If Obama supporters are upset with the guilt-by-association paradigm, they’ve picked a funny way of showing it: holding John McCain and Sarah Palin accountable for every loose nut that shows up to bark a racial slur into a crowd of thousands. It is by now axiomatic on the Left that McCain is stoking racial and religious intolerance in a last ditch effort to save a spiraling campaign. The evidence for this? Two individuals who said hateful things in the audience of two campaign events.
While McCain tries to point to real concerns about associates and partners in Obama’s past–dangerous men who have played indispensable roles in Obama’s political biography, the Left is on fire over two men McCain and Palin likely never met. Yet, they claim it is McCain’s desperation that finds him reaching so improbably for bogeymen in Obama’s history.
In today’s Washington Post, novelist Khaled Hosseini steps it up a notch and baldly lies about the McCain camp’s response to speakers who invoked Barack Obama’s middle name at recent McCain rallies. “The real affront is the lack of firm response from either McCain or Palin,” Hosseini writes in the piece dated October 12. Meanwhile, on October 8, the AP reported the McCain campaign issued a denouncement by email and McCain spokesman Paul Lindsay said,
We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character and expeience that voters will base their decisions on this November.
Hossieni asks, “Is inaction tantamount to consent?” Good question. Should Americans interpret the years of Obama’s inaction while serving alongside a known terrorists in two different bodies as consent? Actually, we don’t have to bother with interpretation: Obama endorsed Bill Ayers book, so we know he’s a fan. Okay, should Americans interpret Obama’s inaction for two decades sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church as consent? Oh yeah, there again we know the answer: Obama told us he could not disown Wright. In Obama’s case, it’s nothing short of guilt-by-endorsement.
So, the question really needs to be put to the electorate. What might you be endorsing if you elect Barack Obama?
