Patterico (hat tip: Instapundit) reports that a piece of key evidence that Barack Obama launched his political career in 1995 from the Chicago living room of unrepentant Weatherman bomber William Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn has been made to disappear.

An Oct. 16 article in the Los Angeles Times criticizing John McCain’s most recent debate performance asserted the following:

“McCain charged that ACORN, a community organizing group that Obama has supported and that has been accused of padding voter registration rolls, is ‘maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.’ And then, returning to Ayers, McCain alleged that Obama launched his political career in the former Weatherman’s living room, an assertion for which there is no recorded basis.”

Trouble is, as Patterico, promptly pointed out, Maria Warren, a Chicago liberal who had attended that very launch had posted this “recorded basis” of the living-room launch on the blog Musings & Migraines in 2005:

“When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the livingroom of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

After Patterico pointed out the discrepancy between what Warren said and what the L.A. Times editorialists said, the page containing Warren’s post mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Fortunately, Patterico retrieved the page via Wayback and you can read it here.

Strange, isn’t it? Fortunately Warren’s post isn’t the only “recorded basis” for McCain’s assertion. Back in February, when Obama was still battling Hillary Clinton for the Dem nomination, Politico ran a story that not only quoted Warren’s post (without attribution), but quoted another launch-party attendee interviewed by Politico:

“’I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer [the Illinois state senator Obama replaced] was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,’ said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. ‘[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.’”

Uh-huh. We’re waiting to hear what the L.A. Times has to say about that.