And so in the first week of the last full month of the 2008 presidential campaign, a desperate John McCain has sent Sarah Paln back to the well to try to exploit the long-ago and passing relationship between Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground fugitive foot soldier, and Barack Obama.

This unholy alliance is back in the news not because of new revelations. We’re still stuck where we were months ago.

That is that Obama, in his rookie run for the Illinois Senate, attended a fundraiser hosted by Ayers, and while they had some incidental contact, it was minor, fleeting and so long ago as to not really matter except where it might matter: Did Obama at any time approve of Ayers’ conduct? Nope. Did Ayers mind-meld with Obama and some of his radical drivel rubbed off on him? Nope.

This has not phased Palin nor Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, the co-chairmen of the McCain Cue Card Club, who beat the guilt-by-association drum loudly in a recent a conference call with reporters in the kickoff of the campaign’s latest sleazapalooza.

For the record (and dontcha love it when a writer says that?), I knew several of Ayers’ cohorts back in the day and am a longtime friend of one whom I invited into my home when he was a fugitive. Even in the context of those crazy times, the Weathermen were a bunch of zonked-out wannabe revolutionaries who diverted attention from their occasionally worthy causes by doing a lot of really bad stuff.

Ayers himself remains shamefully remorse free for the role that he and his missus, Bernardine Dohrn, played in a 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse bomb factory blast that killed three fellow Weathermen. For what it’s worth, and it’s damned little, Ayers turned himself in to authorities in 1981 but was never arrested.

Among the frequent visitors to the dry Ayers-Obama well are two right-of-center bloggers with normally-keen intellects who should know better.

Both Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse and Ed Morrissey at Hot Air have been all over the Ayers non-story like a pair of cheap suits. Then there is Republican lapdog Stanley Kurtz’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece headlined “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools” that not only failed to deliver but never even explained what the radicalism was.

Kurtz was so determined to find dirt in the dry well where Palin is now thrashing around that he demanded and got access to the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers helped lead and of which Obama was a board member.

But after sifting through 70 linear feet of material (that’s 70 boxes more or less the same size as a 24 bottle case of 12 ounce beers), Kurtz was unable to find anything damaging beyond this smoking gun (and I hope you’re sitting down): Ayers was one of five people who signed off on Obama joining the Challenge’s board.

Kaboom!!!

It’s easy to say that Kurtz, Moran and Morrissey are desperate to find anything remotely concerning about someone whom they seem to fear if not actively dislike, but that is giving them too much credit. It’s simply a matter of them being so far in the well for John McCain (and Sarah Palin, whom Moran waxes about in boy-crush terms) that they don’t realize nor care that they’re coming up with dust and not dirt.