Speaking out again now that the U.S. presidential election has been decided, Bill Ayers tells Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, 11/14/08) exactly why his family "actually didn't pay a lot of attention to" the ongoing media controversy over him:

We recognized that there was this cartoon character kind of thrust up on the screen, and I was an unwitting and unwilling part of his presidential campaign. We tried not to watch it, because, pretty much, it was distracting and kind of crazy-producing.... There's so much that's dishonest in it that it's kind of impossible to kind of know where to enter it.

First of all, the idea that Bill O'Reilly says, you know, that I was in hiding. I wasn't in hiding.... What I wasn't doing was commenting on the presidential campaign to the media...because we couldn't figure out a way to interrupt what we took to be a profoundly dishonest narrative.... We had no way into it.

The idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense. We never killed or hurt a person. We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam. And by contrast, the war in Vietnam really was a terrorist undertaking. The war in Vietnam was terror on a mass scale, with thousands of people every month being murdered, mostly from the air. And we were doing everything we could to stop it.

And so the government-friendly media version of that war--going strong to this day--continues to influence national U.S. politics, and has Ayers proclaiming "again, it's hard to know where to start to interrupt that narrative."

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Election. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.