Megan McAr­dle, respond­ing to the Obama campaign’s new attack on McCain’s Charles Keat­ing links, writes:

[I]n fact I think that the Ayers con­nec­tion is too ten­u­ous to be inter­est­ing. But there is a nugget of a real cri­tique at its heart, which is that the aca­d­e­mic cul­ture Obama belongs to thinks its just fine to be a former active ter­ror­ist who has refused to renounce sup­port for the vio­lence com­mit­ted by his group; that cul­ture has rewarded Bill Ayers with pres­ti­gious employ­ment and other posi­tions in a way that it wouldn’t dream of reward­ing a sim­i­larly “idealistic” abor­tion clinic bomber. I know it’s hard to imag­ine, but if you’re con­ser­v­a­tive, that seems like a real problem.

So McAr­dle thinks the acad­emy is to blame for not only accept­ing but even cos­set­ing Ayers, and Obama is impli­cated because he’s a member of that same morally bank­rupt insti­tu­tion, the university.

But if you look at what actu­ally hap­pened when it came to Ayers’s social (which is not, obvi­ously, to say moral) reha­bil­i­ta­tion, the key factor is pretty clearly his father, who was the former chair­man of Com­mon­weath Edison, one of the Midwest’s major energy com­pa­nies. Here’s a bit from a Nov. 11, 1985 LA Times arti­cle about Bernar­dine Dohrn’s (Ayers’s wife) attempt to join the New York bar:

Dohrn was grad­u­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Law School in 1967. Lawyers famil­iar with large firms say it is very unusual for some­one with an 18-year gap in her legal career to be hired by a firm like Sidley & Austin. One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion, they say, is that Dohrn is mar­ried to William Ayers, a former Weather Under­ground activist, and Ayers’ father is Thomas Ayers, former chair­man of Com­mon­wealth Edison and a lead­ing member of Chicago’s Establishment.

The elder Ayers recently headed Chicago’s effort to obtain the 1992 World’s Fair. Sidley & Austin served as lawyers for the World’s Fair Author­ity. He also serves on the board of the Chicago Tri­bune Co.

And here’s how Michael Kins­ley put it back in May:

When it became clear even to them that there would not be vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­ica, Ayers and Dohrn shrugged and rejoined soci­ety in Chicago, where he had grown up. It wasn’t dif­fi­cult. While he was in hiding, his father was CEO of Com­mon­wealth Edison, the big util­ity. Ayers the elder sat on every Estab­lish­ment board in town–North­west­ern, the Tri­bune Co., the Chicago Sym­phony. Ayers the younger and his wife were wel­comed back into the fold.

This is the second insult that emerges from the story of Bill and Bernar­dine. They set off bombs and talked about killing their par­ents, and the Chicago estab­lish­ment didn’t even care. The impor­tant thing is that he was Tom Ayers’ boy.

If one were only inter­ested in scor­ing points against one’s favorite bêtes noires, he might ask where we’re to find the con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tique of firms like ComEd and Sidley for their com­plic­ity in reha­bil­i­tat­ing Ayers and Dorhn. Or better yet, to ask why the corporate-​legal cul­ture as a whole is so will­ing to ignore the past mis­deeds of unre­pen­tant former terrorists.

But that’s a pretty boring game. Lots of bad people–and like Kins­ley, I count Ayers as a bad person–make it into lots of kinds of pro­fes­sions, and lots of people get reha­bil­i­tated for all kinds of rea­sons, most of them having noth­ing to do with jus­tice. (Cf. Henry Blod­get, who has writ­ten on finan­cial mat­ters for McArdle’s employer despite his involve­ment in secu­ri­ties fraud.) If McAr­dle wants to hate the uni­ver­sity and the cul­ture that sur­rounds it, that’s up to her. But one would hope she would do it with­out resort­ing to this kind of wit­less neo-​McCarthyism. Does she really think that some­one like Cass Sun­stein is a Weather Under­ground fellow trav­eler? I expect not; but if that’s the case, then what’s the point in sug­gest­ing it?