Things on the eco­nomic front still look very bad out there, what with a stock market in free fall, Ice­land on the verge of bank­ruptcy, and, oh, did you hear that we’re pump­ing another $38 bil­lion into AIG? It’s all ugly, and it’s prob­a­bly going to get worse and stay bad for some time.

But there’s a few little tiny bits of good news that Yves Smith res­cued from the rubble yes­ter­day.

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:

I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.

From a 10/18/65 letter from Norman Mailer to William F. Buck­ley, in last week’s New Yorker:

What the hell does emu­nc­tory* mean? You have here gone to far, sir, even for Buck­ley. I even heard one Roman turn over dis­tinctly in his grave as the word went by and whis­per to his neigh­bor, ‘Does that ‘emunctory’ come from the Greek?’

And a few more gems from the stack…