We all recall John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and the swift-boating of his war hero status. As the grenades were tossed, Kerry offered up “Hope is on the Way.”
Over at Newsweek there’s this teaser set to go in the April 28, 2008 issue:
Obama: Can’t `Swift Boat’ Me – Mark Honsenball and Michael Isikoff.
The Obama campaign is planning to expand its research and rapid-response team in order to repel attacks it anticipates over his ties to 1960s radical Bill Ayers, indicted developer Antoin Rezko and other figures from his past. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, tells NEWSWEEK that the Illinois senator won’t let himself be “Swift Boated” like John Kerry in 2004.
“He’s not going to sit there and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the missiles are raining in,” Axelrod said. “I don’t think people should mistake civility for a willingness to deal with the challenges to come.”
The move appears to be an acknowledgment that the Obama campaign may not have moved aggressively enough when questions about Ayers and Rezko first arose, and it comes amid fresh indications that conservative groups are preparing a wave of attack ads over the links.
There’s nothing more hollow or damaging than guilt by association. Beware thy neighbor.
What of Rezko?
The connection has been so sifted:
Obama Bought His Home With No Rezko `Discount,’ Seller Affirms
Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) — The couple who sold Barack Obama his Chicago home said the Illinois senator’s $1.65 million bid “was the best offer” and they didn’t cut their asking price because a campaign donor bought their adjacent land, according to e-mails between Obama’s presidential campaign and the seller.
The Illinois senator has said he made a “boneheaded” move in involving contributor Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Chicago businessman, in the purchase of the property on June 15, 2005.
Rezko’s wife, Rita, also an Obama donor, bought the adjoining plot in Hyde Park from the couple, Fredric Wondisford and Sally Radovick, for the $625,000 asking price, the same day that Obama bought the house for $300,000 less than the asking price. Antoin Rezko was under federal investigation at the time.
Rezko was indicted on unrelated fraud charges 16 months later, in October 2006. Obama has since returned about $85,000 in campaign contributions made or raised by Rezko. Obama’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, has questioned Obama’s ties with Rezko.
The sellers hadn’t previously made their side of the story public out of concern for their privacy, according to Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama’s campaign. They approached Obama’s Senate office 15 months ago and agreed to break their silence now through the campaign out of concern that the story was being distorted in the media, Burton said.
Toured Property
Burton said Obama, 46, toured the property with Rezko for 15 to 30 minutes at some point before the purchase. Burton said Obama wanted Rezko’s opinion of the property because Rezko was a real-estate developer in the area. Burton said he didn’t know when the pre-sale tour occurred.
In my view the bleating of Rezko is an attempt to spin pig’s ear into a silk purse. After two years of investigative reporting, The Chicago-Tribune, wrote there’s nothing here.
Let’s take Ayers. Those over 55-65, baby boomers who came through the 60s/70s… the Vietnam era, will see this in a very different light.
In our society we do not believe in rehabilitation but in revision. Back in the 60-70s-80s anti-war militants of the Vietnam years and freedom fighters of the Reagan years are today relabeled Qaedy terrorists.
Olie North participated in illegal trade of guns, fueled a guerrilla war in Central America that did more damage and death than Ayers’ planting bombs in the Pentagon washroom.
I do not condone bombings or terrorists but we need to put everything in context.
How old was Obama when Ayers led the underground?
From The Chicago-Tribune: Mayor Richard Daley and friends of Ayers
Bill Ayers’ turbulent past contrasts with quiet academic life
Friends, Daley defend ex-radical, Obama neighbor
Bill Ayers long ago settled into a life of quiet respectability as a well-regarded professor of education and a much-published activist for better schools. With his Ivy League doctorate, 48-page curriculum vitae and liberal politics, he fits comfortably into Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood.
But Ayers’ unquiet past as a leader of the violent Weathermen during the Vietnam War has been thrust into the Democratic presidential race because of his relationship with a neighbor, Barack Obama.
In Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Obama was asked to defend his connection to Ayers, which has been fodder for conservative TV and radio talkers for weeks.
On Thursday, neighbors, friends and colleagues who know Ayers and the work he has done on behalf of educational reform in Chicago and nationally joined his defense.
“He’s been a valuable member of the community with regards to education. Helping young people,” said Mayor Richard Daley, who was also friends with Ayers’ father, Thomas, a civic activist and former chief executive officer of Commonwealth Edison.“Bill has contributed heavily to the quality of life not only in the city but in the entire world as well,” Daley said.
and Dave Lindorff – Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers
The pundits are having a heyday with Hillary Clinton’s sleazy McCarthyite attack on Barack Obama during the April 16 debate, trying to link him to the Weather Underground because of his having served on a charity organization board with one of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, who is currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, and who is married to Bernadine Dohrn, another Weather Underground veteran.
What has them in a lather is Ayer’s comment, made a few years ago, that he has no regrets for the organization’s having set off several bombs back in the early 1970s, and that in fact they “should have set of more.”
(Incidentally, as Robert Parry notes, those comments were made before 9-11, not, as Hillary Clinton charged duplicitously in the April 16 Philadelphia debate, right after 9-11.)
In fact, it’s important to remember that while three members of the Weather Underground died at their own hands because of a failed bomb they were constructing, no one else died at their hands. The group scrupulously worked to make sure that their attacks were on property, not people.
It’s also important to remember that they were targeting a government that was engaged in a criminal war against a peasant country half a world away, that had killed nearly two million Indochinese people, most of them civilians, and that was well on the way to pointlessly sending 58,000 American troops to their deaths.
The actions of the Weather Underground may have been misguided and quixotic, but they were not terrorists in the sense of trying to cause mass terror among the American public, in the way that Al Qaeda terrorists or other terror groups indiscriminately attack civilians. They were much more carefully targeting the levers of power, and in effect, trying to “bring the war home.”
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It’s not as if the Republicans and, especially candidate, McCain have no skeletons.
McCain has baggage: `The Keating Five’ and Vietnam.
Two days ago, McCain dropped his pledge to run a “respectable” campaign.
McCain’s campaign E-mail links Obama to Hamas.
All is fair game in politics. If McCain supporters have their sights on Obama, there are those who have their sights on McCain, and within his party too.
John Kerry was a war hero made controversial. Did he throw those medals? Brutal questions are raised over McCain `s Vietnam years at Counterpunch Magazine, in print and at their website, this weekend. Ouch.
War Hero? Meet the Real John McCain: North Vietnam’s Go-To Collaborator
“Hero” John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW? – Alexander Cockburn
John McCain’s been getting kid-glove treatment from the press for years, ever since he wriggled free of the Keating scandal and his profitable association – another collaboration, you might say — with the nation’s top bank swindler in the 1980s. But nothing equals the astounding tact with which his claque on the press bus avoids the topic of McCain’s collaborating with his Vietnamese captors after he’d been shot down.
How McCain behaved when he was a prisoner is key. McCain is probably the most unstable man ever to have got this close to the White House. He’s one election away from it. Republican senator Thad Cochrane has openly said he trembles at the thought of an unstable McCain in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Shall we count the last eight years – The GOP culture of corruption. The war crimes?
