Tom Hayden: Hey, I Forgive McCain for Killing People in Vietnam, So Lay Off Ayers Already

I guess this is some kind of moral equivalence in Tom Hayden's fevered mind. Buried deep in an otherwise reasonably fair account of Barack Obama's relationship with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers is this incredibly lame rationalization (H/T Lauren).

Tom Hayden, an anti-war activist who met Ayers in the 1960s and later was elected to the California Legislature, says Ayers' past should be forgiven.

"I have met and like John McCain, but he bombed, and presumably killed, many people in a war I opposed," Hayden says. "If I can set all that aside, I would hope that Americans will accept" that Ayers has changed, too.

Such arrogance. Because Hayden opposed the war, anything McCain did in prosecution of that effort is wrong, while Ayers was merely joining him in protest. So let's all just forget about it and get back to that hopey changy thing, OK?

Of course, Hayden was more than just an "activist" back in the 1960s. He helped organize the mayhem during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

The figure most closely associated with the Chicago protests is Tom Hayden, now point man for Progressives for Obama. Students for a Democratic Society activist Gerry Long recalled to David Horowitz that Hayden noted the benefits of firebombing Chicago police cruisers. “I heard Tom Hayden speak, in chillingly cavalier tones, about street actions which would run the risk of getting people killed,” Todd Gitlin remembered in The Sixties. In a conversation with me, Mike Klonsky, SDS’s national secretary during the convention riots, described how Hayden plotted to scatter nails over a nearby highway. And Bill Ayers writes in his memoir, Fugitive Days, of Hayden’s altered persona when addressing closed audiences of radicals...

The behind-closed-doors Hayden occasionally ventured into public view. In Chicago, he called on activists to “avenge” the injuries of co-organizer Rennie Davis, who had suffered a concussion battling the police. Hayden exhorted the throngs: “Make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over this city.” Hayden wasn’t alone among future Chicago Eight defendants in his violent rhetoric. “If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club,” Black Panther Bobby Seale counseled, “and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself! We’re going to barbecue us some pork!”

Yup, just some community activists and what a shock, one is buddies with Obama while the other is not the point man of Progressives for Obama.

I guess Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn aren't the only "former" terrorists Obama knows.

How many others are out there?

Curious today how Team Obama is trying to intimidate the folks behind this ad.



Might we now find out more about Barack and Bill's relationship?