Some interesting happenings on the search for truth front.  The indispensable National Review columnist Stanley Kurtz has been doing some much needed digging on the extent of the relationship between Barack Obama and Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. 

Well yesterday, Kurtz went on WGN Radio in Chicago to discuss his findings and what sort of trouble he’s run in to, and the Obama campaign let out this incredibly dishonest email:

WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears.  He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers. 

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse.  It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. 

At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz’s lies.

Phew! 

Slimy character assassin?  Anyone that’s ever read or followed Stanley Kurtz, or publications he writes for, would know that he’s an honest and good man who does good work. 

Baseless attacks?  Then why exactly was it so hard to get the University of Illinois-Chicago to open up the records of his work with Ayers. 

Offer sane and honest rebuttal...why didn’t anyone think of that??!?

Milt explains, repeatedly, that he contacted the Obama campaign (he gave the name of the campaign official his producer spoke with) and the campaign — the HQ of which is about a quarter mile from the studio where the show airs — declined to come on. They were offered the opportunity to have someone there with Stanley for the entire two hours, and they said no.

Man, Obama learned some pretty serious political ju jitsu in Chicago.  Keep paying attention to this one folks, because it’s very serious stuff and the blogosphere will no doubt stay on top of it.  Maybe even some day the MSM will pay attention. 

For the entire interview, check out this post at Little Green Footballs. 

For much more, Michelle Malkin is keeping an eye out for us. 

UPDATE:  Here’s the response from National Review.

Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Harvard-educated social anthropologist and frequent contributor to National Review, among other publications. He is widely respected for his meticulous research and measured commentary. For months, he has been doing the job the mainstream media refuses to do: examining the background and public record of Barack Obama, the first-term senator Democrats are about to make their nominee for president despite the shallowness of his experience and achievement.

Kurtz has written extensively, and with characteristic attention to factual detail, about Obama’s early career as a “community organizer,” his cultivation of benefactors in the most radical cauldrons of Chicago politics, his long-time pastor’s immersion in Black Liberation Theology, his ties to anti-American zealots, and the years in the Illinois state legislature this self-styled agent of change spent practicing the by-the-numbers left-wing politics of redistribution and race-consciousness, remaining soft on crime and extreme on abortion.

This has led Kurtz, naturally, to scrutinize the relationship between Obama and one of his early political sponsors, William Ayers. Ayers, as we have previously detailed, is a confessed terrorist who, having escaped prosecution due to surveillance violations that came to light during his decade on the lam after a bombing spree, landed an influential professorship in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). As he has made clear several times before and after helping to launch Obama’s political career, Ayers remains defiantly proud of bombing the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other targets. He expresses regret only that he didn’t do more. Far from abandoning his radical politics, he has simply changed methods: the classroom, rather than the detonator, is now his instrument for campaigning against an America he portrays as racist and imperialist.

Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a “smear” and smacks of “guilt by association.” A presidential candidate’s choice to associate himself with an unrepentant terrorist would be highly relevant in any event — does anyone think the Obamedia would keep mum if John McCain had a long-standing relationship with David Duke or an abortion-clinic bomber?

But we are talking about more than a mere “association.”

Bluntly, Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for “reforms” of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers’ 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

Read the whole thing.