As I write this, I am in Maine on vacation and have not been paying close attention to the news over the last week. But I saw some news last night that included several clips of McCain pressing the issue of Bill Ayers. He is defending a vicious\u00c2\u00a0automated call campaign that has a lot of people scratching their heads.\u00c2\u00a0 I heard about\u00c2\u00a0this on the local\u00c2\u00a0news in Bangor. A Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins, is urging McCain to stop the “robo” calls that say Obama has worked closely with a terrorist whose organization bombed the Pentagon and other federal buildings.<\/p>\n
McCain’s\u00c2\u00a0point is that it is important to get all the facts about Obama’s past associations. This is really bizarre. Nobody, especially John McCain, believes for a nanosecond that Obama as president would surround himself with terrorists. McCain strongly insinuates that Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers is closer than he will admit. Then he presses even harder suggesting that Obama wants to buddy up with America’s enemies instead of disposing of them.<\/p>\n
A\u00c2\u00a0big problem for McCain is that nobody\u00c2\u00a0is buying the\u00c2\u00a0assertions that are implied or stated in these insinuations\u00c2\u00a0except for the people who are already dead set against Obama and looking\u00c2\u00a0for any rock they can throw. Obama’s numbers have gone up since the ads came out suggesting that maybe McCain is getting hammered for so desperately grasping for straws.<\/p>\n
But the\u00c2\u00a0deal-killer for McCain is that in a pissing match of past associations, McCain has some major exposure\u00c2\u00a0from the last major financial crisis –\u00c2\u00a0involving the meltdown of major savings and\u00c2\u00a0loan organizations. A personal friend of McCain’s, Charles Keating, headed up a couple of the S&L corporations that failed and which\u00c2\u00a0Keating admitted to looting when failure was imminent. Keating was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy (his conviction was eventually overturned but he pled guilty to lesser charges and was sentenced to time served). Senator McCain\u00c2\u00a0made calls “asking”\u00c2\u00a0regulators to back off when investigations started\u00c2\u00a0homing in on Keating.\u00c2\u00a0He is on\u00c2\u00a0the record as admitting that the\u00c2\u00a0calls could have been interpreted as pressure on behalf of his friend. In response to\u00c2\u00a0a question from\u00c2\u00a0the press, Keating helpfully stated that he sure hoped that his campaign contributions influenced McCain and four other senators to apply pressure.<\/p>\n
McCain ultimately escaped\u00c2\u00a0censure from the Senate Ethics Committee\u00c2\u00a0but that does not vindicate his judgment. When McCain has been pressed about this, he has said, essentially, that those mistakes were in the past. But he has opened the door wide for a discussion about past mistakes in judgment. In fact, he is insisting on it and counting on it to stop the Obama juggernaut. So far, Obama has graciously (or calculatingly) absorbed the blows without retaliating on a personal level since releasing\u00c2\u00a0a viral video on the Keating association\u00c2\u00a0the first week of October. I have a feeling that if\u00c2\u00a0McCain pushes much harder, he will get exactly what he wishes for, except the part about it hurting Obama.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I write this, I am in Maine on vacation and have not been paying close attention to the news over the last week. But I saw some news last night that included several clips of McCain pressing the issue of Bill Ayers. He is defending a vicious\u00c2\u00a0automated call campaign that has a lot of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fiveminuteorator.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}