PUTTIN’ ON AYERS

Ahh, the pleasures of a sunken wreck, where hidden crannies are made for sulking, and long-abandoned galleys are still stocked with un-salvaged wine to challenge the jar-opening skills of an octopus. There is nothing like a good shipwreck to soothe a savage cephalopod.

Your faithful mudsquiggle has returned!  No more self-flagellation (and don’t ask where the sucker-shaped hickeys come from).  I don’t care if my earlier posts were riddled with specious reasoning and ad hominid attacks on hopeless humanoids.  I tried to play fair … but the McHacks are back again … so I changed my mind.  According to rumor, Senator John McCain intends to raise the Ayers issue during the next and last presidential debate.

Here is what a conservative blah-blah-blogger is saying about the Obama-Ayers connection:

Obama is associated with Bill Ayers, a man whose terrorist group killed police officers and bombed the U.S. Capital …

But wasn’t Obama eight years old when this Ayers fellow started the Weather Underground?  If Obama spilled a glass of milk at age eight, not even General Ripper would give a rap about losing precious vital bodily fluids.  But Senator McCain does.  And who exactly is this Ayers fellow? According to the New York Times:

“Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.   “He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues …  “This is 2008,” Mr. Daley said. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”

And this is what Tom Hayden, the former 1960s activist, thinks about the Obama-Ayers connection:

[Hayden] said he saw attempts to link Mr. Obama with bombings and radicalism as “typical campaign shenanigans.”   “If Barack Obama says he’s willing to talk to foreign leaders without preconditions,” Mr. Hayden said, “I can imagine he’d be willing to talk to Bill Ayers about schools. But I think that’s about as far as their relationship goes.”

So Barack Obama and William Ayers crossed paths and served on the same education board, while swarming wingnuts are making a big buzz over little more than a casual association. More than a buzz, the McCain/Palin campaign is using the Ayers trope to turn political rallies into ugly mob scenes with chants of “terrorist,” "traitor,” "kill him” and “off with his head.”   In the year 2008, it is hard to believe there are still people acting like this:



Can you name even ONE wingnut who understands this as inciting mob violence? Can you name even ONE wingnut who has spoken out?

Of course, wingnuts conveniently ignore all evidence they find unsuitable to their cause, especially the language of hate when it benefits their candidate.  Incitements to violence may not bother them, but they bother me. Angry mob scenes remind me of witch burnings, lynchings, pogroms, and 1930s Germany.

Amazing. Wingnuts have even ignored the pleas of their own candidate. Here is McCain trying to undo the damage of his own campaign run amuck:



But here is the rub.  About the McCain supporter who called Obama an “Arab,” she was later interviewed via streaming cell phone by Noah Kunin from The UpTake, Adam Aigner of NBC News, and Dana Bash of CNN:



According to the transcript, the McCain supporter who called Obama an “Arab” got this information from a pamphlet supplied by her local McCain campaign office [my bold]. The implications are disturbing. When will candidate McCain fess up and take responsibility for the worst assault on civil discourse in American history? When will he finally admit to crossing the line and inciting mob violence? How does one equate “Country First” with outright lying?

In this world, there is hardly one politician untouched by six degrees of separation. Somewhere, there will always be a questionable association - whether real or imagined. While the McCain-Palin campaign points a finger at Barack Obama, there are more than enough skeletons in McCain's closet to delight Wes Craven. These include Randy Scheunemann, G. Gordon Liddy, Charles Keating, former Senator Phil Gramm, and dozens of lobbyists and other shady characters too numerous to mention.

But wingnuts will read only what they want to read, hear only what they want to hear, and believe only what they want to believe because their minds are tighter than clams, and they are incapable of acquiring new knowledge or considering other viewpoints.

I grow tired of this post now.  Maybe I'll talk about these shady characters some other time. Meanwhile, your faithful, blue-blooded octopus is hungry.  Is that a tasty McMorsal I see crawling furtive under anemones?