Skin-crawling

The unutterably foul Bill Ayers in the Toronto Star today, on his being an issue in the late presidential campaign:

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then – and often unpredictably – appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam.

Then came this political season.

You can read how put upon he and Barack were for yourself. I'll just quote the big finish:

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.

Yet hope – my hope, our hope – resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

History is always in the making. It's up to us. It is up to me and to you. Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this Earth both hopeful and all the more urgent – we must find ways to become real actors, to become authentic subjects in our own history.

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Veteran Churchill watchers will know the feeling when I ask (plaintively), How can there be anyone who doesn't see through this guy?

(via Killian Bundy on an LGF spinoff link, which I've never figured out how to link to)

Update: Or rather, since Snapple will be watching, "to which I've never figured out how to link")