"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Hey Now... This Is Not So Good, Senator McCain
Posted 5:30 p.m., Oct. 16, 2008
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Under the banner of both the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee comes this call. Brought to you, we could almost guess, by the writers of FOX-TV's paranoiac series "24."
Have a listen. It's all yours.
This is a "robocall" that reportedly is automatically dialing numbers in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Northern Virginia, Maine, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina., according to Politico.com.
It's not even so much what's in the message as how it's being said. Am I just a crazy anti-American leftist terrorist, or is there a note of barely contained panic in this guy's voice?
"You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans...."
Not to nit pick, http://www.featherly.com/kevblog08/kevblogarchive_1016.htm Ayers' Weather Underground was only ever investigated for killing one American, a police officer in San Francisco. Which is pretty bad stuff, but the case was never solved. Which means we don't know they did it.
To my knowledge, the only other Americans we know that the Weather Underground killed were three of their own members, and that was quite by accident.
It's the kind of thing that'll happen to you if you're a bonehead who likes to play with high explosives.
Badge of Dishonor
I am only one American among 300 million, so it's not like this is an original observation. But this is the most shameful and ignoble presidential campaign I have ever witnessed.
Even Karl Rove would have pulled up short of the callous carelessness of this attempt to tie Barack Obama to terrorism, an effort that could very well stoke up violence against the candidate.
I'm no Ayers defender. I do understand that criminals should be allowed to rehabilitate themselves, but not before they pay their penalty. I think that is true of Bill Ayers and I think it is true of Marc Rich. Both of these men should have paid society back for what they did with prison time, and neither man did.
But I also know American history well enough to know that Ayers' Weather Underground did not exactly measure up to its reputation as one of the nation's most serious domestic threats. These guys were the New Left's Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight--thank God.
The group's only successful "terrorist attack" occurred when a nail bomb was inadvertently detonated in their own safe house. Which is to say, the fools blew themselves up.
From Factcheck.org: "It would be correct to call [Ayers] a 'former terrorist,' and an 'unapologetic' one at that. But if McCain means the word 'terrorist' to invoke images of 9/11, he's being misleading; Ayers is no Osama bin Laden now, and never was."
Still, a bad guy just the same. And for better or worse, Ayers was allowed back into polite society, which is why Obama wound up serving on an education-reform board with him.
It's not unlike the public resurrection of John McCain's own domestic-terrorist buddy.
Oh, yes. Sen. John McCain has his own "lengthy relationship" with a domestic terrorist, as Carl Bernstein, the reporter who helped break open the Watergate story, wrote in a column published Oct. 13.
The culprit is a fellow you might have heard of, goes by the name of G. Gordon Liddy.
Patriot Games
What's that you say, G. Gordon Liddy is no terrorist?
Oh, right, right, right. I have so much trouble keeping this stuff straight.
Liddy represents the political right. Therefore, his history of plotting to bomb the Brookings Institute, to murder columnist Jack Anderson and to kidnap antiwar protesters--in addition to actually burglarizing Daniel Ellsburg's office and masterminding that little botched hotel break-in--those incidents don't make Liddy a terrorist.
Those actions make G. Gordon a patriot.
Liddy showed his bloody-red patriot's stripes in 1994, when he gave some sage advice to right-wing black-helicopter chasers on his conservative talk radio show. "Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms," Liddy counseled, "resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests."
Instructing fanatics on how to commit violence against his own government. Yes, I'm sure that makes Liddy a patriot.
Because John McCain is a patriot. He keeps telling us so. And in 1998, ex-con Liddy gave a fundraiser for McCain, during which McCain declared that he was just so doggone "proud" of good ol' Gordon.
These patriot/terrorist rules get so confusing.
-- Kevin Featherly
