One word: devastating.
Intellectual honesty compels me to make one point in Ayers’s defense: his behavior this year – staying out of the limelight until after the election was over – was exactly as it should have been. At least, unlike the Rev. Mr. Wright, Ayers was willing to forgo the limelight when taking it might have had bad political consequences.
But everything Hilzoy says is still true. The Weather Geeks were no more “non-violent” than the abortion-clinic bombers; what they did was stupidly narcissistic even when it wasn’t shockingly immoral; and the rehabilitation of Ayers and Dohrn just proves that they were right the first time about “class privilege,” the way the failures of the Bush Maladministration prove that they were right the first time about the risks of shoddy public management.