Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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