William Ayres

This is all very inside baseball. If you haven't been following the presidential campaign since 2006, it may seem as though it is an argument in progress. It is. Feel free to skip.

Just a few posts ago I was wondering about Barack Obama, "Who Does He Owe?"

It seems as though one of the people he owes is William Ayres. As pointed out by Hillary Clinton, Obama used the position that he had in Ayres operation as a bullet point on his resume.

This is the absolute sticking point for me. My family calls me McCarthyite and say that I'm attempting to smear Obama with guilt by association.

And yet.

"I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough", and, when asked if he would "do it all again" as saying "I don't want to discount the possibility."

"We weren't terrorists," Ayers told an interviewer for the Chicago Tribune in 2001. "The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."

Oh, God. Do we think that the Red Brigade were random? Bader-Meinhof Group? Were all the pain and horror and death in the end for nothing?

Calling me McCarthyite isn't the worst thing that has ever happened to me.