I hardly want to be in the position of defending Bill Ayers but it's just not true, as McCain stated today, that Ayers "still, at least on Sept. 11, 2001, said he still wanted to bomb more." That really would be grounds for.... punitive measures, let's say. And it might make Obama's continued, if fairly distant, association with Ayers a good bit harder to comprehend.
But the fact is that while Ayers did tell the New York Times "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough," in September '01, he said those things prior to 9/11. The article in question wasn't published until, by a freak coincidence, that historic morning's paper, which rolled off the presses hours before Mohammed Atta checked in for American Airlines Flight 11.
If Ayers is self-evidently loathsome enough that we should doubt Obama's basic judgment, then surely McCain, once corrected on this point, won't feel the need to keep stretching the facts as a way of connecting Ayers to something more emotionally salient and politically relevant than the Vietnam War.
Right?
Bueller?
--Michael Crowley