As the global economy staggers on crazy legs and even rich people stop taking taxicabs in New York City, the McCain campaign, solidly losing for the first time, has struck back like a vicious, cornered animal in the run-up to tonight’s debate. We knew they were mean; the election until now had proved them to be brutally calculating and soulless. But with their chips literally down, McCain/Palin doesn’t have anything left to lose, and they’re cashing in on fear and hatred and sound bites.

They can’t talk about the economy, can’t offer any means of fixing it, or of denying their connection to it, and no one wants to talk about the Middle East. Harking on Rev. Wright runs the risk of reminding all the people they’ve convinced Obama is a Muslim that he is, in fact, a Christian.

So the McCain campaign has piped up their ridiculous focus on Obama’s association with Bill Ayers, a 63-year-old Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. Both were on the board of a community anti-poverty group eight years ago in Chicago. A very long time before that, in the Age of Aquarius, Ayers was part of the radical antiwar group the Weather Undergound. This is the man you’ve heard called a “terrorist” by no less than Potential-President-in-Waiting Sarah Palin (never forget).

One thing’s for sure: whatever Ayers participated in when Barack Obama was eight years old should not have bearing on your life right now. That a he once hosted a coffee for Obama should not be more important than whether you should be stuffing your mattress with dollar bills and running to the bank.

If there’s ever been a time in the recent history of America when Americans need sound leadership, concerted action and real truth on issues, it’s right now. As our current President phrased it, “this sucker” going down is affecting everyone. Do you know a single person unconcerned about the economy? Have your conversations turned to little else in recent days? Exactly. So why Bill Ayers, why now, and why do our Republican candidates think he is more important than your money?

Ayers is a distinguished professor these days — which surely loses him some points among McCain’s base, if they even know — though I guarantee that 60% hear “terrorist” and think “Muslim” and 40% hear “’60s radical” and think “militant black activist.” The Republicans just need the scary words. Ayers, a Caucasian, whose most recent books contain titles like “The Good Preschool Teacher” and “City Kids, City Teachers” is being linked to events nearly forty years old and buried  — because he’s since worked with Obama on education reform and anti-poverty efforts.

It’s a dispicable low, even for Republicans. At the same time that they’re scaring middle America with their favorite terrorist fantasies, they’re trying to distract aging Americans who just watched their 401k drop with reminisces of what it was like to have domestic chaos and riots in the streets.

Nevermind that Ayers’ radical activism stemmed from a fierce fight for civil rights in the late 1960s and ’70s, and that the group of young angry idealists who blew up statues and buildings together thought they could make their fucked-up world a better place, make it “classless” and more free. They were furious about the escalation of unjust foreign wars, and they tried to do something about it because they didn’t have blogs. They were a largely privileged group who cared enough about shaking up the unjust system to align themselves outside the status quo. The Weathermen’s greatest tragedy was perpetrated on themselves, when a bomb they had been preparing blew up three of them, including Ayers’ girlfriend, at a Greenwich village townhouse. You won’t hear that part from McCain, who only needs your fear.

But these guys named themselves after a line from a Bob Dylan song, for Christ’s sake. They were never a real threat to the American way of life forty years ago, and an aged professor who once believed equality was worth a fight has no place being brought into the national discourse in a time of very real crisis. We need to be talking about how to make the market stop bleeding and how to make the credit come back — and how average Americans are going to do through this, and just what the fuck the government is doing with our money. We need answers and a way foward, not false exaggerations of history from people who have never studied it.