Government Dirt

by Maria Fotopoulos

There’s absolutely no doubt that the W, Cheney and Rovian (WCR) Principles 101 software has been completely downloaded into the pod that is known as Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.

This weekend, pod person Palin utilized the device of making an outrageous statement based on a perverse reading of the facts to disparage the opposition and force discussion on a nonissue in order to derail discussion on real issues. (Note that WCR software is system compatible with units that are loaded with Literal Bible Interpretation software.)

Palin stated that Barack Obama began his political career in the living room of a terrorist. She has repeated that message in other iterations, including that Obama is someone who “would pal around with, and work with, a former domestic terrorist” and Obama “pals around with terrorists” – terminology that is pure Palin, WCR-enhanced. There also was Palin’s statement in Colorado: “Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Palin’s references are to Bill Ayers, a ‘60s activist. As reported in Florida’s St. Petersburg Times (Sept. 30, 2008), Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground. That radical group claimed responsibility for bombings between 1970 and 1974, which kept Ayers and his wife on the run until surrendering in 1980. Charges against Ayers were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct, according to the newspaper.

Ayers now is a professor of education at the University of Illinois – Chicago.

Let’s repeat that. Ayers now teaches at a university.

Ayers “was instrumental in starting the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for which Obama was chairman,” according to the newspaper report, and “Ayers lives in Obama’s former state Senate district in Chicago” and “hosted a party for Obama early in his career and gave him a campaign donation.”

Yesterday, the AP reported that Palin’s statements about Ayers were “exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were ‘pals’ or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.”

Perhaps Palin also is unaware that there were thousands of radical activists in the 60s. Many people were more than a little upset about something called the Vietnam War, which left 58,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians dead. The American government lied to its citizens during this time and killed its own citizens (Kent State).

The Ayers-Obama relationship already went through the news cycle earlier this year – driven in no small part by Fox News, also known as the PR arm for the Bush Administration – and ultimately wound down to “no story here.” As well, Obama has denounced Ayers’ views from the Vietnam era. We should be done with this nonissue.

These weekend slurs are testament to Palin’s ignorance. If she truly believes that she’s raising a legitimate concern about terrorist ties here, she truly is ignorant. Of course, this would be most in line with the WCR stance of wearing ignorance as some sort of badge of honor. Go bubba!

More likely, though, she knows what a load this is, which makes her behavior, well, just not very nice for a “hockey mom.” Actually, this makes her an out-and-out liar who believes the White House can be won only on the backs of bubbas who buy in to such nonsense spun as “the truth.”

Can November come any quicker to be rid of this empty suit?