Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202-863-8500.
It's worth pointing out that during the 2000 Republican primary, McCain, coming off a major victory in the New Hampshire victory, seemed poised to steamroll through the crucial early primaries and lock up his party's nomination. But something happened on the way to the next primary, which was in South Carolina. A then little-known man named Karl Rove, chief campaign strategist for Texas Governor George W. Bush, flooded South Carolina with robocalls about Cindy McCain's addiction to prescription medication and implying that the McCains' adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually John McCain's illegitimate inter-racial child fathered by a black woman. Bush went on to win the SC primary and the party's nomination before ultimately winning the presidency by a final vote of 5-4 in the Supreme Court. McCain decried robocalls as hateful smear tactics. Indeed, just nine months ago his campaign manager Steve Schmidt denounced the practice. Apparently, they've changed their tune.
Sources:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/mccain-robo-calls-critical-of-obama/
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/flashback_mccain_condemned_rob.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/17/report-mccain-using-same_n_135699.html
3 comments:
"Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country."
I guess the difference is that this robocall is both substantively true and germane to the campaign.
I guess it depends on how elastic you're willing to be about "substantive truth".
"Has worked closely with"?
"Democracts will enact an extreme leftist agenda"?
"Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country"?
Yeah, I guess I can see where this is all pretty objective and leaves no room for misinterpretation. Of course, using these standards for substantive truth, McCain really does have a daughter 'out of wedlock', and that daughter's mother is a woman of color.
And now that he's placing these calls, we could add to the list:
* hypocrite (decries robocalls then uses them),
* liar (says he doesn't care about Ayers then uses Ayers to portray Obama as a terrorist),
* coward (won't say this in public anymore),
* manipulative (care to make the case against this one?),
* manipulated (even his GOP friends say this is not the John McCain they knew even six months ago, before he sold his soul to the team who blew him up in SC 8 years ago),
* erratic (see previous points),
* desperate, demagogic, and divisive (qualities one often finds in extremists and terrorists).
All to say, I couldn't agree more with you about the fact that these calls definitely speak to the character, associations, values and agenda of a candidate... just not the one the script mentions.
"Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda"
and
"Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country"
are bits of political flummery, I may believe them to be true, you may not. We may array our facts and debate those two points but I don't think that you would disagree that such accusations are at all foreign or out of place to a political campaign. What I was referring to, and what you really seem to take umbrage at, is any mention of Obama's close relationship to William Ayers.
Senator McCain's full quote on that "old washed up terrorist" taken from the Washington post is as follows:"Mr. Ayers -- I don't care about an old washed-up terrorist, but as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship," he ventured. "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."
After a detailed defense by Obama, McCain pressed one more time. "You and Mr. Ayers, together, you sent $230,000 to ACORN," he charged. "And you launched your political campaign in Mr. Ayers's living room. . . . Senator Obama chooses to associate with a guy who in 2001 said that he wished he had have bombed more, and he had a long association with him. It's the fact that all the -- all of the details need to be known about Senator Obama's relationship with them and with ACORN and the American people will make a judgment."
That he "worked closely with Ayers" seems difficult to dispute. Obama was helped at many stages by Ayers. Ayers got him chairmanship of The Annenberg Challenge, unusual it seems for a young lawyer and Obama launched his political career at Ayers home. That he had to deny and denounce this association, as he did with Rev. Wright, Acorn, Rezko, and others, combined with his paltry legislative record would indicate to me a justified need into examining his past relationship in hopes of shedding some light on his future plans and his character. It is difficult for me to understand why his relationship to Ayers is off limits. It is equally difficult for me to understand why drawing attention to this relationship could be compared to calling McCain’s wife a drug addict and suggesting that he fathered a inter-racial child out of wedlock. Isn’t there an order of magnitude of difference between the two political ads?
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