Mike has been all over the connection between Obama and Bill Ayers. Today, Bob Novak is on it, too; he thinks that Obama, who called the terrorist-sympathizing, America-hating Ayers just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” will have to offer voters a more thorough explication than that.

Obama supporters should hope any such explication is better than the one put forth by Stanley Fish, law professor and New York Times blogger, who justified his own association with Ayers by noting that people should not be held accountable for the actions of their acquaintances. That’s baloney. It’s also shockingly relativistic. It also won’t convince voters in Ohio. It also violates what everyone’s mother told him in first grade.

And while the sins of Ayers’s past are disturbing, so are his present sins—i.e., the drivel that he continues to publish and proffer. In one of his latest blog posts, for example, Ayers suggests that teachers structure their lesson plans to encourage the ideas in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, such as “love the sun and the earth and the animals, despise riches, give alms to anyone who asks... dismiss whatever insults your soul,” etc. Ugh.