Seeing as how the economic "crisis" has tanked McCain's poll numbers, his campaign has been forced to change the subject. (Obama helped out by taking the bailout off the table.) McCain's new direction: William Ayers, the Weathermen bomber who happens to live in the same neighborhood as Obama. (Naturally, the New York Times has eagerly jumped into the tank, as have the conservative C-SPAN callers I've heard.)
Why is knowing Ayers so bad? To quote John McCain, "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?"
It's a great question -- for John McCain. One of his senior foreign policy advisors (as we were reminded at length in the debates) is Henry Kissinger, the man who engaged in bombing innocent people in North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and anywhere else he could get Nixon to send bombers to.
The Weathermen bombed the FBI and the Pentagon, but tried to get everyone out of the building first so that no one was hurt. Kissinger, on the other hand, took the bombs straight to people's houses. And thanks to Nixon's fetish for taping everything, we actually have Kissinger's exact orders: "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flys on anything that moves. You got that?"
Why isn't Kissinger in jail for genocide? After all, it's pretty rare you have tape recordings of mass murderers issuing their orders. But, of course, Kissinger isn't a public enemy -- he's a powerful, well-connected person, so Interpol has refused demands to arrest or detain him, no matter how strong the evidence.
And why is Ayers a Chicago professor instead of behind bars? After all, you'd think the least our government could do was arrest a confessed terrorist. But no, the FBI spent all their time doing infiltration and illegal wiretapping instead of real policework, so all their cases got thrown out of court. (I guess this is why Bush refuses to have his terrorist trials in real courts.)
If John McCain wants to make this campaign about Obama living down the street from a political activist, someone ought to point out how he's being advised by a genocidal maniac.
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