BARACK 'n' AYERS

The connections between Barack [middle name redacted] Obama and "unrepentant LYING terrorist" Bill Ayers loom like a foreboding monolith in Candidate Soetoro's path to the White House.

Barry has thus far treated Bill Ayers differently than he has treated Jeremiah Wright, Jim Johnson, and his own grandmother: he has continued to defend his association with a man who planned to detonate an anti-personnel nail-bomb at a social gathering of American soldiers at Fort Dix.

Rather than his usual tactic of throwing his embarrassing associates Under the Bus, Barack has attempted to downplay his association with Ayers. He thinks he can defend himself by asserting that he was only eight years old when Bill Ayers was leading the Weather Underground. And he claims that the ties that bind him to Ayers are "tenuous."

But Obama was 35 years old when he launched his first political campaign (for Alice Palmer's State Senate seat) with a dinner party at Bill Ayers's (and Bernardine Dohrn's) home -- the home of a man who rhapsodized:

"There's something about a good bomb … Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down."

And Barack's association with Bill Ayers didn't begin in 1996. They were already well acquainted from working together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, funneling grants to Marxist-Leninists and other former terrorists.

In fact, knowing that Bill Ayers's father, Thomas G. Ayers, is an important Chicago philanthropist with ties to the Daley political machine, and that Michelle Obama (then Robinson) (daughter of a Daley machine precinct captain) worked for a small law firm that also employed Bernardine Dohrn, it may be that Bill Ayers is one of the most significant background figures in Obama's life. More important, perhaps than even Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, or the pedophile, pornographer and communist Frank Marshall Davis.

The fact that Obama's connection is far from tenuous may be the reason that the Obama campaign has attempted to use the courts to prevent broadcasts of a television spot that highlights this dubious relationship.

However, now that independent investigators have been granted access to the Annenberg Challenge Archives at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the truth will out.

And then the pathetic evasions and cover-up will be seen for what they are.

Of course, since as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, Bill Ayers has more self-discipline than the self-aggrandizing windbag Wright, he has kept out of sight, and the cover-up has been possible. But only up until this point.

And if you want to know what Bill Ayers is really like, if you want to know what sort of man Obama takes as an ally and friend, read this.

And vote accordingly.

UPDATE - Thursday Morning

Stanley Kurtz began to lay out the story of the Obama-Ayers relationship last night on WGN Radio in Chicago. The Obama campaign reacted with a flurry of abuse, and appealed to the legions of Obamanauts to call the show and expostulate. The host was genuinely surprised that they would react to Stanley Kurtz and his painstaking fact-finding in that way.

As Jonah Goldberg put it on the Corner, "As they say in the Air Force, if you're catching flak, you must be over the target."

Prediction: the evidence will show that the electoral career of Barack Obama was launched by Bill Ayers like a missile at the heart of America because he was convinced that Obama shared his Marxist-Leninist outlook. Perhaps Obama was fooling him, as he has fooled so many others. But perhaps that is the real skeleton in the closet where hangs the empty suit.