Associated Nonsense

The McCain campaign, falling further behind by the minute, is escalating its attacks on Senator Obama's "associations." McCain's argument here is that Obama has associated with people who are hostile to the United States or hold otherwise objectionable views, and thus is somehow guilty of the same misdeeds and hostile attitudes.

I happen to think the argument is specious. But we are blessed to live in a free country. So, let's say you believe it. It follows that McCain and Palin should be subject to the same kind of examination and guilt by association. So, what about Palin's connections to the Alaska Independence Party, which has advocated violent secession from the United States? Here's a quick rundown: 

• Palin and her husband were once members of the party, whose founder, Joe Vogler, has said he hates the US government and in 1983 convinced the government of Iran to use its United Nations membership to give him a forum for urging the UN to support Alaska's secession from the US. Todd Palin belonged to the AIP for seven years. 

• Palin helped engineer her election as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, through the support of a local member of the AIP whose nickname around town was "Black Helicopter Steve" because of the cache of weapons he kept to stave off U.S. troops, whom he was convinced would strike at any moment to impose the dreaded "New World Order." 

• After being elected Mayor, Palin appointed Black Helicopter Steve to the city council. 

• As a gubernatorial candidate in 2006, Palin appeared at the AIP state convention.

• Palin ended a videotaped address to the AIP earlier this year by saying "keep up the good work, and God bless you." 

Now let's turn to some of Senator McCain's associations. In 1987 he tried to persuade federal regulators to lay off his pal Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan, which collapsed two years later amid a tsunami of bad loans, costing taxpayers $3 billion, bankrupting untold widows and orphans and helping trigger the wider savings-and-loan bailout that cost you and me $125 billion.

Senator McNasty also served on the board of the US Council for World Freedom. One of this group's particularly paranoid anti-Semitic members in 1985 accused Jews of milking the Holocaust for sympathy and has suggested that a small coterie of Jewish financiers and business leaders control the entire world. 

The McCain-Palin ticket's associations arguably make them look a lot more anti-American than do Obama's. 

To me their rhetoric feels a lot like people who stridently oppose keeping abortion legal because of their "respect for life" yet feel no compunction whatsoever at extinguishing life via the death penalty or preemptively invading a sovereign nation that did us no harm and killing tens of thousands of its citizens. They're not pro-life, they're pro-some-lives-over-other-lives. McCain and Palin are being just as hypocritical by dwelling almost constantly in their campaign appearances on the supposed ghosts in Obama's attic. Somewhere George Orwell is having a good chuckle.  

I can't wait to see what happens if McCain is man enough to bring up all this nonsense in Wednesday's debate.