Writing for the Huffington Post, Robert Mackey would have you believe that being associated with a party that has secessionist beliefs is essentially the same as having a strong association with a man who lead a terrorist group that actively bombed government targets. Only in the reality-distorted world that dominates the Huffington Post could someone be so moronic as to draw a moral equivocation between bombs and a ballot box, aside from a political system which allows the masses to declare war. Since this is not ancient Greece, obviously he does not have that excuse.

In actuality, despite what Mackey claims, the Alaska Independence Party's platform is actually very moderate, all things considered. For one thing, its most radical platform is not secession, but actually to recognize a legal right for jurors to judge the law itself, essentially making jury nulification a formal power of the jury. It also supports ending sovereign immunity for public officials, which would have the effect of allowing them to actually be prosecuted for criminal offenses committed under the color of law. Even the matter of secession is not accurate as presented, as Wikipedia shows how the Alaska Independence Party really wanted a referendum that gave the people of Alaska the full set of options for their state, which included:

1. Remain a Territory.
2. Become a separate and Independent Nation.
3. Accept Commonwealth status.
4. Become a State.

That is quite reasonable by any international measure, and anyone who claims to respect individual rights and this country's values should want to give a region that is discussing entrace into the federal union the opportunity to consider all of the options availible to it. Perhaps some of the more hardline members of the AIP would not regard the federal union the way they do, had their state been given a more open set of options. It's hard to begrudge them their bitterness if the federal union is so involuntary that their only choices are to stay a territory with no power, become a state, or seek independence through a war against the federal government. That sounds more like the thirteen colonies' original relationship with the British Empire, than what America is supposed to stand for.

Yes, it is a free country. You get to associate or marry whomever you want, no matter how distasteful. Yes, Senator Obama served on a board with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground and now a college professor and activist in Chicago. However, Senator Obama has clearly distanced himself on numerous occasions from Professor Ayers' actions in the 1960's. This is a non-issue. Perhaps that is why you have decided to focus on it -- better a non-issue than having to learn and think about real problems that affect everyday people, like health care, the economy and education. Those, I suppose, are just too gosh darned hard.

Not only is Ayers unrepentent for what he did, but he remains unrepentent for what he tried to do. In his own words, published for all of the world to see:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

One would have to speak from a position of pure ignornance or a complete and utter disregard for the lives of the people that Ayers sought to murder, in order to blithely write something like "a former member of the Weather Underground and now a college professor and activist in Chicago" as though Ayers' worst offense were merely to commit some misdemeanor, minor felony or some sort of egregious faux pas in his youth. It does raise serious issues about Obama's character that he is not utterly repulsed by such a man, and that he had a long professional, working relationship with him.

For McCain, the equivalent would have been to have a fund raiser at Eric Rudolph's house, if Rudolph had stopped bombing abortion clinics a long time ago. No one in the media would forgive McCain for having a relationship with a man who is unrepentent about bombinb abortion clinics, but it is apparently much ado about nothing for Obama to have a relationship with a man who remains unrepentent about bombing government targets, and attempting to mass murder US military personnel with weapons that included pipe bombs filled with nails.

The real hypocrisy here is that the type of people who tend to support Obama won't hesitate to castigate a conservative or libertarian by even the most tenuous association. It's about time that the tables got turned.