McCain: Barack Hussein Obama=Terrorist

If you've been watching the news the past couple of days you might have seen some of the reports about the vile, ignorant things being shouted out at McCain/Palin rallies by their supporters; in response to the candidates' question, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" (never mind that we know infinitely more about Obama than we do Palin) there have been shouts of "Terrorist!", "Treason!" and "Kill him!" The McCain campaign has not denounced this hate-filled invective because it is the result of their new strategy: to paint Obama as unAmerican, frightening and alien by claiming that he "pals around" with terrorists and by implication, that he is some kind of secret Muslim who wants to destroy this country.

Even if we were to disregard these sleazy campaign tactics, which are nothing more than base attempts to inject hate and fear into the presidential race, and just focus on their core message of Obama's affiliations we find gross exaggeration and/or flat out lies. Here are the facts: William Ayers was a member of a radical left organization in the 60's called the Weather Underground who were adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War, so much so that they bombed a number of domestic military targets and banks. As detestable a practice as this was, they did send communiques ahead of their attacks so that innocent people could be evacuated and were never responsible for any deaths.

The group disintegrated shortly after the end of the Vietnam War and Ayers and his wife went on the run for most of the 70's until the charges against them were dropped because the government's case was based on illegal wiretaps. Ayers and his wife came out of hiding, got jobs in academia and are now tenured professors at Chicago area universities and live in the same neighborhood as Obama and his family. Obama's first fundraiser was held at Ayers' house at the behest of the state senator who had chosen Obama to be her successor, although Obama has said that he wasn't aware of Ayers' past at the time. Obama also served on the boards of two charitable organizations of which Ayers is also a member.

That's it; they're not friends or even that close and Obama has not spoken to the man in years. Ayers committed his crimes when Obama was eight years old and Obama has repeatedly repudiated Ayers' unrepentant actions since learning of them, calling them "despicable". Yet to hear Sarah Palin at her rallies lately, you would think Obama and Ayers spend their weekends making bombs together, or to put it simply:

...the truth is that Senator Obama treated Mr. Ayers as a polite member of Chicago society, holding a fundraiser at his house and sitting on the board of a non-profit alongside him — and a bunch of Republicans and other unobjectionable Chicagoans — without denouncing him or seeming to care about his past, even though decades before as a 60s radical Ayers committed abhorrent acts of domestic terrorism for which he never apologized.

A distortion a low information voter might believe is that Obama is "good pals with" a domestic terrorist.

The worst one can say of Obama is that he didn't take occasion to disrupt the local Chicago establishment for fear of derailing his own political goals and ambitions; it's not something to be entirely proud of (and I personally don't approve but hey, he is a politician) but neither is it right to vilify him and his reputation by implying that he condones and endorses terrorist acts against his own country.

This is the rank "politics of personal destruction" we always hear about from the candidates and the media and it seems to be all the McCain campaign has left, but unfortunately it is even more dangerous than it is disgusting; the kind of animosity being drummed up at their rallies lately by McCain and Palin is the same as that used to rile the KKK and the Nazis. Now of course I'm not calling McCain a racist or a Nazi but the simple truth is that hate is hate and these tactics have been used before because they usually work; watch a sampling of some of John McCain's more avid, "low information" supporters and the rhetoric they've taken away from his and Palin's speeches that day in Ohio:

McCain has decided that his only chance at victory this year is to play to the lowest common denominator of the electorate: those who are too dumb to see through his lies and those who are so afraid of (insert Republican/small town fears here) that they'll willfully believe the lies they need to hear to feel safe. More and more lately though it's beginning to look like Obama is pulling away with this thing; he clearly outclassed McCain in their second debate last Monday (which I've been too busy to write about, so that was just my official review of the event) and he's been pulling away in pretty much every poll taken of late. Hopefully Americans are starting to see past all of the dirty pool and mudslinging of this election and are finally realizing what is in their own best self interests; we'll know for sure in 26 days.

[Update: Obama counters the vitriol.]

[Update II: David Weigel at Reason.com comments on the above video:

This is a huge problem with the McCain campaign's negative turn. No swing voter took offense if a Bush surrogate called Kerry a limp-wristed, French-looking fraud. But I think they wince when they hear someone accusing Obama of terrorist "bloodlines." The guy still has a net 18-point favorable rating. People simply don't look at him and think "radical." The velocity with which the McCain campaign has become a political arm of Sean Hannity's America makes it look ugly and desperate, rather than strong, as Bush I looked when he mocked Dukakis or Bush II looked when he mocked Kerry.]