William Ayers

Re "Radicals never say sorry," Opinion, Feb. 26 Jonah Goldberg once again displays his tone deafness. He wonders, "How is it that [William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn] get prestigious university jobs when even the whisper of neocon tendencies is toxic in academia?" The answer, dear boy, is power. The radicals, for all the bodily harm and property damage they wreaked, were essentially powerless to alter anything. The neocons, with their bloody hands on the levers of government, were and are powerfully able to change the world.

Re "Debate dwells on Obama's past," April 17 Once again, it appears that the news media control the debate. For at least 50 minutes, both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton were quizzed on some of their silly misstatements that have already been analyzed ad nauseam. Finally, I thought, we'd get a chance to hear their views on the issues most of us care about. Wrong again -- but this time I don't think we can blame the candidates. They had to go to war with the questions they were given.

William Ayers, a former radical leader turned academic and school reformer, has never been hesitant to speak his mind. Although there has been no public response from him since his ties to Barack Obama -- the two neighbors served on a charity board together for three years -- were referenced during last week's Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Ayers said Wednesday that he has a good reason.

Re "It was Iraq, stupid," Opinion, June 5 Rosa Brooks continues to perpetuate the biggest canard in modern political history: the difference between Hillary Clinton's vote for the Iraq war and Barack Obama's opposition. Obama was a civilian observer who was subjected to none of the pressure that Clinton was. The biggest deception during the battle for the Democratic nomination was the obfuscation of Obama's past, especially his poor judgment. He insisted that his judgment was superior to Clinton's experience.

On the Media: An On the Media column in Friday's Section A about a Fox News program that looked at Sen. Barack Obama's association with Weather Underground co-founder William Ayers misspelled his last name as Ayres.

Republican John McCain was on the attack during much of the final presidential debate, assailing Democrat Barack Obama for ties to William Ayers, a Vietnam-era radical, and ACORN, a liberal-leaning group whose voter registration efforts have come under scrutiny. But Obama's associations with both appear more tenuous than suggested by McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Automated telephone calls from Republican John McCain's presidential campaign continue the effort to link Democratic nominee Barack Obama with onetime Weather Underground leader William Ayers. The robocalls began in Nevada, Wisconsin and other states Thursday, the day after the final presidential debate, saying Obama "has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans."