McCain Renews Ayers Attack

I thought for a minute that McCain was going to take the high road since he called off his pit bull yesterday, after days of innuendo that Obama is a radical terrorist Muslim. Seems Palin was inciting too much hatred at her rallies. Her supporters are into that theme. Palin is so inspiring.  But McCain, eyes closed, has gone full bore down the dirty road. And we'll see about Palin because she'll be out on her own again today.

Politico:
McCAIN LAUNCHESAYERS WEB VIDEO – Politico's Andy Barr: 'John McCain's campaign released a new 90-second web [video] Thursday on Barack Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers. ... 'Barack Obama and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Friends. They've worked together for years. But Obama tries to hide it. Why? Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue. The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor. When Obama just says, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' Americans say, 'Where's the truth, Barack?' Barack Obama. Too risky for America.'

EXCLUSIVE: A TV AD IS PLANNED.

McCAIN CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER NICOLLE WALLACE, during round of morning shows, SAYS OBAMA 'LIED.'

Nicolle, to ABC's Robin Roberts on 'Good Morning America': 'Nobody in America sitting around the kitchen table ... cares about a washed-up terrorist like Mr. Ayers, which he is. It's about telling the truth about your record. And if we can't trust Barack Obama to tell the truth about the guys in his neighborhood, who also happen to be domestic terrorists, who also happen to be people who have held events for him, how can we trust him to tell the truth about what he could do as president?'

Obama's Robert Gibbs: 'You heard a crazy answer right there from Nicolle. Let me address some of the things that Nicolle knowingly misstated, in another desperate and dishonest attack from the McCain campaign.'

WALLACE: 'Do I look desperate?'

WALLACE, on NBC's 'Today': 'The point is he lied when he first talked about his association.'

Obama's Bill BURTON, on Fox: 'Even after all these reports, at the end of the day, their paths crossed a couple times. Did he know about his past when he went over to his house? No. When he found out about the terrible past, did he say the actions were detestable and deplorable? Absolutely.'

Here's exactly why the McCain camp is taking the low road and McCain knows it, but lacks the wisdom or the integrity to do anything about it:

GRAND RAPIDS -- Following an unpopular president, supporting a costly war, and now facing a financial crisis at home, Sen. John McCain's race for the presidency should be in worse shape.

"What makes John McCain plausible is Barack Obama," news anchor Ray Suarez told a local crowd Wednesday.

The "pseudo controversies" about Obama's background are symbols for a "racial calculus" hard at work in U.S. politics.

Opinions about Obama's inexperience, his childhood in Indonesia, and the persistent but untrue rumors of him being Muslim are stand-ins for something his detractors cannot admit, Suarez said.

Particularly, "religion has become a proxy for race," he said.

Characterizing Obama as Muslim "is a way to confer otherness on him for those people who are uncomfortable saying they're against him because he's black."

Suarez spoke at Fountain Street Church as part of the Diversity lecture series. He is the senior correspondent for PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and former host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program.

That's why Campbell Brown is wrong on this one. So is Glenn Beck.
More on this:

NYT: McCain may feel compelled to go back to his guilt-by-association theme. And this has me feeling very guilty about my associates.

The McCain folks have been obsessed with William Ayers, a neighbor of Obama’s who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Back in the 1960s, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were leaders of the Weather Underground, an antiwar group whose penchant for violence was exceeded only by its haplessness. Ayers has since become an education expert and was named Chicago’s Citizen of the Year in 1997. He gave Obama a house party when Obama was running for the State Senate.

In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

To me, this Ayers line of attack seems like just preaching to the choir. It seems people inclined to think Obama is a terrorist Muslim will bite the bait. But really, how many stupid people are there in America? That's a scary question.