Robo Phone thanks you for your cooperation. Good night.
McCain camp robo phone calls included, if we're really going to start in with this shit, let's strap on the hip waders and get in there. The McCain campaign, and their pit bull with an up-do Palin, want us all to focus on the fact that Barack Obama has a distant and tangential relationship with former Weather Underground member Professor Bill Ayers. Don't get me wrong - it's a good idea to question and fully talk out the associations, past and present of anyone running for the highest office in the land. So let's do that.
William Ayers was active with the Weather Underground, making bombs and setting them off, from 1968 or '69, to when he started ducking the law in 1970. Rightly or not, federal charges against Ayers were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct and the machinations of COINTELPRO. If this controversy has a silver lining, it's that it has given me an excuse to mention COINTELPRO on my blog. In 1980, Ayers turned himself into the authorities for his crimes, and about fifteen years later, he hosted a coffee at his house for Obama, during the latter's first run for office. They've also been on two boards together, the Woods Fund, and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Since then, he's made some anti-American statements, most unfortunately on September 10th, 2001, the day before which it would become illegal to make anti-American statements.
And that's pretty much it. So are they associated? Yes. Are they buddies, cohorts, brothers-in-arms, and planning behind the scenes to reduce all of America to terrorist destruction; great piles of smoking rubble with tattered flags protruding from them in an effort to teach us all which way the wind blows? No. They are about as associated as I am to everyone in every political campaign in which I have worked, and that includes a person who eschewed the regular wearing of pants, a lady who painted Jesus on the backs of anything flat, three dead people, several potheads, and several dozen committed and probably decent people with some skeletons in their closets I never bothered to ask about while we were shaking hands, tabling, handing out GOTV lit, or sealing envelopes together.
Well, what about John McCain's associations? Seems only fair, yeah? I got a couple:
We've got Charles Keating, Jr. a convicted felon. McCain's direct association with him earned him a rebuke of "poor judgment" from Congress while absolving him from any actual unlawfulness. Chuck was not so lucky, and got an orange jumpsuit for his troubles.
There's G. Gordon Liddy, another convicted felon, insane person, radio commentator, and Watergate plumber. That's plumber in the "burglar who hides shit for the President, who in this case is Nixon" sense, and not plumber in the "Joe" sense. Liddy killed and cooked a rat as a child, and is inspired by the power of Hitler's speeches.
These men are contemporaries of McCain, people who supported him, or acted with him in instances that led to bad things. Maybe they never smashed windshields or made pipe bombs. That might have been because they were in prison, though.