It’s not a trailer, actually. It’s a snippet from the film itself, premiering next week in Minneapolis during the convention and produced by Citizens United, the conservative outfit led by former Whitewater investigator David Bossie that attacked Maverick with a “McCain = Hillary” ad during the primaries. Nothing here you don’t already know but plenty here that the average voter doesn’t, so expect it to draw the usual hysterical denunciations-sans-arguments from the left eager to kill the meme but without any effective rebuttal to the charge. Ayers is much more dangerous for Obama than Rezko is, I think: The public’s not going to reject a guy for engaging in the sort of petty graft which they assume all politicians engage in, but hobnobbing with terrorists is a different matter. Absent any defense of his actions better than the idiotic point that he was only eight when Ayers committed his crimes, the Democrats are going to have to find someone in McCain’s own orbit with whom they can pull a tu quoque. Although even there, they’ll run up against his POW Absolute Moral Authority (assuming he hasn’t used it all up on silly defenses by then).

For your companion reading, try Fox News’s report of its 2004 interview with Ayers if you missed it last night. Sure, the Weathermen were terrorists, but they were “driven by hope and love and aspiration as much as we were driven by despair” so everything’s cool. He also insists that the bombs they set were calculated so as not to harm anyone, a claim Fox seems to take at his word. Really? Who killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell, then?

Update: I missed Andy McCarthy’s evisceration of Ayers’s lies about his true intentions as a Weatherman this morning. Essential.