A lot has already been said about Colin Powell’s endorsement. What struck me is how incoherent his case against McCain was, and nowhere more so than in the disgust he expressed at McCain’s campaign tactics. He decried the suggestion that “because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted.” He claimed that by raising the Ayers issue the McCain campaign “goes too far.” Yet in the very next breath, literally, he engaged in exactly the type of innuendo that was just denouncing:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” …. I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”

Note that he never claimed that McCain himself has engaged in such nasty insinuations about Obama. In fact McCain has always disavowed anyone who has even dared to publicly mention Obama’s middle name (“Hussein”). So punctilious is McCain about avoiding any hint of racial animus that he has ignored the perfectly legitimate issue of Obama’s long-time association with the odious Rev. Wright. Powell admitted, “John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know.” Nevertheless he tarred him by association because a few yahoos who don’t represent McCain or his campaign have engaged in smear tactics against Obama. Talk about accusations that “go too far.”