Last January, when some blogger was still undecided as to who, among the Democratic candidates, would get his vote in the New York primary in March, asked a question about how much it mattered that one or other other candidate was running a dirty campaign. It would not matter, it seemed, if the "dirty" candidate was so much better than the one being attacked.
That question was, of course, a false syllogism. The dirty campaign is always, as certainly applies here, the last refuge not only of the scoundrel, but of the loser.
The American master of filth, at least in recent memory, was, of course, Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose "recklessness" as Joseph Welch famously described it, reached its peak when it was McCarthy himself under attack. The Rove (spiritual "son" of Lee Atwater)-inspired whispering campaign against Senator McCain's sanity---the suggestion that he might even be a real-life Manchurian candidate, and that he was father of a black child (a deceptive attack against a family which adopted a child), came after Sen McCain beat Gov Bush in the 200 NH primary.
So now we have the Bill Ayers thing---the old Joe McCarthy trick of throwing stones at people based not on their own opinions but of those with whom they have "associated".
[A belated postscript: I have seen the McCarthy-Welch encounter referenced above a thousand times, and thought that pasting it in this diary was too much, since it is a bit long. Then I watched it again. Think of what Gov Palin said yesterday and watch this, and tell me how what she did is different than what McCarthy tried to do here:
Gov Palin says she got her information from the New York Times which she says with a tongue in that cheeky cheek of hers, is almost never wrong, but she did not read the whole articleapparently. In fact, she missed the sixth paragraph, which flatly reported:
the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.
This is what the next few weeks will be all about. And it is a disgrace, one which decent men and women need to speak up against, in the way they did not against Senator McCarthy (until he was toast), not against Governor Bush (who, ahem, won the primary and got close enough to steal the election).
This is a good start from the Obama campaign, but I am waiting for a "no sense of decency" line:
And, finally, to defend the idiot blogger who asked the question at the top of this diary, it is worth quoting the basis on which he finally decided to support Senator Obama int he primary, which suggests how the undecided may view the sleaziness today:
[Senator Clinton's] campaign...has bordered on the scurrilous. It has featured extremely harsh rhetoric ... and deliberate attempts to twist reasonable statements into ridiculous ones, so as to make it easier to rebut them. [T]he differences in the Clinton and Obama campaigns is about the past at war with the future. The past is important–history is important, and it is unnecessary to quote the many bromides which make that case. But a replay of the culture wars of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is not only the wrong way to go, it is irrelevant in a new age where so many of our ancient prejudices seem to be on the precipice of the complete rejection they have so long deserved.