Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

President Barack Obama’s past has come up several times in the national debate. Is this a legitimate issue? The disreputable pasts of other presidents have been noticed in other campaigns. President Bill Clinton, some people recall, had a “bimbo” problem. President John Kennedy had serious health problems, and he also wandered from his marriage vows. President Nixon may not have been a crook, but his politics was not always straight and narrow. Mr. Obama’s past has been examined since he has been in office. It turns out the book that introduced him to the American public, “Dreams of My Father,” was not, as many people supposed at the time it was issued, a strictly factual production. There are huge chunks of Mr. Obama’s past that are only fleetingly touched upon in his supposed autobiography. Many of the incidents in the book, it appears on close examination, are fictional; some of the characters in the book are “composites.”

Billy Ayers keeps coming up, like a baby’s warm spittle, over the shoulder of US Sen. and Democrat Party presidential nominee Barack Obama. In the meantime, the diggers, among them blogger ZombieTime, keep digging. Everything you wanted to know about the saintly professor Ayres but were afraid to ask is here: William Ayers' forgotten communist manifesto: Prairie Fire . An excerpt from the manifesto: “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years… We need a revolutionist communist party to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build a new society… We have only just begun. At this time, the unity and consolidation of anti imperialist forces is an urgent and pressing strategic necessity. PRAIRIE FIRE is offered as a contribution to this unity of action and purpose. Now it is in your hands. Bernadine Dhorn Jeff Jones Billy Ayres Cecilia Sojourn For The Weather Undergroun...

CNN, not noted for supporting the McCain candidacy, has now completed its investigatory report on the Ayres/Obama connection. The bottom line of the report: Obama’s claim that his connection with Ayres was casual is what Mark Twain might have called “a stretcher.” Bill Ayres is the now well known “unrepentant terrorist” who, along with his present wife Bernardine Dohrn, was in the silly sixties one of the founders of The Weather Underground, an anti-Vietnam group that turned to terrorism as a means of self expression. The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol in Washington DC and Congress, a distinction they share, as conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh never hesitates to point out, with the 9/11 bombers. Ayres apparently was given numerous occasions to repent of his past terrorist activity but politely declined. He said he and his wife “had not done enough” during their bombing spree in the sixties to turn the country against the war. Ayres is now a pedagogue at Univers...