The Republicans are Getting Desperate and Resourting to Unjustified Attacks

The folk who ran George W. Bush's campaigns, Karl Rove et. al., are infamous for their willingness to use ugly and untrue charges in attack adds when their candidates are running behind. I have read that a lot of those same people have joined the McCain campaign. I know that John McCain has expressed repentance for politically motivated moves that he has made in past losing campaigns, but I thought he was above the current move towards attack adds. On the other hand, he has chosen a running mate who is a self professed equivalent of an attack dog with lipstick, and who seems to have few other qualifications for the office of vice president.

The Washington Post today reports that Sarah Palin is publicly charging that there is a close relationship between Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weatherman Underground, and Barack Obama, citing a New York Times article.

Palin told Republican donors in Colorado that Obama "is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world."

First, I thought Sarah Palin was a strong, born again Christian, and I would have guessed that she would think God was the "greatest force for good in the world.

The New York Times story in fact says:

the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

According to Wikipedia:

William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born 26 December 1944)[1] is an American elementary education theorist, and former leading 1960s militant. He is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.

He went underground for years, but after federal charges were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct, eventually surrendered to the authorities.

It sounds like he was an antiwar activist who did some very unwise things in his youth, but turned his life around, and became active in his local community, who is now being defiled by innuendo without any chance to defend himself. In any case, I thought in the United States we hold a man innocent until proven guilty.

Certainly Obama's connection with Ayers, participating in occasional joint meetings, is much less damning than McCain's association with convicted felon Charles Keating, for which McCain was formally reprimanded by the Senate.

Palin is not alone in making this baseless charge. I note the comment by John McCain, also quoted in the article in The New York Times:

In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”

Now I realize that Senator McCain ran bombing runs in North Vietnam in his youth, but I do not feel that fact alone should disbar him from holding high office in the United States, much less from associating with serious candidates for office. There are lots of other reasons why I don't think Senator McCain should be elected President -- his lack of economic wisdom, his close contacts with lobbyists and gambling interests, his reprehensible promotion of Keating even after the Saving and Loan scandal became public, his support for all of the worst policies of the Bush administration and the likely continuation of those policies if he is elected, and his narrowly hawkish foreign policy views are enough for me. Were they not sufficiently damning, the possibility of Sarah Palin suddenly becoming an unelected president, as eight vice presidents have done in the past, is truly frightening. Now I can add to the reasons for voting against the McCain-Palin ticket their letting their campaign go into the gutter.

This blog focuses on Knowledge for Development, and I usually refrain from commenting on the election. There are a lot more knowledgeable people for that. But the use of false claims during the election campaign does is a misuse of the media that fits clearly in the content of this blog.

Herbert Hoover, a very good man but a terrible president, vetoed Congressional bill after Congressional bill at the start of the Depression, and let an economic crisis develop into a global economic depression. We can not afford to let the current economic crisis evolve into something much worse.

George Bush and his administration told us that they had definite information that justified our going to war, and that the war would be short, liberating a people who would welcome our troops and quickly create a democratic government. They were tragically wrong, at a cost of thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis, huge damage to the Iraqi nation, and damage to the American foreign policy we may never be able to repair.

We can not entrust economic policy over the next four years to candidates who gain office by gutter politics. We can not entrust our foreign policy and the conduct of two wars to candidates who gain office by gutter politics. If I can't trust what they tell me when they are running for office, how can I trust what they tell me if they get into office???!!! And if I can't trust what they tell me, how can we expect markets and foreign nations to do so?