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George Bush Thanks a Terrorist
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AP
What's the difference between William Ayers and Charles Colson? One just got a presidential medal.
The Republican campaign of 2008 will be remembered, among other things, for the accusation that Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists," namely former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. But visions of domestic terrorism don't seem to bother the Republicans now. On December 10, President George W. Bush bestowed the prestigious Citizens Medal on Charles Colson, who plotted various acts of domestic terrorism in the Nixon White House. To paraphrase an old saying, one man's terrorist is apparently another man’s medal-winner.
In Bush’s final days, perhaps few other gestures could capture the arc of the Republican era. Colson is a representative figure, once Richard Nixon’s special counsel and chief dirty trickster turned into born-again missionary for the religious right and mentor to Bush and his acolytes—including his former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. By honoring him, Bush exalts the whole legacy.
Ayers’ and Colson’s violent extremism inspired each other, just as their current self-recreations reflect similar efforts to distort the past.
For Nixon, Colson operated a black-ops program, willing to resort to any means—even planning a bombing and a riot—to destroy perceived White House enemies. But after a seven-month stint in prison for obstruction of justice in the federal investigation of the break-in of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Colson found a new identity through the wonder-working power of Jesus. To many on the right, his sins were forgiven. He is now, in the words of columnist Peggy Noonan, “one of the heroes of Watergate…He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful.”
At the same time that Bush rewarded Colson’s long march toward rehabilitation, William Ayers sought respectability of his own. On November 17, at Washington, D.C.’s All Souls Unitarian Church, he delivered his first major statement since the campaign began. Before an adoring crowd, many of whom were too young to have heard of him before the right used his past to attack Obama, Ayers unburdened himself. “The big lie that gets perpetrated, that somehow I’ve been violent, that somehow I’ve killed people, is utterly false,” he insisted to raucous applause.
Ayers’ coming-out party was followed with a New York Times op-ed and a round of nationally televised interviews. During his most recent one, on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Ayers discussed his Weather Underground activities in third person, referring to himself as “this young man…in those extreme conditions.” Matthews played the role of priest granting absolution: “I think you’re a different man than you were in the Weather Underground, and you’ve said so.” Finally, Matthews plugged the newly published paperback edition of Ayers’ Fugitive Days, a 2001 memoir in which Ayers claimed, “Terrorists intimidate, while we only aimed to educate.”
Both Colson and Ayers appeal to America’s unique attraction to personal conversion, confessing airbrushed versions of their stories with varying degrees of repentance (Ayers less so than Colson), then bullying forward to stress their good works. Ayers’ and Colson’s violent extremism inspired each other, just as their current self-recreations reflect similar efforts to distort the past.
No redemption can take place without the fallen sinner first confessing his dirty deeds. “The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices—the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious—as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation,” Ayers recalled in his December 5 New York Times op-ed.
He referred to “an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village,” avoiding mention that the “accident” of March 6, 1970, was a bomb intended to massacre dozens of young Army officers and their wives at a Fort Dix dance. Ayers also neglected to note that one of those “comrades” killed was Diana Oughton, a girlfriend he had just abandoned, according to fellow Underground member Jane Alpert.
A year after that tragic incident, Colson plotted a bombing of his own. Hoping to create a diversion for a team of burglars so they could retrieve classified State Department documents the White House wanted back, Colson proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, the preeminent Washington think tank. When he revealed the plan to Nixon aide John Caufield, however, Caufield stormed out of his office in a panic. Caufield “came straight to [White House counsel] John Dean,” an anonymous associate of Dean told then-Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, “saying that he did not want to talk to that man Colson again because he is crazy.” Top Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman shut the operation down, fearing that Dean would disclose details of it to the media if it were actually carried out.
Less well known but equally sinister was Colson’s orchestration of violent “hard hat riots.” The riots began on May 8, 1970, four days after National Guard soldiers killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University and four days after a Weather Underground bomb blasted a Chicago monument dedicated policemen who died in the Haymarket Riot. As Ayers and his followers paid explosive homage to the ghosts of cop-fighting workers, Colson organized hard hats to brutalize anti-war demonstrators.
On the steps of New York’s City Hall, a thousand peaceful students gathered to protest the Kent State massacre. In a show of solidarity, liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay ordered that flags be flown at half-mast. Across the street, a phalanx of 200 burly ironworkers from the AFL-CIO clanged metal pipes against the girders of an unfinished building and chanted, “Lindsay is a queer!” NYPD officers stood aside and watched as the workers savagely attacked the students, chasing them onto the campus of nearby Pace University. There, the hard hats continued their assault, beating dozens of innocent bystanders with metal bludgeons. “I didn’t see Americans in action,” said one ironworker disgusted by the violence of his co-workers. “I saw the black shirts and brown shirts of Hitler’s Germany.”
A White House tape of May 5, 1971, captured the riot’s initial planning phase, revealing Colson’s role. “Chuck is something else,” says Nixon. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, says, “He's gotten a lot done that he hasn't been caught at.” He goes on: “And then they're going to stir up some of this Vietcong flag business, as Colson's going to do it through hard hats and legionnaires. What Colson's going do on that, and what I suggested he do—and I think that they can get away with this—do it with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up their eight thugs.” “They've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off,” Nixon gleefully replies. “Sure,” says Haldeman. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that's what they really do…regular strikebuster-types...and just send them in and beat the shit out of some of these people. And hope they really hurt 'em, you know what I mean? Go in with some real—smash some noses.”
Two weeks after the White House organized the attack, Colson arranged a ceremony at the White House to honor its field general, Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades and later appointed secretary of labor.
At the same time, Ayers went underground. Bouncing from one safe house to the next and pickpocketing unsuspecting rubes for false IDs, he composed a Weather Underground manifesto, Prairie Fire, which declared: “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years…Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.” Dedicated to convicted RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan and “All Who Continue to Fight,” and proclaiming “revolutionary” war, Prairie Fire was released in 1974—toward the end of the Vietnam War that supposedly motivated Ayers’ terrorism.
After resurfacing, Ayers was acquitted of his crimes due to prosecutorial misconduct. While he began a career as a professor of education, financed by his father, Thomas Ayers, chief executive officer of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison Co. (“My father worked for Edison,” he wrote obliquely in his memoir Fugitive Days), his one-time partner, Kathy Boudin, continued “revolutionary war.” Her quixotic struggle ended when the first African-American member of the Nyack, N.Y., police department was murdered during a Weather Underground robbery of a Brinks armored car in 1981. One Weather Underground member was killed in a subsequent firefight. Boudin, convicted of murder, along with three others, was sentenced to prison. (She was paroled in 2003.) “We killed no one and hurt no one,” Ayers claimed to The New Yorker in one of his first published interviews after the presidential campaign.
Over the years, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, another Weather Underground leader, remade themselves within the activist circles of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. That is where they met Barack Obama, an ambitious former community organizer possessed with pragmatic instincts and boundless intellectual curiosity. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley used Ayers as an informal adviser, awarding him $50 million in grants to promote education reform (led by members of the wealthy and influential Ayers family). Explaining their relationship, Daley said, “I believe we have too many challenges in Chicago and our country to keep refighting 40-year-old battles.” Ayers’ transformation seemed almost complete.
But, then, while promoting Fugitive Days, Ayers veered off script. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told a New York Times reporter for an article published on September 11, 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
While Ayers was underground, meanwhile, Colson nervously prepared for his trial. In the summer of 1973, with the prosecution preparing its case against him and the press corps circling like sharks, Colson knelt on the floor with his friend Raytheon CEO Tom Phillips. While Colson fought back tears in an embarrassed state of silence, Phillips prayed for his soul. Driving through Washington afterward, Colson suddenly began to cry “tears of release.” “I repeated over and over the words, Take me…” Colson wrote in his best-selling memoir, Born Again. “Something inside me was urging me to surrender.” The sinner was ready to come to Jesus.
After serving seven months in prison, Colson returned to convert the godless criminals he encountered there. In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship, now a multimillion-dollar organization that operates with public funding in several states and 110 countries. The hundreds of thousands of inmates who have enrolled in Colson’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative—motivated by coercive enticements like extended visits with family members and access to musical instruments and better food—are promised by official program material that they will be transformed “through an instantaneous miracle.”
Named one of the 25 “Most Influential Evangelicals” in 2005 by Time, Colson has used his platform to inflame the culture wars. Colson’s 1995 science fiction novel, Gideon’s Torch, reads like an imaginative right-winger’s crash re-edit of Ayers’ Prairie Fire. The book follows a heroic band of Christian guerrillas who must stop the National Institutes of Health from harvesting brain tissue from aborted fetuses to cure AIDS, a plan funded by Hollywood liberals. To do so, they launch a righteous killing spree of abortion doctors, eventually firebombing the NIH—just as Colson hoped to do to the Brookings Institution.
Unsurprisingly, Gideon’s Torch became a recruiting tool for those wishing to realize its fictional narrative. It has been excerpted at length on the website of the Army of God, a radical anti-abortion group responsible for the killing and bombing of abortion providers.
Only moments after Obama’s spectacular victory, Washington pundits immediately adopted the conventional wisdom that “Nixonland,” the polarized country depicted in historian Rick Perlstein’s recent book, had finally been replaced by “Obamaland,” where we all just get along. Even Ayers parroted the trendy theme. “We’ve ended the era of 9/11 and we’ve entered the era of ‘Yes, we can,’” he proclaimed on Hardball.
Meanwhile, Colson was fresh from a political victory, as a leader in the movement for Prop 8 in California, banning gay marriage, a battle of “Armageddon,” he said. “We lose this, we are going to lose in a lot of other ways, including freedom of religion.”
Then Colson went to the White House, where President Bush bestowed the Citizens Medal on him. The inscription read: “The United States honors Chuck Colson for his good heart and his compassionate efforts to renew a spirit of purpose in the lives of countless individuals.”
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in spring 2009. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
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The ideological split seems unbridgeable between the neoconservatives and the realists, and this is further proof. With Cheney's remarkable hubris and the complete abdication of any contact with reality the Bush administration has shown repeatedly, our country has become nothing but a house of cards furnished with smoke and mirrors!!
Maybe Bill Ayers should pretend to have found Jesus too instead of going around saying he is an anarchist/Marxist. That seems to be all it takes in America to convince people you are reformed.
Death bed conversions - jailhouse conversions - omitted was the classic Chuck line that he'd "run over" his grandmother for Nixon.
They had the nerve to talk about PE Obama palling around with terrorist's during the campaign....isn't this a turn up for the books...hypocrisy at it's highest level!!!
Hasn't that been Bush' mantra for years....terror... terrorist's and here he is giving a " home grown" terrorist a medal...absolutely incredible!!!!
So even though Ayers was no longer a part of the Weather Underground when someone was killed you want to hang that around his neck? LOL Rational people are laughing at you for that one very weak attempt at a tie in......
I can also tell from your picture that you were not old enough to have been a part of what was going on in the 60's so your take on it is just not relevent. The same 1000 students who were beaten by the "workers" stirred up by Colson supported the Weather Underground 100 percent..you forgot to add that little fact into your yarn so I thought I would do it for you!
Try using facts and someday people may admire what you write.
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The people at the very top of religious hierarchies understand that they are exploiting the ignorance of the masses to maintain power for themselves.
The difference is whether its yours or mine.
At age 69 my memory isn't what it used to be. Nevertheless, your article was the most balanced piece I can ever remember reading. I am so tired of ideologues, which seems to include almost all of our politicians
Whatever wrongs either may have committed, I see no prima facie case they are terrorists.
yup, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter......
Your attempt at moral equivalency between Mr. Ayers a man who is UNREPENTANT about REAL domestic terrorist activities in which he and his associates participated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
and Mr. Colson who was an extremist/activitist, who as far as I can ascertain never either killed anyone or associated with anyone who did so and has also REPENTED his extremist past is dishonest, politically motivated bull:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Colson
There is no moral equivalency here as far as I can tell.
NLC
Max Bluenthal:
You are placing a good man, a Christian who has led a good life since being out of prison for a crime he should not of been charged with, in with a criminal terrorist who wishes he did even more evil. Sir, I love your blog, but I must say that you are dead wrong on this story. Colsen and Ayers should not be mention in the same day, and by the way, you too cannot hold a candle to Colsen who has done so much good, you are good at times Sir, but not today....with respect Jerry
Mr. Blumenthal:
Is there a single Christian evangelical whom you don't regard as an evil, destructive, repressive force in our world? What does a person have to do in your eyes to earn redemption for their past actions? Rick Warren is a closed-minded bigot, Chuck Colson is a terrorist... One wonders what sort of negative encounter with Christianity might have caused you to be so closed minded and anti-Christian yourself. Whatever it might be, I hope you'll give us another chance at some point.
God Bless.
lol please get over the "Christian persecution" angle....I am loving the brilliant logic that a major difference between Ayers and Colson's acts (other than one did so protest of a the Vietnam war and the other as part of Nixon's criminal lackeys) is their religion. As long as you are Christian and REPENT then no one can ever review or comment on your past (well, I see how all of those Catholic priests keep their jobs even 'after' the complaints start rolling in.....)
Brilliant - next thing you know this will become part of some type of government policy. Because we are a 'Christian Democracy' we might start using this overwhelming moral advantage to invade and occupy foreign countries (killing 100,000 of innocent citizens) and to torture 'evil dooers' - The good news is that as long as we shout out a 'forgive me father...' in 10 or 15 years it's all good!!
oh, wait....
This story is a sad Joke. Mr. Blumenthal ups the ante for the left's normal attempts at drawing moral equivalency.
In trying to articulate parallel narratives between William Ayres and Charles Colson, he seeks to score cheap political points, but succeeds only in embarrassing himself and the loony left. Even in the era of Matthews-Olbermann style agenda-driven media, his bias in making these specious comparisons serves only to diminish his own credibility.
First, Blumenthal tries to make the actions of Ayres and Colson seem comparable. But Colson was accused of aiding the Nixon administration's conspiracy to break and enter offices in the Watergate building. He was convicted of obstruction of justice. Colson has been criticized for this and rightly so; but he has not been labeled a terrorist because the nature of his actions was not violent. Blumenthal stretches and fails to support his allegation that Colson supposedly operated a "black-ops program, [that was] willing to plan a bombing and a riot." Even if this undocumented claim were true, the key word would be "planned."
In contrast, Bill Ayres lead the Weather Underground, an organization which conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s, injuring and killing innocent people. Ayres has even admitted that one of the bombings (in Greenwich Village) led to the death of one of his co-conspirators. Even with overt bias as strong as Blumenthal's, he must realize his comparison will not do.
Blumenthal errs further in trying to draw out similar redemption story-lines between Ayres and Colson. A moment's casual reflection, however, shows this to be an exercise in the absurd.
Colson was convicted of obstruction of justice and served time in prison for his actions. On the heals of his incarceration and conversion to Christianity, Colson founded the Prison Fellowship ministry, where he has dedicated much of his life to helping other inmates better their lives as he has. Also, not insignificantly, Colson has frequently and explicitly apologized for and disavowed his past actions in written and spoken word. Peggy Noonan is right to say that Colson "paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful."
Ayres, in contrast, still tries to lay his actions at the feet of what he considers an illegal and unpopular war. He stated to the New York Times that he does not "regret setting bombs, wishes he had done more, and was open to the possibility he would do it all again. Indeed Ayres published a radical manifesto, Prairie Fires and dedicated it to RFK's assassin, among others. Then, as if it needed emphasis, Ayres wrote a book in 2001 about the fact that he chose to become a fugitive from the law. Hardly a repentant man seeking absolution. This does not phase Blumenthal who speaks approvingly of Chris Matthews giving Ayres "absolution" and fawns that Ayres and fellow Weather Underground co-conspirator, Bernadine Dorn "remade themselves," and with help from wealthy parents and Hyde Park radicals, accomplished a "transformation [that] seemed almost complete."
Almost complete if you ignore Ayres' brazen boasting about planning and setting bombs that killed innocent people, writing extremist manifestos and admitting in print that he was "Guilty as sin, free as a bird - what a country, America" (this the caption of an article where Ayres posed standing atop an American flag). Charming, but not not exactly contrite.
Blumenthal actually compares a recent Colson work of fiction about an apocalyptic end-times scenario with Ayres' political manifestos and how-to books. He goes to lengths to avoid any dispute or even fact-checking of Ayres' assertions that the Weather Underground took "responsibility for placing...bombs" and did not use violence. He allows Ayres to couch the Greenwich Village bomb incident--in which Ayres admitted the bomb killed one of his co-conspirators--as an "accident." Blumenthal, then in his own words reiterates that it was "tragic accident." What is tragic here, is the galling lack of moral clarity by Blumenthal. Setting bombs in public buildings are not "tragic accidents," but shameful and intentional acts. Blumenthal admits, but spends no time pondering the importance of Ayres' carrying out of a March 6, 1970 bomb that was intended to massacre dozens of young Army officers and their wives at a Fort Dix dance. This apparently is what liberal anti-American sentiment has come to.
Most egregiously, Blumenthal misses the political significance of these two cases as they relate to Americans' distrust of their mainstream media outlets. Blumenthal unwittingly concedes (as he must), that in the case of Chuck Colson and the implosion of Nixon's presidency, the "press corps circled like sharks." This is an understatement. Woodword and Bernstein won Pulitzers for their reporting and had it memorialized in the award-winning movie All the President's men. This one story made these two reporters' careers. As well it should have. More than thirty years later, celebrated A-list director Ron Howard has another movie out about Nixon's downfall, albeit a proxy for what he sees as the evils of the Bush administration. The point is that the American media has made Nixon and his administration an enduring symbol for all that is corrupt in politics, whereas, they have spoken of Ayres as an "alleged terrorist," or leader of radical group, or in some cases, an educator.
The same scrutiny has not been afforded the Ayres story. Or rather non-story. Blumenthal fails to give this important difference any air time. The major media outlets not only inexplicably failed to investigate Ayres' actions, but deliberately tried to downplay Presidential candidate Obama's close connections to him. Many outlets simply failed to accurately report Obama's many and long-time connections to Ayres.
Colson and company's actions led to the President of the United States resigning in disgrace. Ayres' much more despicable and violent acts led to the media deciding Americans did not deserve to be informed on the matter and to the election of Senator Obama.
It is sad that Max Blumenthal has chosen to conflate a man like Chuck Colson, who was part of a corrupt administration, with Bill Ayres, how set about murdering innocent Americans. One man took stock of his wrong actions and now runs a non-profit charity in several states and 110 countries. The other publishes manifestos apologizing for his terrorist plots and says he might do it again.
Oh please. This is the kind of thoughtless left-wing critique that persuades no-one who is not already persuaded.
It reminds one of the perverse argument by some on the extreme left that there is no meaningful moral distinction between Osama Bin Laden and George Bush. When one cannot see the distinction between the intentional targeting and killing of as many innocents as possible and the overly-zealous pursuit of an otherwise legitimate goal that results in unintended damage to the innocent, well, one is likely to put men like Colson and Ayers in the same camp.
I'm surprised your article didn't read "A Terrorist Thanks a Terrorist." But I'm most surprised that the DailyBeast agreed to run such an irresponsible comparison.
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To Mr. Blumenthal and others who agree with him,
Rehabilitation and Revolution are the focus of this article. However, Mr. Blumenthal, you focus on a man's past and you attempt to connect the Army of God to Colson's FICTION as someone might connect the German composer Wagner to Hitler. Yes, Hitler co-opted Wagner. No, that doesn't make Wagner a Nazi.
You have used the blogosphere's equivalent to the H-Bomb: Chuck Colson is (not was) a terrorist. Your use of a term like this to describe Colson, and for that matter, to paint Ayers as a present-day terrorist pushes us further away from each other into bickering camps: "Your saint is a terrorist!" is followed by "No, your saint is a terrorist!"
Rehabilitation is possible and necessary. I am opposed to the death penalty for this reason. Look at the life of Stanley Tookie Williams III, one of the original founders of the Crips street gang in Los Angeles. He changed, and he attempted to undo some of what he did. Did he confess to all of his crimes? I think he did not. However, he wanted to stop violence in the name of the Crips gang. CAN'T WE LOOK FOR ANSWERS, NOT DISPARAGE PEOPLE who want to stop hurting others?
Unbelievable. The slant was so steep I almost fell down while reading this. Max Blumenthal seems to have conveniently ignored Chuck Colson's post-Nixon life. Colson is transparent about his past, humbled and broken about his actions and commited to helping others - his ministry to prisoners and their families is a huge blessing - just speak to a child whose parent is incarcerated that has received a gift from Angel Tree Ministries. On the other hand, Bill Ayers words resonate his convictions that his past actions were noble, justfiable and commendable. "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country"-William Ayers, 1981. The comparisons between these two men are few, however, the constrasts abound - Mr. Blumenthal's angry agenda is so obvious I felt insulted reading his work.
hahahahahaha, man Bush is a genius. Who else in the entire planet could pull this off?
The layers of hypocrisy and duplicity in the Bush administration are rich and deep. Rewarding Colson for his 'conversion' underlines Bush's own neediness to be redeemed as the now-dry alcoholic more than it demonstrates clear thinking as to who deserves the Citizens Medal.
Add to this hypocrisy, recent duplicitous remarks from Bush, Cheney and Rove on how the Iraq War happened -- contradicting each other -- tarnished this medal, yet another legacy of the Bush administration.
Raytheon CEO converts Colson.... Jesus would never have been CEO of an multi-billion dollar armaments company responsible for the deaths and maiming of millions. A true Christian could not work for, much less lead such a business. What is irksome about religious beliefs is that people use them to blind themselves to their own evil, while stampeding like cattle to point the finger at others (again contrary to Jesus` explicit instructions). Most religions do point the way to the light, so to speak, but the way is not easy, and many followers seem to think their moral and spiritual struggles are over once they align themselves with a particular set of beliefs. This is the root of much evil. Aside from that, I would like to know what public monies are being used to fund Colson`s `ministries`. Sounds illegal, but so much of what government does these days seems to be illegal.
These comments are all over the place. The bottom line is that Colson (and cohorts) worked as a terrorist under cover of our government while Ayers (and cohorts) worked as a terrorist trying to bring attention to what our government was doing. Colson's activities, when exposed, are much more diabolical and require some serious repenting - which I've not seen yet. Ayer's activities on the other hand probably should be compared with our countries originators, who declared war on their oppressors when those oppressors stepped over the line.
Take a close look at the definition of a terrorist and then compare the activities our countries leaders and organizations and businesses have made in most of the other countries of the world that have experienced war, genocide, assasination, suppression of speech and regime change through violent means. there is a good chance our government had representatives involved in precipitating them or made explicit decisions to let events play out in the cases where someone else precipitated them if our government concluded that the killing would further our governments or businesses goals toward global empire/power.
for supporting details check Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival" published in 2003. It is well written and has an extensive bibliography of supporting documents.
Colson illustrates the type of person that abused the trust of Americans in their leaders to further a secret agenda. This seems to be a typical theme over the last few decades.
Ayers illustrates the type of person that had just enough smarts to be disgusted with that abuse but couldn't think of any better way to get our attention than to attack bits and pieces of the people and institutions that propped up those leaders.
I'm not sure that I would apologize either if I were Ayers. I guess you had to be there. Oh, wait we are there - they had Nixon, we have Bush.
The whole premise of this article "Bush exalts the whole legacy" is incorrect and the author knows it. The Daily Beast will be able to rise above daily garbage when it starts addressing issues with a minimum degree of intellectual honesty.
Thank you.
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