Ayers the Education Professor on the Election

We'll be seeing more careful interviews of, and comments from, William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright in the coming days and months. After the abuse heaped upon them by the McCain campaign and independent organizations hostile to Barack Obama's candidacy, it will be time to straighten out the record.

The Washington Post published a small interview with Ayers. Some selections:Asked Tuesday if he wishes he had set more bombs, Ayers answered, "Never." He also said he had regrets.

"I wish I'd been wiser," he said. "I wish I'd been more effective. I wish I'd been more unifying. I wish I'd been more principled."

History has shown of the Vietnam War that "those who opposed it were on the right side," Ayers said. But he said some of his early rhetoric was "juvenile."

This certainly contradicts the NY Times quote.

Ayers blames the "liberal media" for failing to dismiss the Republican assaults. He called the media's performance "kind of shameful" and likened the situation to the 2004 episode when Swift Boat Veterans for Truth created a narrative that helped doom the candidacy of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

"The dishonest narrative," Ayers said, "is that guilt by association has some validity."

This calls out the media and all those claiming that the media has a liberal bias (O'Reilly? Drudge? Coulter? Limbaugh?). A fair and unbiased media that had some spine might have fact-checked the Ayers meme a little more accurately. Most of what I saw, on supposedly liberal media replayed Republican ads with little in the way of discussion.

William Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader who became an issue in the 2008 campaign, said Tuesday that he is not close to Sen. Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."

Worse things than being a cartoon character...

Beep Beep!