Apologies if my brain lags behind the bulk of the TPM community but something has bothered me for some time.  Why didn't Bill Ayers seriously derail Barack Obama's candidacy?  To be clear I don't believe that the two men had anything close to a meaningful relationship except on the provincial issue of education in the greater Chicago area, but since when did the truth matter?  Bill Ayers did do some really dangerous and reprehensible things and remains largely unapologetic.  Barack Obama did know him and work with him; whether this relationship was peripheral shouldn't have mattered to the large portion of the electorate who take a brief and shallow interest in political campaigns particularly in light of the mainstream media's penchance for noise amplification.  What gives?

     After 9/11 the Bush administration launched a protracted and concerted effort to brand the enemies of America.  Much of this we now know was to create a convenient umbrella definiton under which Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and a host of other unsympathetic entities would find themselves.  It worked to a large degree.  Many thoughtful people were persuaded to set aside the myriad cultural and religious differences between these organizations, and more importantly, to blur the serious divergence of their objectives.  For instance at this moment many intelligence analysts would have to acknowledge a high level of antipathy between the Taliban leadership and the remnants of Al Qaeda stemming from the loss of Afghanistan. 

     This refusal to make fine distinctions did a great disservice to the public and armed forces of the United States and gave rise to the popular conception of terrorism as endemic to the middle east and muslim societies.  It helped us forget that a handful of years ago a young man left a crude and devastating bomb in Oklahoma City.  It helped us forget that in our lifetime a bomb was planted in a c