McCain Campaign Refuses To Address Palin Lies About Obama "Palling Around With Terrorists"

CNN bends so far over backwards to present all sides, that they often-- very often-- will state completely made up propaganda from the GOP and give it an equal footing to objective reality. It's part of the reason I bade my longtime station adieu and migrated to MSNBC earlier this year. But today CNN did yeoman's work in debunking the Lipsticked Pitbull's latest Obama smear, the Bill Ayer's nonsense. Keep in mind that Obama was 8 years old when Ayer's was a member of the Weather Underground and that he long ago denounced Ayers' violence.

Ace McCain, of course, is too chickenshit to repeat this whopper himself so he sends the hapless Mooselini of Wasilla out to repeat it while he hides away in one of his dozen homes and refuses to respond to questions from the press about why his campaign is rolling around in the gutter after promising the nation not to. Palin should still be in her remedial campaign classes learning basic geography so she stops mixing up Afghanistan and Mexico instead of running around the country spreading her lies, poisonous racism and divisiveness on behalf of Senator Chickenshit's increasingly hopeless and desperate campaign to capture the White House.

Harold Meyerson makes a good point in tomorrow's Washington Post about McCain's new all-negative all the time campaign strategy:

... [I]f the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has called Gramm one of his leading economic counselors and has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become McCain's Treasury secretary if he's elected.

CNN hoping viewers want to see the actual truth about Palin's lies and smears:



UPDATE: AND WHAT ABOUT PALIN'S PALLING AROUND WITH SECESSIONISTS?

The McCain campaign, through their happy fool Palin, has accused Obama, who was 8 years old when Bill Ayers was a Weatherman, of "palling around with terrorists. McCain himself actually has palled around with terrorists-- right wing kooks and criminals like G. Gordon Liddy-- and Palin more than palled around with terrorists; she has been heavily involved with a militia group and even married one! Would she and McCain pardon Terry Nichols, the right-wing Oklahoma City bomber? He has the same world view they do. Dave Neiwert brings up a great point at Orcinus this morning: Palin is throwing stones from a glass house.

Notably, she nominated one of her local militiamen/John Birch Society types in Wasilla to serve on the city's planning board. This is a big deal to "Patriot" folks, who consider local planning and zoning ordinances to be among the chief signs of creeping socialism, and fight them tooth and nail. Had the Wasilla Council not balked at her nomination, the man no doubt would have wreaked havoc with the city's planning laws and their enforcement.

She also fired the city's museum director at the behest of this character.

And then there were Palin's notable and extended dalliances with the radical secessionist Alaskan Independence Party. In 1992, its members largely supported former militiaman James "Bo" Gritz for president. It has over the years been associated with promoting paranoid "New World Order" conspiracy theories.