Victor, respectfully, the Ayers/Obama continued association by phone and email is mystifiying only if one assumes that Ayers’s vile 9/11 comments mark the revelation of an Ayers different from the one Obama knew for the many preceding years. There is not a scintilla of evidence that such a thing could be true.
Ayers has never pretended to be anything other than what he is: a revolutionary Leftist, who described himself as “a radical, small ‘c’ communist” in 1995 — the very time when Obama started formally partnering with him on education reform, humping Ayers’s radical 1997 book, appearing on panels with Ayers, joining with him to fund the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and the like. He did not become proud and creepy after 9/11. He is what he is and has ever been.
That is to say, the continued association is easily explained for anyone willing to look at the facts. The post 9/11 Ayers was exactly the same guy as the pre-9/11 Ayers. That’s what drew Obama to him in the first place. The media and our esteemed commentariat choose not to look at the facts — after all, Obama is such a fine writer and has such intellectual rigor. So we have the usual dismissal or complex rationalizations of something that is obvious and simple: Obama shares Ayers’s Leftist politics. Whatever distance Obama has imposed in the last couple of years is strictly a function of his electoral ambitions.
Characteristically, VDH is getting to the heart of the matter. What is sadly remarkable is how many others are prepared to draw sweeping, negative inferences about Sarah Palin because of her accent, yet, when it comes to Obama, they avert their eyes from the unmistakeable evidence staring them right in the face.