On October 15, 2008 MSNBC's Chris Matthews questioned Robert Gibbs, then senior advisor to Senator Barack Obama, about his relationship with terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. These questions came immediately after the third presidential debate. Here is the sum of what Obama said during the debate when questioned by John McCain:

Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.

Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican- leaning newspaper. Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House. So that's Mr. Ayers.

As even Matthews admitted of Obama's summary, "He did not quite come clean." He then asked Gibbs point blank if Ayers had hosted a fundraiser for "your candidate" in his race for Illinois State Senate. (Thanks here to Breitbart TV)

"No he did not have a fundraiser for our candidate," said Gibbs, who then repeated, "He did not have a fundraiser for him." Gibbs elaborated that the claimed fundraiser was "another myth propagated by the McCain that has been debunked both by people in the Chicago media and in the national media." Matthews chose not to press.

Three years later to the day, Bill Ayers spoke to a group of educational activists about his support for a grade school teacher Bob Peterson in Peterson's bid to become president of the Milwaukee teacher's union.

"We did a little fundraiser for the campaign in our house," said Ayers, "and we reminded him that Barack Obama did a little fundraiser in our house too." The audience laughed.

In this same talk, Ayers verified a claim I had made in my book Deconstructing Obama, namely that Obama seemed like "an ambitious young man," one who "wants to be mayor of Chicago." This assertion matters in that it suggests why Ayers would have helped Obama write his book, Dreams From My Father, which was published just months before the 1995 fundraiser. As mayor, Obama could have pushed Ayers's radical educational agenda through the swamp of the Chicago educational bureaucracy.

Media hypocrisy is a given. As Newt Gingrich recently observed, "The news media has never found itself excited about the facts about Barack Obama." But one question that Milwaukee residents might be asking themselves is this: if Ayers's acts were so "despicable" that the president of the United States felt compelled to disown him, why did their teachers union honcho feel free to embrace him?