Liddy and McCain

In its increasingly desperate attempt to prevent the landslide that is about to come down on their tiny heads, the McCain campaign continues to plume the alleged depths of Barack Obama’s past associations. Although McCain himself and the ridiculous Sarah Palin have dropped the topic from their stump speech (Palin hilariously substituting tributes to whatever "pro-American" part of the country she happens to be visiting), Obama’s mild and long-severed acquaintance with education activist Bill Ayers in Chicago continues to be, as Obama rightly pointed out in his third victorious debate performance, the "centerpiece" of the McCain campaign.

In a suitably ironic use of dark resources, McCain has hired the same firm that the Bushies used to slander him in 2000 to send out millions of robo-calls to voters, warning of the Ayers connection and the unknown dangers thereof. Since recent polls show that such negative messages only injure McCain, it is hard to figure out what they hope to accomplish by this. Besdies, automated phone calls don’t have nearly the impact they did back at the turn of the millennium. People are much more sophisticated about unsolicited phone calls coming in – from just not answering to hanging up the moment they figure out that the conversation is, by nature, one-sided. Heck, I do it with people I'm agreeing with.

But, at least it looks like they're doing something in their lost cause. Perhaps they are trying to take the edge off of the angry mobs who were threatening to grab their torches and pitchforks and take over the campaign just last week. The last time that happened, local radio clown J.T. Harris shamefully "begged" McCain to take it to his African-American brother, and thus began his mercifully brief stint as a national laughing stock and local embarrassment. If you haven’t seen the pitiful scene he made on CNN early this week – pulling off his earpiece and lurching off-screen when he was mildly challenged by an actually thoughtful black conservative – you owe it to yourself to watch how lame and vacant Harris really is. Besides, times are tough – you need a good laugh.

The Ayers talking-points have served only to hurt John McCain. The Obama campaign has been very kind by not dragging up much of McCain’s bad buddy choices through the years, all of which were much more intimate, involved and corrupting. His close friendship with S&L criminal Charles Keating – who provided McCain with free airplanes and vacations, not to mention $112,000 in political contributions – is only part of the story. It took David Letterman, of all people, to confront McCain about his continuing relationship with unrepentant Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy.

In many ways, Liddy was worse than any of the Watergate actors – except maybe Richard Nixon himself. It was Liddy that came up with the plot to wire the DNC, as well as other bright ideas such as burglarizing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (done) and kidnaping anti-war protesters and shipping them to Mexico (not done – drat! Even Nixon wimped out on some stuff). In other words, Liddy was an unapologetic actor in the biggest threat to our Constitution in our nation’s history.

Since he got released after five years of his twenty year sentence by the too-kind Jimmy Carter, Liddy has been the poster boy for unrepentant thugs, from Ollie North to Karl Rove. After the Branch Dividians set fire to their compound and killed their children at Waco in 1994, the charming Liddy suggested that "if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

"He paid his debt, he went to prison, he paid his debt," said McCain on Letterman, which is only one-fourth true as far as the prison is concerned and not at all true regarding his debt to society. People who subvert the Constitution and try to come up with creative and violent ways to serve a criminal president have a bit more of a "debt" to pay than making things worse by bragging about what he got away with. Liddy was a pioneer in the hyper-macho "I'm glad I broke the law" right-wing punk ethic.

G. Gordon Liddy did far more to threaten the very fabric of our government than Bill Ayers ever did. At least Ayers tried to make amends by becoming a positive person in the Chicago educational community. Libby continues to be proudly criminal and unconstructive, who will continue trading on his idiocy as long as ignorant people buy his books, listen to his quack radio show and enlist his services (for Sarah Palin in Alaska, no less). It reflects on McCain that he continues to associate with such people, but, hey -- he's a Republican. If you run in those circles, punks like Liddy is about what you get.