WaPo Tries To Downplay Ayers in Caption as 'Former Radical'

Downplaying William Ayers came naturally in The Washington Post on Saturday. A picture on page A8 was captioned "John McCain has criticized his rival's ties to former radical William Ayers." Former bomber might be correct, but certainly not former radical.

It came in a story that mostly concerned how McCain isn't dwelling on Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, from Steven Holmes and Michael Shear. One unnamed GOP adviser said Wright was a better target and joked, "Most people these days think the Weather Underground is a band."

Ayers also came up in a different Shear story on A4 (but no picture). Shear  Called Ayers "a Vietnam War-era radical" and explained the Weather Underground "bombed U.S. facilities in protest of the Vietnam War." The Pentagon and the Capitol went unmentioned.

Perhaps the most amusing Ayers mention in the Saturday Post came in the Saturday "Free for All" selection of letters to the editor. Several writers accused the Post of being a tool of the Obama campaign. But Andre Sauvageot of Reston defended Ayers as a professor and Chicago "citizen of the year." He found the terrorist associations inspiring:

It is precisely the rich, diverse associations in a tough neighborhood as a Chicago community organizer that prepared Obama to bridge themost bitter partisan divides. It is a tribute to his character that he could learn empathy from these associations, which did not subvert him but better prepared him to deal realistically with a tough, complex world.

UPDATE: Retired Army Colonel Sauvageot also thinks anyone who opposes Obama must be a racist. From a washingtonpost.com message board after Hillary's convention speech:

Hillary left such people with no factual or logical rationale. This suggests that the most common variable governing such people is what Bob Herbert described in his column "The Dog That Isn't Barking" (NYT, 26 August 2008) racism, even though it may be masked with concerns about Obama's putative "inexperience" blah, blah.