As I have been saying, there's a bigger problem than Bill Ayers' unrepentant terrorism and his present day radicalism, and that is his mainstream respectability.

For. The. Umpteenth. Time.

Bill Ayers should not be respectable or mainstream.

For some reason, that issue is seen as irrelevant or nonexistent, and the Ayers issue is spun alternately as:

No one cares what Ayers did and it was a long time ago so it doesn't matter

Barack Obama was a child when the bombs went off so it doesn't matter

Obama's contacts with him involved working for "educational reform"

The economy is more important, so HOW DARE McCain even mention Ayers?

When he did last night (after Bob Schieffer brought up Sarah Palin's "palled around with terrorists" remark), here were Obama's words in response:

In fact, Mr. Ayers has become the centerpiece of Senator McCain's campaign over the last two or three weeks. This has been their primary focus. So let's get the record straight. Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago.

Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.

That Obama would invoke Annenberg's name shows a clear intent to continue -- not denounce -- the ongoing mainstreaming of the unrepentant Ayers.

So does Obama's invoking the names of other members of the board:

Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican-leaning newspaper.

Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House. So that's Mr. Ayers.

McCain came back with this:

MCCAIN: Well, again, while you were on the board of the Woods Foundation, you and Mr. Ayers, together, you sent $230,000 to ACORN. So -- and you launched your political campaign in Mr. Ayers' living room.

OBAMA: That's absolutely not true.

MCCAIN: And the facts are facts and records are records.

OBAMA: And that's not the facts.

As to Ayers and Obama funding ACORN, it is true:

Obama's tenure with the Woods Fund is perhaps most noteworthy for his association with former terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers served on the Woods board for three years of Obama's tenure and remained on the board after Obama departed. Hillary Clinton raised this issue earlier this year at the Philadelphia debate when Obama, as he has done throughout the campaign, tried to minimize his relationship with Ayers.

[...]

During Obama's time on the Woods Funds ACORN received grants of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), and $40,000 (2002) from the Woods Fund.

But I'll say this for Obama: he's come a long way since he described Ayers as someone he barely knew who was "a guy who lived in the neighborhood."

What annoys me the most about Obama's performance last night is his attempt to continue the mainstreaming of a murderous radical who should never have been mainstreamed in the first place.

Yes, I think Ayers, a murderous, admitted enemy of the United States, was lucky to avoid prison, and should never have been given tenure and respectability. Even now he should be fired, and removed from all semblance of respectability. I know this is not going to happen, and I realize there is no way to hold the people who hired, coddled and promoted Ayers accountable, but I think that if Obama can't at least denounce him as outside the mainstream, he is unfit to be president.

Instead of denouncing him, Obama promotes the meme that Ayers is an "educational reformer" (as he did last night). This is not much different from promoting the meme that Mao was an "agrarian reformer."

In today's Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern (who has studied Ayers in detail) takes issue with that meme in a piece titled "Ayers Is No Education 'Reformer' -- The new media spin is worse than Obama's original evasion."

...[A]s one of the leaders of a movement for bringing radical social-justice teaching into our public school classrooms, Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.

He still hopes for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism, but this time around Mr. Ayers sows the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America's future teachers. Thus, education students signing up for a course Mr. Ayers teaches at UIC, "On Urban Education," can read these exhortations from the course description: "Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression -- we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things. We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine."

The readings Mr. Ayers assigns to his university students are as intellectually diverse as a political commissar's indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"; two books by Mr. Ayers himself; and "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks (lower case), the radical black feminist writer.

Two years ago Mr. Ayers shared with his students a letter he wrote to a young radical friend: "I've been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your 'youthful idealism' is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don't grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan's vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I'm an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out." (The letter is on his Web site, www.billayers.org.)

America's ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Mr. Ayers has tried to give the civic culture ideal a coup de grace, contemptuously dismissing it as nothing more than what the critical pedagogy theorists commonly refer to as "capitalist hegemony."

In the world of the Ed schools, Mr. Ayers's movement has established a sizeable beachhead -- witness his election earlier this year as vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation's largest organization of education professors and researchers.

Bill Ayers epitomizes what has gone wrong in this country.

This is bad, bad, stuff. I don't know how many blog posts I've written over the years on the systematic destruction of the schools, the indoctrination of children, and the steady infiltration of radical leftists in the educational system. (A lot, I'm sure.) But here's a guy who, despite the fact that he is proud of his murderous, treasonous past, has been given enormous power to do all of these things, and a guy who helped him and worked with him closely is running for president. This would speak poorly of Obama, even if Ayers was not a famous Weather Underground terrorist.

But what happened last night really gave me the creeps. Not only has Barack Obama assisted in the deliberate mainstreaming of a dangerous radical, but he did it right there on national television for the world to see.

Let me repeat what I said yesterday before the debate:

Regardless of how Ayers came to be respectable and mainstream, though, the people who made him respectable are not running for president. Obama is, and so the issue of Ayers -- and his respectability -- is fair game. It is not enough for Obama to say Ayer's "past" is despicable if Ayers does not repent it. Nor does hiding behind the "everyone else did it" claim of Ayers' respectability.

The question is not whether Ayers' past actions were despicable, but whether Obama thinks being unrepentant about terrorism is despicable.

Similarly, the question is not whether Ayers is respectable, but whether Obama thinks he should be respectable.

So I have another.

Does Obama truly believe that Ayers' acts were despicable?

I wonder.

McCain almost touched on the problem when he said this last night:

...Senator Obama chooses to associate with a guy who in 2001 said that he wished he had have bombed more, and he had a long association with him.

Anyone who thinks Ayers is repentant in the least, watch this (from 1998):

Does Barack Obama think that such people -- who he admits committed "despicable acts" but who don't regret those acts -- should nonetheless be welcomed into and become part of the respectable mainstream?

Apparently yes.

Why? Might it be that he doesn't think what they did was all that despicable?

Should someone who thinks that way be president?