The Last Month of Dirt, aka What Will Stick?

By: Jet Peterson

Now that we have reached the last month of the campaign season, the mud-slinging is increased.  The old claims and the old relations are being dug up to create a guilt by association. Barack Obama has been in associations with the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. John McCain has associations with Keating. Both are old relations with loose validity and both are being used to create an association to the candidate and the bad guy.  John McCain is being associated with financial corruption and the down fall of the financial system currently. Barack Obama is being associated with domestic terrorism and the dangers in the world. These are the last efforts to go to our deepest fears, and that the candidates are the demons that are ruining our fears.  The only thing that we can actually do is be rational and pick out what we really want out of a candidate, not what they’ve done in the past or who they have met with.  This is not a time for fear mongering but for deep discussion on who we want to lead the country for the next 4 years. The following are the videos each campaign has been slinging at each other with hopes that they will stick and scare us into voting the other way.  Its important to evaluate each of them, but not be stuck in the rhetoric 

The Obama campaign put out the following video describing the relation of John McCain with Charles Keating.

Here is CNN’s truth squad giving its fact checking on the video and the overall campaign opinion on it. It found that overall the Obama campaign was truthful in describing McCain’s involvement in the Keating scandal of the 1980’s.

It is fair to note that John McCain was involved only slightly, and was accquited of any illegal activity, and was only repramanded for his poor judgement on pushing that legislation that held back the regulations on the Savings and Loan group. 

Here is the video of the American Issues Committee defining Obama’s relationship with Ayers, and Ayers’ involvement in terrorism.

Here is CNN’s Truth squad giving its evaluation on Obama and his involvement with Ayers or the actions that Ayers took place in. They found that the claims were false.

Fox News presented another count of his involvement with Ayers in the Chicago School group.  It shows more clearly what happened with Obama and Ayers in that group, and how they are related. Here is that video on Fox with Stanley Kurtz.

Its fair to note that the relationship that Ayers and Obama has is mostly political due to the highly left politics in South Chicago.  Left politics in South Chicago is far left, and the machine is focused on Ayers and Wright. 

The last bit of bad past relationships that are being dragged up is the relationships of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. Here is the Special Comment by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Keith brings up Sarah Palin’s association with the Alaskan Independence party, and a guest Minister at her Alaskan church known for leading a Witch Hunt in Kenya.

This kind of mud-slinging will only worsen politics for this last month before election day. When these sort of ideas are dug up just to deface the opponent it only hurts us as citizens that will live under this individual for four years. Making it so that we can’t trust out leaders doesn’t do anything to help us when they are elected. In crises trust is needed in our leaders not finger pointing and over developed allegations. So I am hoping that Americans will look past all of the dirt and elect the next president not on the dirt, but on actual beliefs that the person they picked is the person that is best for America.

McCain’s “Swift Boat” won’t float

by Kiley Larsen

I’m not going to go as far as former Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson and say this thing is over, (I am a lifelong Red Sox fan after all, think 2004 ALCS!) but the McCain campaign looks downright desperate right now. We all know that the “Swift Boat” ads from 2004 pretty much single-handedly killed Kerry’s campaign, but in these rough times, small ball politics are not going to win an election.

This election’s “Swift Boat” has turned out to be Bill Ayers, former “terrorist” and now respected professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As co-founder of the Weather Underground organization, he participated like many others in the late 60’s, in radical movements (blowing up empty buildings), but has turned into a powerful community member who pushes education.

Now Sean Hannity is playing right along with this, and in an effort to counter the propaganda, John K. Wilson of The Huffington Post has posted 30 lies about the association of Obama and Ayers. Here is just a sampling of what he found:

LIE: “My view is that the community organizer was really a sham event. Bill Ayers was testing him.”(Andy Martin, Hannity’s America, October 5, 2008, “Obama and His Friends: History of Radicalism”)
TRUTH: Bill Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s community organizing job. It’s pure lunacy to imagine that Ayers was “testing” Obama.

LIE: “They live half a mile from William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist” and “Just a half a mile from those homes is Louis Farrakhan.”(Hannity’s America, October 5, 2008, “Obama and His Friends: History of Radicalism”)
TRUTH: It’s true, of course, that Obama lives in this same neighborhood, as do tens of thousands of other people who presumably are also guilty by geographical association. The logic of this argument would be, if you live half a mile from a sex offender, then you agree with child molesters.

LIE: “Bill Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist.”
TRUTH: Bill Ayers is not, and apparently never was, a terrorist. The conventional definition of a terrorist is someone who tries to kill innocent people for political purposes. As Factcheck.org noted, In fact, nobody died as a result of bombings in which Ayers said he participated as part of the Weather Underground. (Factcheck.org)

LIE: “Obama is hanging around with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. By the way, Bill Ayers advertised himself as being a communist with a small c just when he was beginning to
partner with Obama on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. (Stanley Kurtz, Hudson Institute, Washington DC, October 1, 2008)
TRUTH: Contrary to this McCarthyist attack, there’s no evidence that Obama ever knew that Ayers supposedly called himself a communist, nor is that a good reason for Obama to end his work on school reform and charitable activities.

When Wilson says McCarthyist attack, he hits the nail on the head. The McCain/Palin campaign, is full of this accusation with no fact fluff. If this was just another election, people might fall for it, but the real issues are much more important than apparent associations with people who are viewed as unconventional. This may round off things a bit for McCain but is by no means going to change his fortunes.