One of the great things about my new job is that it affords me the opportunity to listen to 106.7’s Junkies on my drive to work in the morning. For those of you who live outside the beltway (you poor, unfortunate souls), the Junkies (originally the Sports Junkies, they dropped the “Sports” a few years back) are a quartet of local boys who talk about all manner of nonsense, much of it sports/entertainment related. Sometimes, like this morning, they slip into politics.

It’s interesting when they start up on politics, because of the four only one (E.B., I think; their voices all sound pretty similar over the air, especially when you only listen fifteen minutes a day) is a conservative and the rest of the guys (as well as the call screeners, producers, and everyone else in the booth) tend to gang up on him. Today, a mother of one of the Junks even called into the show to harangue E.B. for saying that Barack Obama has been known to consort with terrorists. Obama and Ayers were never close acquaintances, she argued, and even if they were, so what? Ayers isn’t an unrepentant terrorist.

Now…I’m of the mind that Bill Ayers is a nonissue, except in the sense that it makes me dislike Obama on a personal level. But to suggest that Ayers is not an unrepentant terrorist is, simply and factually, wrong. Let’s break the phrase “unrepentant terrorist” into its component parts. Was Ayers a “terrorist”? Well, he set numerous bombs in sites around the country with the intention of destroying public and private property and intimidating/scaring people. Sounds like terrorism to me. OK, is he “unrepentant”? In an irony noted by many others, there’s a New York Times article dated September 11, 2001 in which Ayers is quoted as saying

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Those don’t sound like the words of someone who is sorry for his actions.

CNN has also recently debunked the idea that Obama and Ayers barely knew each other; I’d embed the video, but for some reason the computer I’m working from hates doing that. I’ll instead link to the Weekly Standard’s summation of the report. You can watch the video there.

My point is this: the left can argue about how relevant these attacks are, but they can’t argue about the basic facts of the situation. Barack Obama is friends and political allies with an unrepentant terrorist. I’m sorry if it’s distasteful to hear, but it’s true. Should this relationship disqualify him from the presidency? Probably not. But don’t act as if Sean Hannity and the rest are making up facts.