New Obama ad: Why is McCain trying to distract us with that unrepentant terrorist I’m friends with?

(Hot Air) - Mark Halperin has the clip, which is ironic since he described Ayers with the same polite euphemism yesterday that The One’s ad team uses here (George Will thankfully was there to correct him). Conventional political wisdom demands a forceful response to a forceful attack, but even so, I can’t quite believe Obama would throw fuel on the Ayers thing by running a reply ad. His argument is so weak that it doesn’t really qualify as an argument: Yes, we’re friendly, but it’s ancient history and I denounced what he did, so what’s the big deal about socializing with, um, an unrepentant terrorist? As for the submoronic point about Ayers’s crimes having been committed when Obama was eight — a staple of the left’s feeble defense of him on this subject — imagine what the reaction would be if Bobby Jindal, say, had struck up a chummy pen pal correspondence with Charles Manson while in his late 20s. Think the left might find that relevant to his character? Think the fact that Jindal wasn’t even born when Manson’s crimes were committed would get him off the hook? Of course not, because as even an eight-year-old can understand, the salient point isn’t how old Obama was when the crimes were committed, it’s how old he was when he formed the moral judgment that led him to associate with Ayers in the first place.