A nerve has been struck

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.

Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

It's the type of going-for-the-jugular approach to politics many Democrats complain that Kerry lacked and that Republicans exploit.

Obama's target is an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group that questions Obama's ties to Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

The lone financier of the anti-Obama ad, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, was also one of the main funders of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who targeted Kerry. Simmons, a McCain fundraiser, contributed nearly $2.9 million to the American Issues Project, according to documents filed by the group with the Federal Election Commission.

Fox News and CNN have declined to air the anti-Obama ad. But by Monday afternoon, the ad had run about 150 times in local markets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan, according to Evan Tracey, head of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, an ad tracking firm.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous.

"Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks," Vietor said.

The problem, for Obama, is that every word in the ad is true.

Bill Ayers was a founder of the Weathermen. He did bomb the capitol, NYPD headquarters and the Pentagon. He does say that he is not sorry for what he did but wishes that he had done more. Obama and Ayers served on the board of a left-wing organization and worked closely together on another left-wing project called the Annenberg Challenge (its purpose was to further screw up the Chicago public schools). And Obama's political career was launched in Ayers house at a party which Ayers and his wife, fellow Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dhorn, hosted to introduce him to the movers and shakers in the Illinois state senate district where he was running.

Here is the ad:

To put this in perspective think back to the 1967 bombing of the Beth Israel synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. What if one of the planners of that attack and founders of the Klan chapter which perpetrated the bombing had been arrested but not prosecuted because of a legal technicality and John McCain was a friend and political ally of that man?

The situations are EXACTLY THE SAME.

The mainstream media cannot see it in this light because to them Ayers was a good man working for what they consider to be the absolutely right goal, but just going - perhaps - a bit too far in his methods.

After all, the typical media liberal reasons, Nixon was president! We were in Vietnam! Ayers was trying to stop all of that and bring about socialism in America!

As far as most of the media is concerned Ayers is a tragic hero, far more like John Brown than Osama bin Laden.

But Ayers is not a hero, tragic or otherwise. He is a murdering thug. William Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist and and unrepentant communist and he is not better than the Klansmen who blew up synagogues and burned churches and murdered civil rights workers. The fact that the evil which Ayers was working to achieve was a bit different in character than the evil the Klan was working to achieve is irrelevant. They are just sightly different kinds of monsters. Nothing more and nothing less.

The issue is not whether Barack Obama shares all of William Ayers views and supports all of Ayers methods. The issue is that Obama knew what Ayers was and still considered him a worthy friend and political ally. Barack Obama wanted to be in the Illinois State Senate so badly that he was willing to go to Ayers house and publicly kiss Ayers ring to get there.

Let me state this again for the slow witted (Democrats drop by here once in a while). Barack Obama knew what Ayers was and what he had done and at the very least didn't care

What would the mainstream media, the Obama campaign and the Democrat party (I know, redundant) be saying about John McCain right now if he had been friends with that synagogue bombing Klansman?

What they would be saying about McCain would be harsh, but also totally true and deserved and whatever they would be saying about McCain can also be said about Obama and it will be equally true and equally deserved.

Whittaker Chambers once observed that it is not the innocent who utter shrieks of outrage but the guilty.

A former Marine once told me that in combat if you find that you've kicked the enemy where it hurts then you should keep kicking them there.

The Republican party needs to keep up this line of attack. The outraged shrieks coming from the Obama campaign and the mainstream media (I know, redundant) prove both Obama's guilt and the fact that he knows that this can sink him. So he has been kicked where it hurts all the GOP has to do now is keep kicking.