NYT:
Senator John McCain on Sunday sharply criticized one of Senator Barack Obama’s supporters, a former member of the Weather Underground, as an "unrepentant terrorist" and called on Mr. Obama to condemn remarks by the supporter expressing regret that his group did not conduct more bombings in the United States in the 1970s.
This man has lost his marbles. Obama's crime here is serving on the board of an anti-poverty organization. Why? Because another person on that board was a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose philanthropy is shared by his wife's directorship at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. These community members hosted what guests call an "unremarkable gathering" where a state Senator identified Obama as her successor. And why is this so wrong? Because when Barack Obama was eight years old and on a completely separate continent, the couple in question engaged in violent radicalism that Obama has repeatedly denounced, rejected, and done other synonyms for denounced and rejected.
How dare Obama serve on that charity? How dare he go to an event with a state senator?
Perhaps McCain just forgot the repeated rejecting and denouncing, and wants to hear it again. Or perhaps McCain's "everybody is al-Qaeda" fantasies extend to brown people in general. Or maybe he thinks that while he can happily lead a bigot parade of anti-Semitic, Holocaust-revising, anti-Catholic, homophobic and racist supporters, it is wrong for a Democrat to have ever known a former radical. Here are the words of McCain's most prized endorser, John Hagee, regarding Jews and the Holocaust:
It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day ... Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come ... It rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people."
— "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To War", paperback edition, pp. 92-93
No one could see the horror of the Holocaust coming, but the force and fear of Hitler's Nazis drove the Jewish people back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have — Israel ... I am stricken with awe and wonder at his boundless love for Israel and the Jewish people.
— Ibid., p. 133
Yes, and slavery strikes me with awe of God's boundless love for black people. No, wait, that's Pat Buchanan who thinks that.