Why Bill Ayers is kind of a big deal

Over at the Corner, Andy McCarthy notes:

Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization’s ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

Look, I get that all this happened almost forty years ago. But that doesn’t change the fact that the McCain campaign and his supporters are well within their rights to break down the campaign thusly: on the one hand, you have a candidate who kicked off his campaign at a terrorist’s house who spent the Vietnam era trying to kill soldiers, and on the other you have a guy who spent a large portion of the Vietnam era in a POW camp. Obama’s run a pretty amazing campaign, but I can’t believe that no one on his staff thought “Hm…maybe it’s NOT a great idea to be so cozy with a radical terrorist.”