'Not a sin, but a virtue.'

Bill Ayers. Remember him? He was supposed to be the "unrepentent domestic terrorist" that Barack Obama hung around with, according to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Just another way in our sound-bite culture to try to disparage Obama by association during the political campaign.

Well, now Ayers has spoken out.

"I was cast in the 'unrepentent terrorist' role,' Ayers wrote in the New York Times, "I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the 'Two Minutes Hate' scene from George Orwell's '1984,' when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing."

Well, it turns out that Ayers was no more than one of many, many protestors of the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

"I never killed or injured anyone," Ayers said. "I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. 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 said he has regrets, including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else.

"No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets," he said. "The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long."

The Weather Underground carried out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war, Ayers said.

Ayers said he can't imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. He's a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Let's hope,' he concluded, "we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue." --Jim Broede