NYT runs Ayers op-ed

As Snaps points out in comments to the previous post, Saturday the rapidly failing Old Grey-Underweared Lady gave space to the mutant: "The Real Bill Ayers." It's the same spiel he's given since the election, in more or less the same words--I was cast as "the terrorist" to get Obama, we weren't terrorists, we were an anti-war group, we never hurt or killed anybody, but gosh, my youthful idealism may have crossed a line here and there and I have vague "regrets"--you know the drill. Read it if you enjoy loathsome things (as I do).

Speaking of loathsome things, the tape-like unspooling of Ayers' "thinking" reminds me of no one so much as, yes, Ward Churchill, in particular his story about how the Dutch, after stealing Manhattan Island from the natives, massacred same when they protested, then played kickball with their heads right where the Twin Towers would later rise. (Geddit?) I've heard him tell that one at least four times (once live) and it is, natch, a lie in almost every particular, told to make a political point. We know Ayers and Churchill have never met, but they're like twins.

Update: And remember, Vote Love!

Update II: Patterico: "The Real Charles Manson":

Over the years, I have been cast in the role of “1960s-era mass murderer.” Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close.

Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and became a big fan of the Beatles. I was a songwriter and admittedly a bit of a drifter. In the late 1960s, I founded the Manson family.

The Manson Family crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, Roman Polanski’s front door, Leno LaBianca’s refrigerator, and Sharon Tate’s and Leno LaBianca’s abdomens. The attacks on property, never on people — unless you consider the pigs we slaughtered to be people, ha ha — were meant to respect human life, by repeatedly taking it.