You fear-mongers are much scarier than Ayers.

The Chicago bully tactics aren’t going to work. While Obama sics his lawyers and Kossack minions on TV stations that dare to air an independent ad about his close relationship with Weather Underground terrorist-turned-academic Bill Ayers, the truth is seeping out. Thanks to the efforts of NRO’s Stanley Kurtz, blogger Steve Diamond, and intense pressure from Internet readers and talk radio listeners, the University of Illinois - Chicago was forced to release a trove of papers that a former official attempted to shield from public view. There are some 140 boxes and 1,000 files to sift through — and MSM outlets have barely scratched the surface. Kurtz is in Chicago to review the documents and will report tonight on his findings for two hours on Chicago station WGN’s Milt Rosenberg Show. (Good background here, too, in an in-depth discussion on the malign influence of Ayers’ educational philosophy and practice.)

Despite only partial review of the papers, some outlets are pooh-poohing the disclosures. The Chicago Tribune writes: “A partial examination of the documents did not reveal anything startling about the link between Obama, the Democratic presidential contender, and Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, a Vietnam-era anti-war group that claimed responsibility for several bombings.”

And yet:

The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the education program got under way. The two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program, records show.

At a Democratic debate this year when the association between Obama and Ayers was raised, Obama said: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood. . . . He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Obama called Ayers’ past radical acts detestable.

But critics note that Obama visited Ayers’ home for a meeting at the start of his first state Senate bid in the mid-’90s.

The UIC records showed that Ayers was instrumental in securing the $50 million education grant to reform Chicago Public Schools, part of a national initiative funded by the late Ambassador Walter Annenberg. . After Chicago was awarded the money, Obama served as president of the Challenge’s board of directors, the fiscal arm that disbursed the grants to schools and raised private matching funds. Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with the grant recipients.

Fox News’s James Rosen uncovered more of Ayers’ unrepentant, radical face while researching his latest book:

William Ayers, who was a founder of the 1960s and 1970s radical group the Weather Underground, told FOX News correspondent James Rosen in a candid 2004 interview that he still believed he was “on the side of justice” years after the group’s wave of attacks.

In the interview, conducted three years after the September 11 attacks, Ayers argued the U.S. government had carried out “many other acts of terror … even recently, that are comparable,” and claimed he and his bomb-planting comrades were “restrained” in their actions.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, served with Barack Obama on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago for three years and helped launch Obama’s political career in Illinois by hosting in his Hyde Park home an informal campaign event for the future state senator in 1995.

Ayers claimed the Weathermen were driven by “hope and love,” not despair, and said he did not think the group’s violent acts, targeting federal officials and local law enforcement officers, were “a big deal.”

…Interviewed in May 2004 in connection with Rosen’s book “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate,” published recently by Doubleday, Ayers affirmed that 9/11 was “an act of pure terror,” one that had caused him to weep, and that terrorism is “always wrong, always evil.” But Ayers also condemned the Bush administration for using the attacks “to advance a right-wing agenda on every front: every uterus must be examined, every tree chopped down, every oil well dug. I mean, it’s absolute madness.”

“I mean, the only group of people that I know who weren’t weeping for the next several weeks [after 9/11] were the people who were busy typing legislation into their computers,” Ayers continued.

When asked about some Palestinians who had been captured on videotape dancing in the streets after the attacks, Ayers said coverage of those individuals had been “overwrought” in the U.S. media, and added: “[E]verybody in the world knows that Americans are geographically challenged and historically challenged. We don’t have a sense of who we are or where we are. So I think every American that I know was weeping over the next several weeks, and devastated and shocked. Was that an act of pure terror? It absolutely was.

“And there are many other acts of terror carried out by our government, even recently, that, that are comparable.

Ayers is not only a flag-trampling apologist for domestic terror. He’s an inveterate liar. Andy McCarthy refreshes your memory.

Obama can wrap himself in the flag and attempt to gag his critics, but his false portrayal of Ayers as just a guy in the neighborhood is not going to fly. Obama’s friend is America’s enemy.

And America deserves to know.