In his endorsement of Barack Obama today, Boris Johnson offers a good summary of the Ayers hoo-ha:

I revere Melanie Phillips, and I have carefully studied her blog entries about Obama and the vote-stealers, or Obama and his association with a quondam terrorist called Ayers.

In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun.

Obama’s terrorist chum is now a professor, and his last act of terrorism took place when the candidate was eight, and it is not really clear that he and Obama are chums at all.

Lady Phillips of Neoconomia answers,

It has been said that beneath Boris the Buffoon is Boris the Brilliant. But maybe beneath Boris the Brilliant who is beneath Boris the Buffoon is Boris the Butterfly. The charge against Obama is not that he is acquainted with someone who used to be a terrorist. It is that Obama himself has been personally involved with ultra-left, anti-white and anti-American organisations which use thuggishness and intimidation in pursuit of an agenda of cultural infiltration and takeover, as laid down by revolutionary ideologues at whose feet Obama sat all his life, and about all of which he has systematically dissembled…. Alas, I fear poor Boris has fallen victim to Neocon Derangement Syndrome.

Ah, what cool intellectual precision. And how clever. When someone points out something obvious, the trick is to diagnose them with a thought disease. The truth, however, is that, if anyone in this exchange is suffering from a mental derangement disorder, it is Mel P.

If she believes that “The charge against Obama is not that he is acquainted with someone who used to be a terrorist” then she’s misleading herself. That is exactly the charge being made against Obama. What else did Sarah Palin mean when she said the Democratic nominee was “palling around with terrorists?”