It was interesting that the Washington Post wrote about the anger and hate displayed against candidate Barack Obama in Waukesha by what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called "an enthusiastic crowd" in Waukesha.

The Post's headline was, "Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally."

Since the McCain-Palin crowd is whipping up a lynch mob mentality, I'd better confess my own ties to so-called domestic terrorist Bill Ayers before someone runs a TV ad against me, hustles me off to Guantanamo Bay or, worse yet, reaches for a length of rope.

My relationship with former Weatherman radical Bill Ayers is almost as strong as Barack Obama's.

You see, my father, Bill Eggleston, worked for many years for Ayers' father, Thomas G. Ayers, who was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, the power company in Chicago.

They didn't work closely together, but they worked in the same neighborhood in Chicago's Loop. They rode the same elevators, they ate in the Edison dining room. They may even have talked about their children, who were nearly the same age.

At the time, of course, no one could have known that Bill Ayers would grow up to marry Bernardine Dohrn and join the radical movement, and much, much later become Barack Obama's neighbor and an advocate for public education, a dangerous radical concept. Worse yet, Bill Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a dangerous radical institution.

During the 1960s, I admit that I had dangerous radical thoughts. I thought the war in Vietnam was wrong and the guy in the White House was a dangerous crook. Today, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have persuaded me to join the dangerous, radical American Civil Liberties Union, and I'm a card-carrying member.

Darn it, people who want to take my constitution away from me will have to pry the parchment from my cold, dead hands.

I was never convicted of anything, though.

Neither was Bill Ayers, though he was charged. Whatever evidence the feds had against him was obtained through illegal wiretapping and was thrown out of court. This was long before Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, and illegal wiretapping became legal.

Like Bill Ayers, I've been rehabilitated by the passage of time. As the Phil Ochs song proclaimed, "I believe in God and Senator Dodd and keepin' ol' Castro down." Bill Ayers may feel the same.

But by the standards of attack politics and guilt by association, Barack Obama and I are still guilty. A campaign that has seen attacks on Obama because of statements by his former minister can easily stoop low enough as to attack the man based on who lives in his neighborhood.

I wonder who lives in John McCain's neighborhood. Or, rather, his seven neighborhoods.