Wednesday, October 15, 2008

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?

8 comments:

  1. Now that I've wiped up the keyboard, I have to recall Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Setting smug Sarah Palin loose on the public without strict supervision may just have demolished his campaign.

    You're absolutely right about the 6 degrees of separation and it fact it is a smaller number for anyone involved in civic affairs. They're all met and worked with each other at least one time. In fact, and I've mentioned it before, I met Ayer's wife Bernardine in 1968. I've met a number of governors, senators and presidential candidates of whom I don't approve, but I suppose I could be accused of "palling around" by such a wit as Palin. In fact, my wife shook hands with George Bush and we both despise him.

    I've never blown up anything other than the odd firecracker on the 4th.

    But it's going to be very hard for the old man to explain why he hired the man who lobbied against sanctions on behalf of Saddam Hussein to head his transition team.

    Is he going to rue every instance where his coven has used the name Hussein against Barak Obama?

    I sure as hell hope so.

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  2. Fogg: I met Ayer's wife Bernardine in 1968. I've met a number of governors, senators and presidential candidates of whom I don't approve

    Lucky you! All I ever get a chance to meet are puffer fish and greasy McCain supporters.

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  3. Yes, the Ayers issue is so transparently stupid that it's hard not to wish McCain would make it the basis for the rest of his campaign. Sure, Obama probably downplayed his loose connection to the fellow, but the story has no legs, as reporters say. Unless Ayers and Obama ran a bomb-making factory together, there's nowhere for such a story to go. So by all means, bring it up and on, JMac. But I'm guessing that the hint about bringing up Ayers is a bit of a psych-op: McCain may mention something, but I'm not too sure it will be Ayers, or Ayers alone. No element of surprise there.

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  4. bringing up Ayers is a bit of a psych-op: McCain may mention something, but I'm not too sure it will be Ayers, or Ayers alone

    This is my suspicion too, like using the word "elitist" as a code word for "uppity," and the so-called Bradley effect that trades on "not-one-of-us" words to disguise hidden racism. Here is the diabolical part: you can accuse the McCain people of doing this, and it makes sense to us, but it has that element of plausible deniability.

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  5. Agreed. McCain is between a rock and hard place: he probably has to say something about Ayers or Wright or whomever to keep his knucklehead base from giving up on him--remember that guy at the event insisting that he's mad and wants McCain to go after Obama on personal stuff?--but if he makes personal attacks, undecideds and independents think he's a complete jerk. So he loses on the transaction either way.

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  6. Well, I think he made the same ass of himself he usually does, with the same old "but the public needs to know" when all the facts are long since presented and verified.

    He goes on talking about fines when there are no fines, he thinks a mother's life isn't worth saving if it requires an abortion because the definition is "often stretched" and last of all, he tries to dismiss the better debater, the one with facts on his side for being "eloquent."

    He sure as hell didn't look presidential. He looked like a salesman who knows he's probably not going to make that sale.

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