While I empathized with their desperation, I disagreed with the actions of the Weathermen, even though they went out of their way to avoid harm to anyone. In the last few years we have had tens of thousands of people getting out to demonstrate and the media focus instead on a handful of masked anarchists breaking store windows. They are assisted in their never ending quest to miss the point.

The media also missed the obvious: If anyone was associating with terrorists, it was McCain, who took a great deal of money from his friend G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted Watergate criminal, who had McCain appear on his radio show. The founder of the party which Sarah welcomed and to which Todd belonged, was murdered in a deal for explosives gone bad.

When the media endlessly took the cues and direction of the RNC, and made Jeremiah Wright the issue, they left out McCain and Palin ministerial associates such as Pat Robertson, who advocated killing a head of state in this hemisphere, Rod Parsley, John Hagee, David Brickner, and similar secular professional homophobes, racists and anti-Semites such as Pat Buchanan and Tony Perkins.

I was surprised to see both Obama and Ayers holding their tongues when faced with this torrent of demagoguery. Obviously Obama's campaign survived this flood of unwarranted vitriol: I can't gauge if it would have done better or worse had it confronted the lunacy head on.

A disturbing issue to me is that Palin has willingly chosen to hitch her political fortunes to this disgusting rhetoric. There are credible sources that report her personal racism. Her rallies were hard to distinguish from the KKK's save for the presence of women and absence of white sheets and burning crosses. She consorted with the same Alaskan criminals whom the FBI have been getting indicted. I live with the hope that Americans will quickly realize who she is and more importantly, what she stands for.

Even Alaskans are rapidly catching on. Her ticket is expected to get less than 60% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Republican state and thousands have attended anti-Palin rallies there. Let's hope that it's the harbinger of the death of hatred.

*** A disturbing issue to me is that Palin has willingly chosen to hitch her political fortunes to this disgusting rhetoric. There are credible sources that report her personal racism. ***

Let me guess, the famous "Lucille the waitress" story? Please.

*** Her ticket is expected to get less than 60% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Republican state ***

McCain-Palin will win 60-37 over Obama and it might have been a wider margin if the national media hadn't called the election at 3 in the afternoon.

For comparison:

'04 Bush over Kerry 61-36

'00 Bush over Gore and Nader 59-28-10

'96 Dole over Clinton and Perot 51-33-11

'92 Bush over Clinton and Perot 39-20-28

Ayers and his interviewer conveniently forget the savagery that the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong practiced daily on the Vietnamese civilians, and that they violated Cambodian neutrality far before Kissinger ascended to power. And they conveniently forget that they themselves -- in a similar fashion to the NVA and VC -- targeted their own fellow citizens in cold blood, waiting in the shadows of civil society with nail-laden bombs to maim people at a dance.

That's quite different from crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war on the battlefield. Norms of behavior in a theater of combat are far removed from those against your own people, and with good reason.

Thus, Ayer's feeble attempt at rehabilitation doesn't convince this liberal. The man should be locked away with the countless other common murders who didn't have the good fortune to cloak their viciousness in a shroud of political nonsense.

And the interviewer, an avowed Ayers sympathizer, should feel ashamed. There are those who protested the war peacefully, and there are those that turned to criminality. We should not allow the latter to share in the praise we accord the former.

Kathy Boudin had to serve 20 years in prison and, to this day, her husband, David Gilbert, is incarcerated. I'm not impressed by Bill Ayers self-justification, his Pontius Pilate act, as he's on the point of flogging his book "Fugitive Days" once again.

Please remember that legal immigrants to the US during the Sixties were being drafted into the armed forces to fight in Vietnam. I know one of them but, apart from that, the average age of the draftees was 19 and they were overwhelmingly from working-class backgrounds. Many of the children of the wealthy were more desperately needed in the USA to pursue their legal studies (you are said to have one lawyer for every 280 citizens) and others made their merry way to Morocco to smoke and collect their money orders from their well-heeled parents in the United States at the post office/bank.

The rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War have been hotly debated over the decades, as have those between capitalism and socialism. The wheel keeps on turning but all I know is that it's a craven and despicible act to set off bombs in any civilian setting, no matter what ideology is claimed. Bill Ayers girlfriend, prior to Dohrn, was one of three people blown to smithereens when a bomb they were assembling exploded prematurely. Bill Ayers is a nasty little creep who has never had to truly face the consequences of his misguided actions which have led to the deaths of fellow-Americans while he ends up with a cushy number at the University of Illinois. Having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he could expect nothing less.

Salon's excellent article on Bill Ayers is more about a generation than it is about a single man and his actions. It is more than about a small radical organization --- the Weather Underground. It is an important document about how a portion of a generation responded to a moral issue that got too big to ignore.

(See http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/17/ayers/?source=newsletter)

Did the 1960s Weather Underground do the right thing in responding violently to violence? Historians and pundits have and will continue to argue that question.

As a member of that generation and one who participated fully and nonviolently in the anti-war movement, I can only say that their response was understandable.

The Ayers interview rekindles an ageless moral imperative and reminds us that the issue of war is no different today than it was 40 years ago. We are still asked to stand up and be counted and still frustrated by the refusal of government to respond to peaceful protest.

For me, Ayers ' most notable quote in this article is, "this is where we need to move in the future -- that we cannot believe that presidents save us. They cannot save our lives. We have to do for ourselves the important work of transformation, the important work of reframing the last eight years, the last several decades, into something more hopeful"

I hope to hear more of Ayers' thoughts on that transformation.