The Chicago Annenberg Challenge Ayer/Obama affair (discussed infra) is finally receiving national attention. More here and here. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

While Glenn thinks the files have probably been "vacuumed of any seriously embarrassing matter," I think it's an embarrassment that a candidate for national office worked closely for years with an unrepentant terrorist.

Let me admit my bias here. Contemplating Bill Ayers and his evil wife makes me sick, and regular readers know that I don't say this about very many people.

They are longtime, avowed enemies of the United States who still call this country "the Beast," and who believe in overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with Communism -- the most murderous system of government ever seen in human history. Their terrorist activities were not intended to help the poor or right wrongs, but to bring about a murderous totalitarian state -- by using murderous tactics. The totalitarian state they had (and still have) in mind was to be built on systematic state mass murder -- along the lines of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot.

We would neither forgive nor tolerate unrepentant Nazis or Nazi supporters or enablers. The fact that so many people are willing to look the other way in the case of Ayers and Dohrn is, I think, a national embarrassment. It's a stain on every institution which hired them and gave them tenure, and on every politician who has worked with them -- including Barack Obama.

No matter what details the documents might contain, their very presence is an a seriously embarrassing matter which cannot be vacuumed away.

(Any more than could the tens of millions who perished under Communism.)

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon has a great post on the subject of guilt by association, and on Obama's obfuscation:

I do have some feelings about past associations and what they mean from personal experience. Like it or not, to one degree or another, they are part of our fabric, though not in a simple-minded sense. Knowing communists in the past obviously does not make you one now, or then, for that matter. Nevertheless, the 1972 Roger Simon who gave money to the Black Panthers is a building block of the 2008 Roger Simon who now despises identity politics and thinks it a reactionary betrayal of black people. That past is part of my emotional and intellectual DNA. If I hid that from you, you would not understand my present, where it comes from and what it means. You would be missing important context with which to analyze my current views.

The same goes for Obama, only his past is being shrouded by the institutions and cronies above. No matter what the truth is, this obfuscation makes it worse.

Sounds like he hung in the same radical circles we did.

Of course, my past associations (and later ones) make me a "traitor" now.

Nothing logical about it unless you're a radical Marxist.