This is where the mainstream media has been headed ever since the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate; E. J. Dionne is the latest journalist to claim that any and all criticism of Obama is by definition racist. But he takes it an extra step, saying that John McCain represents the reemergence of the far right.
Yes, really. John McCain, far right extremist. Wow. Meanwhile, Barack Obama associates with people who scream “God damn America,” and with people who are guilty of bombing the US Capitol, and gets a complete pass.
Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?
McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a “decent person.”
Yet McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain’s attacks, she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” What other “terrorists” was she thinking about?
Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.
Notice how many mainstream journalists shamelessly parrot Obama’s talking points about William Ayers, word for word.
McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.
This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.
Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama’s associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.
Obama’s political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber — even a repentant one — he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he “didn’t do enough.”
Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright’s angry racism or Ayers’s unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?
No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.
Since the time of Hitler, civilization has never been so close to the brink of total catastrophe. This American election will decide whether civilization as we know it will survive. As much as economic questions are currently front and center, with blame to go all round, this is not an election primarily about corporate greed, or individuals living beyond their means, or government neglect of economic oversight. Nor is it about whether we should have gone into Iraq where, like it or not, American boots on the ground have begun to create an emerging democracy. This election is about whether there will be a nuclear holocaust.
Alarmist? I sure hope so. Isn’t it about time that we got to the point about the stakes in this election? How many more pundits do we have to watch talking about the minutae — a candidate’s look, an accent, a stumble, a slogan? We have four weeks to talk about the thing that matters most: a nuclear-armed Iran, and which candidate will prevent it.
Don’t be shocked if you see the McCain campaign pull the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of mothballs in new attacks against one-time parishioner, Barack Obama.
McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)
“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.”
If you’re not a fan of Obama, you’re probably thinking, “It’s about time.” It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that Obama’s fans will shriek, “Guilt by association!” and claim that Obama’s relationship with Wright was nothing special.
But they’re going to have to explain this speech by Obama from June 5, 2007 at Hampton University, lavishing praise on Rev. Wright in a way that makes it very clear that Obama was a close personal friend.
This close friend of Barack Obama also joined Louis Farrakhan on a trip to Libya and met with Muammar Gaddafi in 1984, right around the time Obama would have first met Rev. Wright. Has anyone ever asked Obama for his opinion about that trip?
By picking Sarah Palin, it looks like John McCain has lost the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen: The Ugly New McCain.
What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.
McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.
Gerard Vanderleun posts about some quite amazing perfidy from The Atlantic and photographer Jill Greenberg, whose photo shoot with John McCain was deliberately set up to produce ominous, threatening pictures—by using outright trickery: Out-Takes: Behind The Atlantic’s McCain Cover.
When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.
She delivered the image the magazine asked for—a shot that makes the Republican presidential nominee look heroic. Greenberg is well known for her highly retouched images of bears and crying babies. But she didn’t bother to do much retouching on her McCain images. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she says.
After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”
What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I can’t help suspecting that the Obama campaign was set up by John McCain’s self-deprecating statements about not “getting” the Internet. Here’s a Forbes article from 2000, and it’s clear that McCain is nowhere near as clueless as Obama would like to portray him: Forbes.com – Net Vs. Norm.
In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.
If it was a setup, Obama fell right into the trap.
South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler sharply attacked Sarah Palin today, saying John McCain had chosen a running mate “whose primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.” …
Told of McCain’s boost in the new ABC/Washington Post among white women following the Palin pick, Fowler said: ”Just anecdotally, I believe that those white women are Republican women anyway.”
When the call came at 3 am, Ron Paul was steadfast.
WASHINGTON – Ron Paul says he rejected John McCain’s appeal for his endorsement.
At a news conference Wednesday, Paul said he received a surprise call from McCain’s campaign on Tuesday asking for his endorsement. Paul turned them down.
Paul said: “The idea was that he would do less harm than the other candidate.”
When The Atlantic called Jill Greenberg, a committed Democrat, to shoot a portrait of John McCain for its October cover, she rubbed her hands with glee.
