I wrote a series of posts challenging those who challenged Obama on the basis of his “association” with Bill Ayers. Today, in the print edition of the New York Times, Ayers takes his own shot at setting the record straight and offering the repentance for past deeds that so many of his new-found critics demanded he offer...

I enjoy the sneer-quotes around "association." Apparently Pete Abel isn't convinced the two men associated with each other.

Hey, "Moderate" -- it's a rather easy call to cop to an "excess of rhetoric" when you're actually being accused of terrorism and murder. "Mistakes were made" and etc. -- admit the tiniest imperfections while steadfastly denying the serious charges.

This is a "Moderate's" idea of repentance.

In any event, the "Moderate" overlooks the fact that a lack of repentance is not the most serious complaint against Ayers in the first place, nor the most important part of the objection to Obama's chummy association with him. Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist. Note "unrepentant" modifies the word "terrorist."

It would be better for Obama had his good friend, colleague, mentor, political patron, occasional babysitter, likely ghostwriter, and fellow Alinsky acolyte Bill Ayers were repentant. But that doesn't do a lot about the terrorist thing.

Someone can repent for such actions -- but it takes more than a mere confession of a "lapse of common sense" or Ayers' small-bean "If I'm guilty of anything, it's of loving too much" sort of admissions. For example, hey, dedicating one's life to repudiating terrorism and violent political action and speaking out against it and those who practice it, as some truly repentant ex-Islamic terrorists have done. (At some risk to their lives, of course.)

Remember... As gm points out, the NYT allowing Ayers to recycle his spin from Good Morning America and lie about his complicity in murder is the same NYT that rejected an Op-Ed from John McCain as being not quite original enough and failing to address the points made by his critic (in that case, Barack Obama, whose earlier-published essay was apparently not constrained by the requirements of freshness or direct answer to his critics' points).

If only John McCain had bombed an American base. He'd have gotten a NYT editorial -- and presumably a NYT endorsement, too.

posted by Ace at 03:05 PM

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