“I think we made enormous mistakes,” he concedes, then quickly qualifies it by urging us to remember the context of the times. I searched for a way to describe his shtick here but can’t do better than this bit from Timothy Noah’s review of his book:

Ayers periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn’t gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity. “We took ourselves so seriously–OK, a little too seriously, we were too earnest by half and way too insistent,” he writes at one point. “[F]rom the edges, we were entirely inflexible, maybe even a bit goofy.” But in the process of describing such youthful indiscretions, Ayers invariably winds himself up into a self-exculpating frenzy.

The frenzy begins about a third of the way in, after he and Matthews spend a few minutes playing pattycake over how mean Sarah Palin was to “exploit” the fact that our next president used to fraternize with a terrorist. As you’ll see, Matthews actually has a personal connection to the Weathermen’s targets, which only makes Ayers’s ambivalence — “I don’t want to defend what we did but nor do I think it was completely insane” — that much more callous. Exit question: Has this degenerate ever once explained how those bombs were supposed to have ended the war? Did he honestly think Nixon and the Pentagon were prepared to stare down millions of protesters at the polls but that pipe bombs in the Capitol’s men’s room were going to panic them into a pullout?