McCain didn't hold back from "hammering" Obama with Wright out of a sense of honor or fairness. His campaign realized that it had worked for a moment but wasn't going to work anymore, wasn't going to work with the voters they needed (it had already worked with some, but not enough). It was a purely political decision.

And yes, there was violence in Vietnam that was not of our creation. Does that mean the incredible violence that was of our creation was somehow a good or justifiable thing? You really have to twist yourself in knots to believe that, IMO.

But now let us recall that back in the Days Of Fun and Blowing Stuff Up, Ayers' horrible harridan wife Bernardine Dohrn took this quite literally.

"There was a myth that veterans coming back were spat upon, but this was not something that anyone knew or or discussed at the time."

"There" was SeaTac airport in April 1971. I was in uniform, newly returned from Viet-Nam, on my way back home, and I definitely "knew" about that sort of thing. What exactly do you mean by "myth"?

August 20, 1985. 96 TOW anti-tank missiles

September 14, 1985. 408 more TOWs

November 24, 1985. 18 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles

February 17, 1986. 500 TOWs

February 27, 1986. 500 TOWs

May 24, 1986. 508 TOWs, 240 Hawk spare parts

August 4, 1986. More Hawk spares

October 28, 1986. 500 TOWs

It's short.

You really had to be there. Bill Ayer's Weather Underground was only a tiny tiny part of all the protesting. As time went on, protesting got more and more violent, because the government was not paying any attention for a long time.

When parents kept losing their sons to that horrible war, they too joined in the protests. I had several friends of mine lose limbs and had no real effective care through the VA when they came back. Some protesters were mowed down with bullets on campus (Kent State, etal.)and many were arrested, even when peacefully protesting.

About our withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia .. first of all, we weren't even supposed to be in Cambodia, and that was a tragedy. Richard Nixon, a Republican, was the one who did the immediate withdrawal of all troops, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. I thought we had learned an important lesson from Vietnam, until of course Iraq. We need to get out of Iraq before any more Americans and others lose their lives and limbs.

About McCain and his honor? Really? Yeah, him and his good friend G. Gordon Liddy. G Gordon Liddy made plans to bomb the Brookings Institute, kidnap congressmen, and also went to jail for the buglary of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. McCain was also part of the Keating 5, and took illegal trips and money for favors from Charles Keating. Also McCain, while he was a prisoner in Vietnam was known as the "songbird" because he gave real information to the enemy, and made propaganda films for them.When my husband and father were in Vietnam, they actually saw these films. It is no myth.

This weak link to Bill Ayers is just that. What do you mean, we can't take their word for it? Why not? Whose word would you take for it? Someone who didn't know either of them, John McCain and Sarah Palin???

"When I say it was a war of terror, that is not ideal talk. There were entire areas of Vietnam that were designated free fire zones."

shouldn't this be "idle talk"?

Edward O'Grady

Waverly Brown

Peter Paige

Has Ayers ever done anything for the children of these men?

You said: "Hello, Stalin.com! Why do you hate your own country so?"

Jeepers, I think that's a loaded question Zoltan

You said: "Barry and Billy A weren't close because they each say they were not close. Is that really enough evidence for you? Do you suspend all critical thought when these luminaries of the left speak?"

No, but in the absence of any other evidence linking the two, there is no reason to believe otherwise (despite paranoid, conspiritorial fulminations from the right wing noise machine).

You said: "He (McCain) could have really hammered Obama on his 20 year association with Trinity United Church and it's demagogue pastor, but he did not. Had he, he might have won, but he did not want a victory which might have been tainted by cries of racism.

Were you watching the same election that I was? McCain's campaign did attack Obama's pastor--even thought McCain had accepted support and endorsements from the likes of the pastor John Hagee and several other hate spewing fundie bastards.

You said: "You guys do not recognize honor because you have no honor of your own."

What can I say; we all bow our heads in collective shame in the face of your superior morality!

I was in the US Army during Vietnam. Part of the time, I was stationed at Ft. Lewis, Washington. I had a car while stationed there and on my car highly visible on the rear window was a peace symbol. I drove and parked my car on base. I was never asked to remove it; in fact, no one ever said anything about it. That was the attitude during that period. The peace movement was so much a part of the culture of that time that I could as an Army sergeant at an American base have a peace symbol on my car without incident. The fact that the Republicans used Bill Ayers as a negative for Barack Obama in this election shows how little they know about history. It was a different time with different attitudes. I didn't realize it then, but it was also a better time for free expression.

Didn't John McCain kill a whole bunch of innocent people in one of our previous illegal wars?

Wasn't the 2008 Republican vice-Presidential nominee's husband an actual self-declared anti-American activist?

Who are the "terrorists" again?

It is rare that Salon posts a four page article that completely sustains my attention and which I feel is worth the reading. This is certainly one worth it.

It was on March 31, 1968 that Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech and stated, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President." (For those young enough to have missed the historical reference.) I watched that speech from my parents' living room, and when Johnson made that statement I screamed and jumped and cheered. Wrongly, I thought it would mean the end of the war.

I am not one of those who believe that actions done by individuals can be wrong when worse actions done by governments can be right. Who was the terrorist? Ayers, who went to extremes to try to end an immoral war? Or Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who continued the brutal Vietnam War, taking no care for the cost of human life, American, Vietnamese, and Cambodian?

What people seem to overlook is that absolutely nothing was gained by continuing the war. The so-called "peace with honor" was much the same peace that could have been had much earlier. The so-called peace that was achieved was achieved by subtracting innocent lives from this earth.

Evil men in power do evil things.

To Ayers' credit, he tried to make a difference. What arrogance to try to actually end a war by violent means! How his arrogance pales in comparison to Johnson's, Nixon's, Kissinger's, and others.

Whatever Ayers was wrong about, he was right about the war.