To hear the right-wing crowd, you would think Bill Ayers and President Barack Obama were joined at the hip.

Who could forget Sarah Palin's charge that Obama was "palin' around with terrorists"?

Well, goodbye to all that. The 1960s Weather Underground radical-turned-University-of-Illinois professor sounds as steamed up against Obama as he used to feel about President Richard Nixon.

The reason, once again, is a presidential escalation of a faraway war.

As a contemporary of Ayers who covered the Underground's breakaway from the old Students for a Democratic Society for alternative newspapers in 1969 (The Tribune didn't want to give the radicals any "publicity" in those days unless it came from the Chicago Police "Red Squad."), I feel some of his pain. A lot of us boomers thought our generation had learned by now how to avoid unnecessary wars. Iraq and the Bush administration showed we didn't.