The headline in today’s Washington Post metro section makes one gasp: “GOP Head Compares Obama to Bin Laden.”

And then we read the comment that spurred the outrage:

According to a report in this week’s Time magazine, the Virginia party chairman, Del. Jeffrey M. Frederick (R-Prince William), told Virginia volunteers working for GOP nominee John McCain that Obama and bin Laden “both have friends that bombed the Pentagon.”

The comment is a little glib, a little too cute, perhaps; maybe a bit close to irreverence about 9/11, but not inaccurate, and fairly mild for a ugly election season (must I remind you about Sandra Benhard alleged jokes about the rape of Sarah Palin?). The Post then takes a bit of interesting license, clearing Ayers of any role in the bombing of the Pentagon, even though he took credit for the act in his book. They write, “Ayers did not participate in the bombing of the Pentagon but admitted to involvement in other blasts.”

Ayers’ description of the act in Fugitive Days:

Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.
I say “I” even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it—but I’ve had difficulty writing this, and I thought if I just said it boldly—”I bombed the Pentagon”—that might liberate me to go on…
Why did you bomb the Pentagon?
My dad wants to know. He was once offered a cabinet position and was once considered for Secretary of the Army. He knows that I bombed a lot of things—Those were crazy times, he says, better forgotten—and he knows, too, that Diana, whom he liked, is dead—She was older, he says now, and she led you astray. He’s stuck in other patterns as well—You need a haircut, he says automatically, and, You’d better cover that tattoo in front of Mother—and now he wants to know why I bombed the Pentagon.
I didn’t really think that three pounds of dynamite would knock it down or even do much damage—although it turns out that we blew up a bathroom and, quite by accident, water plunged below and knocked out their computers for a time, disrupting the air war and sending me into deepening shades of delight.
I didn’t think that our entire arsenal, 125 pounds of dynamite, would actually count for much in a contest with the U.S. military, but I was never good at math, and I did think that every bomb we set off invoked the possibility of more bombs, that the message—sometimes loud and clear—was that if you bastards continue to wage war, we’ll go into places you don’t want us to go, places like the Pentagon, and we’ll retaliate, and soon—who knows?—you might completely lose control.
It was a story we told ourselves, and a story we spun out into the world. Armed anecdotes. Explosive narrations.
The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world. Do you know what the word for Pentagon is in Chinese or Korean, Arabic or Haitian Creole? Pentagon.
We went back and forth, not only between us but within each one of us. I called up all the courage I could summon in order to take the next risk—to bomb the Pentagon, say—and then I ran my commitment through the severest tests. And then I thought, enough. There must be another way. And then the ferment stirred and the demand to do more, to go further, again issued forth. Back and forth. Without end.
I thought about the justification for each action. Sometimes I answered technically: we worked hard and did our best to take care, to focus, to do no harm to persons and no more damage than we’d planned. The psychological answer, I think, was that we were young with an edge of certainty and arrogance that I would be hard-pressed to recreate or even fully understand again.
The moral justification requires remembering the context of the times. I could barely justify eating my own breakfast because it seemed a kind of inaction, or a kind of moving along blindly as if normal life included unending slaughter. I went for days on end with nothing to eat, no money of my own, no change in my pocket, thinking only of how to stop the war, how to make the price for continuing the war great, how to reach out to the victims of the war and stand alongside them and experience something of what they were experiencing. I wanted intimate knowledge of their situation, of their suffering. I’d marched on the Pentagon more than once, scaled its walls, confronted armed troops there, and even peed on its side. If I could have, I’d have duct-taped it shut, or put it in a trash compactor, but the closest I could come was a tiny bomb in a toilet drain.
We’d already bombed the Capitol, and we’d cased the White House. The Pentagon was leg two of the trifecta.

From his own description of urging on the group, it’s difficult to justify the claim that Ayers “did not participate” in the bombing, even if someone else actually placed the bomb in the Pentagon women’s room. Also note that Ayers was one of the Underground’s bomb-builders, and to the best of my research, we have never learned who built the bomb that detonated in the Pentagon.

UPDATE: A reader says he contacted the reporter who wrote the piece, who indicated the line about Ayers lack of involvement was not in his originial version and was added by editors. Hmmm…