Palling Around With Keating
So, over the weekend Sarah Palin accused Obama of palling around with terrorists in a last-ditch effort to reverse the McCain camp’s fall in the polls, and McCain’s people promise to get “tougher” on Obama.
In response, the Obama people turn to the Keating Five:
How many years have we suffered through Republicans tarring Democrats as unpatriotic traitors? Yes Virginia, 50% of the country, and a good deal of our public servants are — according to the Republican Party — country-hating turncoats. And when you get down in the polls, the only thing you can do is take the Joe McCarthy approach and smear anyone who disagrees with you as not just wrong, but evil.
There’s been a lot of talk that Keating should be off limits, and Obama largely held his fire on that score for the duration of the campaign. But if someone is going to spread lies and guilt by association, particularly as tenuous as Obama’s non-association with William Ayers, then McCain’s darkest moment is now fair game. McCain did take bribes from Charles Keating and vacationed at his Bahamas estate, and he did give the man legislation that would help his business. That legislation eventually led to the S&L collapse.
One wonders if the Republican classic (”Barack Osama is a America-hating terrorist!”) will resonate as much as the honest fact that John McCain has for the duration of his career been a proponent of the kind of deregulation that led to our current economic fiasco. And nothing better describes this than his relationship with the criminal Charles Keating.
McCain decided to go as dark and negative as he could, and his people should have anticipated this. I suspect that the Keating Five will resonate a lot better than what the McCain camp is slinging.
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By James DiBenedetto, October 6, 2008 @ 6:57 am
Here’s a response on the Keating issue:
http://www.slate.com/id/1004633/
The conclusion:
“The Senate Ethics Committee probe of the Keating Five began in November 1990, and committee Special Counsel Robert Bennett recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation. They were not. McCain believes Democrats on the committee blocked Bennett’s recommendation because he was the lone Keating Five Republican.
In February 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found McCain and Glenn to be the least blameworthy of the five senators. (McCain and Glenn attended the meetings but did nothing else to influence the regulators.) McCain was guilty of nothing more than “poor judgment,” the committee said, and declared his actions were not “improper nor attended with gross negligence.” McCain considered the committee’s judgment to be “full exoneration,” and he contributed $112,000 (the amount raised for him by Keating) to the U.S. Treasury.”
I’d argue that the Bill Ayers associaton matters for Obama (well,it matters to me, at any rate) because it displays a fundamental facet of Obama’s character. Bill Ayers declared war on this country (in his own words) and has NEVER apologized for it or changed his views. He should have, for his activities during the 60’s/70’s and because of his refusal to apologize for them, been shunned from decent society forever. He has not been.
Obama’s working on the board of an education reform effort with him, or holding a fundraiser at his home, or even just “being a guy in the same neighborhood” with him, is, to me, EXACTLY the same as if McCain held a fundraiser at Tim McVeigh’s home, or worked on the board of an organization with the Unabomber, or talked of Eric Rudolph as “just a guy in the neighborhood”. Those things would all be unacceptable to me (and, I’d guess) to you as well.
I don’t think Obama is a terrorist because he’s worked on a board with Bill Ayers or becamse friends with him because their kids go to the same school. I DO think it’s hugely damning that Obama apparently sees nothing wrong with associating with a man like Ayers who’s never renounced his terrorist, treasonous (literally; declaring war against your own country pretty fits the definition, if anything does) past.