McCAIN FINDS HIS INNER JOE . . . McCARTHY, THAT IS

McCAIN FINDS HIS INNER JOE . . . McCARTHY, THAT IS 

He can't talk about the economy. It is tanking. He can't talk about "victory" in Iraq. Even the Generals on the ground won't use the word. He can't talk about his running mate. On that subject, everyone is talking about Tina Fey . . . or Katie Couric . . . or the backyard theory of foreign policy experience (if you can see a foreign country from your backyard, you have foreign policy experience). 

So now John McCain and his Veep to be have dusted off a leaf from Joe McCarthy's old playbook. They are smearing Obama as someone who "pals around with terrorists," in this case the aged but erstwhile Weatherman from the days of rage, Bill Ayers. 

The Weathermen were bad people and Bill Ayers, circa 1968, was a very bad guy. Bombs blew up. People died. Some, like Kathy Boudin, went to jail. And belonged there. Since then, Ayers has apparently reformed and become a professor of education, consulted by, of all people, the first Mayor Daley's (no friend of '60s radical's) son, the current Chicago Mayor. In that guise, Ayers happens to have been on a board on which Obama, for a time, also sat. The board helped distribute money donated by the Annenbergs, Reagan lovers to a man (and woman) who apparently had no trouble with the fact that this particular ex-Weatherman was on the board. 

But all that is not good enough for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Apparently, Barack has consorted with a domestic terrorist and should therefore lose the election, now less than thirty days away. 

The philosopher George Santayana once said that "Those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." Would that were true. John McCain has studied enough history to now know very well that he is repeating it. And the history he is repeating has an ugly name. 

It is Joe McCarthy. 

In the '50s, McCarthy terrorized America's political discourse and politicians with his wild charges that everyone from the Chief of Staff of the Army to unnamed State Department employees to General Marshall was either a closet Communist or was coddling those who were. He eventually blew himself up on television (both with Edward R. Murrow's assistance, and all on his own in the famous Army/McCarthy hearings, where a nebishy Boston lawyer appropriately asked whether he had any sense of decency; as it turned out, he didn't). Not, however, before he had ruined more than a few lives, on his way to ruining his inebriated own. 

It is therefore more than a little sad that John McCain is now channeling his inner Joe McCarthy. And that his friends are not calling him on it. 

McCain's charge is as ludicrous as were McCarthy's, in fact even more so. Barack Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were active. He has condemned their actions (as have we all). He did not put Ayers on any board. He doesn't "pal around" with Ayers. Whether Ayers is entitled to rehabilitate himself is a separate question, but it generally is the American way. Whether Ayers is still an extremist is also a separate question. But the answer is irrelevant to Obama's qualifications to be President, just as S & L swindler Charles Keating's subsequent rehabilitation is irrelevant to McCain's. In fact, the Keating case is more problematic for McCain than the Ayers case is for Obama. Unlike the eight year old Obama at school in Indonesia, McCain actually tried to help Keating by going to authorities and asking about their on-going investigation. The Arizona Senator was later reprimanded by the Senate for doing so and has said this was the low point of his career. 

But here's the bad news. 

McCain just went lower. 

And so have his supporters. 

I haven't heard anything from Joe Lieberman on this issue. One would think a "conscience of the Senate" quick to point out the moral failings of Bill Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal would have taken to the podium to upbraid his man on the illegitimacy of trotting out McCarthyesque smears. Maybe Lieberman will get around to saying something. But he should know that, when it comes to McCarthyism and the evil it creates, sooner is always better than later. 

The silence of Bush and Cheney also has been deafening. Ditto, that of the right wing radio echo chamber. I do not expect any of them to criticize McCain. Bush himself was silent as his seconds smeared McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary with charges of fathering an illegitimate child. And Limbaugh et al. have been chomping at the bit for some time to smear Obama, and will gleefully do so from now until election day. 

The old John McCain would never truck with this sort of despicable gutter politics. In fact, he viscerally and aggressively deplored it. 

But that was then. 

And this is now. 

Johnny, we hardly knew ye.