Like the editors of the Daily Worker who failed to receive timely reports about the Nazi-Soviet pact, and denounced as rumor what they were subsequently willing to embrace in fact, some members of the modern media seem not to have gotten the message about the appropriate way to think this campaign season. As was evidenced by the surprisingly pointed questions asked of Sen. Barack Obama, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos seem to have wandered off the reservation a bit, and they were dealt with in the approved leftist fashion- threats of excommunication for their blatant heresy.

Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, sums up the mood thusly: “something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.” Of course, he is careful to place the blame for the behavior of the stalwart Democrat moderators where it belongs, on the machinations of those “Republicans [who] have successfully deployed the trope of “élitism” against every Democratic opponent except the two winners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.” Stephanopoulos actually had to deny that he was doing the bidding of Sean Hannity in the Los Angeles Times. Having been written into the camp of the Enemy, what can Gibson and Stephanopoulos do except try to figure out where they went wrong?

The most obvious answer was Stephanopoulos’ introduction of William Ayers into the debate. One of the more fashionable left-wing terrorists who made a name for himself in the sixties and seventies, Ayers was punished by the Amerikkkans for his years of violent crime by being exiled the University of Illinois, where he languishes to this day, surrounded by other political detainees. For those who deny the reality of this modern gulag, one need only note the great fences and gates that surround their isolated communities, which no doubt account for the fact that they seem unable to venture forth from the towers to which they are confined. Obama, apparently obeying the injunction of the Savior to visit the imprisoned, befriended Ayers some years ago, going so far as to share his exile in the same forlorn neighborhood.

Stephanopoulos had the poor taste to mock Obama’s charitable impulses by noting the unpleasant fact that Prof. Ayers seems to regard his mad-bomber days with some nostalgia, as when he remarked in an unfortunately timed New York Times interview that ''I don't regret setting bombs . . . I feel we didn't do enough.'' Of course, with capitalism still at least theoretically in place in the U.S., Ayers thought it only prudent to note that he was not ruling out future bombing campaigns. This brave stand was made untenable by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when Ayers' printed words became part of the burning debris created by the actions of a similar well-heeled crusader for social justice, Osama bin Laden. With the subsequent Bushitler crackdown on freedom, Ayers could only watch in impotent horror as the reenactment of his own youthful crusade to destroy the Pentagon came to naught, yet again.

Prof. Ayers is a victim both of the U.$. justice system and its corporate controlled media. For his part, he strenuously insists that he was misquoted in that Times interview. He remarks on his blog that “I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her[the interviewer] that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.”

An ordinary person might seek to refute the charge that he did not regret setting bombs by going to the trouble of stating that he regretted setting bombs. But as a professor of Education, Ayers is no doubt attuned to the nuances of discourse and the manner in which a text can be interpreted along the lines of contextual deconstuctionism, or something. For example, he states in his blog that his “memoir [the ostensive subject of the interview] is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminant murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy.” This is the lens through which one is meant to interpret such statements in the Times interview as ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.”

We are meant to understand, apparently, that Prof. Ayers absolutely condemns violence, and the fact that so pure a soul was driven to terrorism is a testament to the inherent evils of the warmongering, racist hell in which he found himself as a young man. We can all be grateful, of course, that he showed such restraint as he did, given the “complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.” So many countless people are no doubt deceived by their memories of the late 60’s and early 70’s as the heyday of The Rat Pack, John Wayne, and the Brady Bunch. The work of Ayers the education professor is thus more necessary than ever, in order that people not forget that that the U.S. was apparently under the rule of a military dictatorship throughout this time.

Several of his comrades were martyred in the struggle for justice, prevented by a tragic accident from blowing up a dance at an army base and thereby ending the war. This is briefly alluded to in the interview, but is best described by Ayers’ fellow Weather Underground activist Mark Rudd on his website:

On the morning of March 6, 1970, three of my comrades were building pipe bombs packed with dynamite and nails, destined for a dance of non-commissioned officers and their dates at Fort Dix, N.J., that night. Still trying to “bring the war home,” their bombs were crude mirrors of the anti-personnel weapons the U.S. was raining down on Indochina. Inexperienced and freaked-out, somebody must have crossed two wires leading to the detonator. The townhouse on W. 11th St. in Manhattan exploded from within, collapsing in fire. Parts of the bodies of my friends, Ted Gold, 23, Diana Oughton, 28, and Terry Robbins, 21, were found in the rubble. This was my own initiation into the world of sacrifice, and of unending mourning.

One can only imagine what the world would be like if these brave souls had succeeded in their just cause. If the Vietnam war had only ended sooner, the victimized people of Indochina could have enjoyed all the benefits that rule from Hanoi has subsequently brought them all the sooner. This without having been tricked by the military industrial complex into taking to the sea in rowboats to escape the understandable growing pains of an emergent socialist paradise. One assumes that the fascist dictatorship which rules the world from Washington has thus far prevented Ayers and his comrades from joining their revolutionary brothers living in the comforts of Hanoi. Should Ayers be released from his indenture at the University of Illinois, he will no doubt be eager to do so.

Obama should not be blamed for the deeds of Ayers; he was after all only eight when the Prof.’s nonviolent bombing spree was at its height. His proud reluctance to condemn the Braveheart-like struggle against oppression exemplified by Mr. Ayers should serve as an example to other politicians who fail to understand the difference between bombing the Pentagon and terrorism. Sen. Obama should go on serving on charitable boards with the man in whose living room his political career was launched. He should lift his hand high at his almost-certain nomination and state to the world that unlike all those bitter, ridiculous rednecks with their guns and non-marxist Jesus, William Ayers cared enough about America to blow parts of it up.