Via Michelle Malkin, we have a report by the invaluable Zombie who has been burning up the reporting on the Barack Obama-William Ayers connection.

Zombie kindly gave us permission to reprint his entire post but advised us that he is updating it regularly, so I am merely reporting its existence here and sending you to his site for the ongoing story. Zombie found a copy of the Weatherman Underground’s manifesto, of which Bill Ayers was a major author (along with Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn). His report provides numerous screen shots and quotations from the book, which I won’t repeat here. (Go read Zombie’s story!) Here, I will just present my own viewpoint.

Bill Ayers was, and is, a communist.

That doesn’t bother a lot of people. Like me, many of those people met communists, often while in college. Most of the communists I knew in college were, to be completely honest, perfectly nice people. They had a terrible error in their thinking about economics and human nature, but they were not evil people - in fact, they were as repelled by the crimes of what they would refer to as “state communism” (that is, communism as implemented in places like Cuba and the Soviet Union) as I was. Other people have met this sort of communist, and found them harmless, at least in numbers small enough that they can’t influence an election. Many of these people are communist in theory, but democratically socialist in practice. Idealists and rainbow-chasers, the sort of communists that most of us know, might be misinformed or even deluded, but they aren’t intrinsically evil, by and large.

Bill Ayers was, and is, evil. He was not a communist of the “hey, let’s start a bread baking co-operative and maybe run a daycare for the neighborhood working mothers” variety. Rather, he led an armed revolution against the West, with the explicitly avowed aim of destroying the United States of America and replacing it with a communist state. He planned, and intended, to kill people, and in large numbers. His organization planned, and intended, to commit the mass murder of as many as 25 million Americans, in the event that they succeeded in their political objective. Bill Ayers was not opposed to war, or concerned about the impact on America of our involvement in Vietnam; he was rooting for the communist revolutionaries to win, because he was on their side of the struggle.

Evil is not mitigated by incompetence. Ayers was incompetent in his terror revolution, and his organization wound up killing their own people, more than they succeeded in killing anyone else - although we should not forget the actual deaths that the Weatherman, and Bill Ayers, are responsible for. After he came out of hiding, Ayers was not convicted of his crimes because of prosecutor and police misconduct, and was able to successfully whitewash his violent past and begin advocating for his Marxist revolution on peaceable terms. And that is OK - as objectionable and as evil as Ayers’ underlying philosophy is, in the United States it is acceptable to peacefully work for even the most horrible agenda. That Ayers and others of his ilk were able to wash their hands of their Weathermen past and start radicalizing the educational system is a testament to the poor judgment and cultural insecurity of the people who accepted him - Barack Obama included - but that is the way the system works.

But that judgment should remain on the table as an issue which Obama must explain. To date, he has not done so. Instead, he has attempted to deny the relationship. Once the relationship was definitively proven to be real, he attempted to deny that it was extensive. Once it was definitively proven that the relationship was extensive, he attempted to deny that he really understood the magnitude of Ayers’ crimes and how objectionable it is for any political figure to have an association with him. Once the ludicrousness of this denial became clear, he attempted to deny that what Ayers had done was all that objectionable or all that different from what other Vietnam-era protestors had done.

But it is different. I know Vietnam-era protestors. They were people who thought that war was wrong, or that this particular war was a mistake. They weren’t people who hated America - they were people who loved America and wanted it to stand for the values they felt it should represent. There is disagreement and contention about the Vietnam War, and we can have that national conversation - we have been having it, for the last 40 years. They weren’t people who planted bombs in police stations, who planned to bomb dances, who tried to kill families, who tried to destroy the country that had given them birth and shelter. They were just people who disagreed with their government, a Constitutionally-protected form of dissent that no patriotic American would dream of denying.

They weren’t bombers. They weren’t Marxists with a specific agenda to destroy their government and replace it with a Soviet-style totalitarian communist state. Bill Ayers was, and is.

It is inexcusable for any public figure to have contact with this man. It is inexcusable that he has been “rehabilitated” and welcomed into the educational establishment to spread his poison - however sweet the words he now uses to coat those lies. Bill Ayers has learned how to hide the grinning skulls of his death-camp plans behind a rhetoric of equality and peace - and those who are fooled by that are responsible for their own folly.

Knowing that he has developed a reputation for throwing past associates under the bus when they became politically inconvenient, Barack Obama has been reluctant to do the same to Bill Ayers, a man with whom he has worked for many years and with whom he undoubtedly has a relationship of trust and mutual appreciation. Thus the long attempt to spin, deny, minimize. But Senator Obama cannot have it both ways. He cannot be both a post-racial, moderate figure who can lead the country towards a centrist future, AND someone who associated himself for decades with one of America’s most notorious and evil terrorists. We all have different versions of ourself, in our past, or in our imagination, or in our presentations to co-workers, family and friends - but those versions must harmonize, must be part of the same person.

The two versions of Barack Obama that we can perceive - one, the version that the candidate so earnestly presents to us in his soaring rhetoric and kindly promises - and another, that comes from reviewing the record and examining the associations and seeing where this man actually stands - are incompatible. One of them is a lie.

Barack Obama is lying to us about who he is. Bill Ayers is the key to unlocking that lie, to seeing what kind of person Barack Obama is and who he has chosen to associate himself with. And that is why Bill Ayers matters.