Salon.com is running an interview with Obama’s “terrorist pal,” Bill Ayers. It’s interesting for any number of reasons, but maybe you can get some of the flavor of it from the video highlights below.

It would have been a fascinating interview even without McCain/Palin’s desperation move of trying to tar Obama as a terrorist using Ayers as a brush. To me, the most interesting passage may have been when Ayers compared the Weather Underground and the My Lai massacre:

[Walter Shapiro of Salon.com:] But there is a larger question about this period, which was when the Weather Underground was making bombs and taking credit for bombings. As you explain in the book, none of you were getting any sleep, you were all living on amphetamines and you were all constantly talking to each other in revolutionary jargon. In hindsight, how crazy were you then?

[Ayers:] I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter [of Ayers’ book], I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.

Meanwhile, another group of Americans -- also despairing, also off the tracks -- walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.

And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?