‘Smear!” “Guilt by association!” “Politics of fear!” The Obama campaign has its cue cards at the ready whenever any of us right-wing demagogues has the temerity to suggest it might be relevant that a candidate for president is a friend of — is a business partner of, is simpatico with — a died-in-the-wool, America-hating terrorist.
The campaign doth protest too much. The sheer thuggery in their reaction to patently relevant questions about Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers, raised by the intrepid Stanley Kurtz and the American Issues Project, betrays their candidate’s panicked self-awareness. Of course it’s relevant. Compound an era of terrorist threat with the Democrats’ decision to nominate a walking, speechifying tabula rasa and what could be more relevant?
Republicans are flabbergasted that Democrats could nominate such a man. Honest Democrats shut their eyes and quake at their party’s roll of the dice — one that could very well elect John McCain in a year when Democrats should be running the table. No one is happy.
And you know why?
Here’s the dirty little secret: You can thank Bill Clinton and his co-president.
For all Bill’s whining about Obama playing the race-card, for all the armchair psychoanalyses of Hillary campaign infighting and mismanagement, the Clintons and all the rest of us should know that Hillary — not Barack Obama — would be the Democrats’ Anointed One today were it not for a single, solitary, gut-check issue.
Terrorism.
I’m not talking about the Clinton administration’s feckless response to al Qaeda. Sure, I could be. But Hillary could have ridden that out. After all, no one seriously thinks Obama would be any better on that score.
No, Barack Obama is the Democrats’ nominee because Bill and Hillary Clinton, reputed geniuses, are short-sighted Hedonists, so self-aborbed, so intoxicated by their craving of the moment, that they can’t plan for the fix they’ll need five moments from the moment.
In 1999, Hillary Clinton — feminist champion whose claim to fame was riding her more politically gifted husband’s coattails — was scheming a run for the legendary Pat Moynihan’s U.S. senate seat. Rudy Giuliani, New York City’s fabulously successful but then-reeling Republican mayor, loomed as a potential opponent. Rudy would eventually drop out, but the Clintons couldn’t resist: Despite a terrorist onslaught that had just claimed over 200 innocent lives in Kenya and Tanzania, the Clintons decided Hillary’s prospects could be advanced if Bill pardoned terrorists.
To appease Democrat activists, who somehow seem always to have a soft spot for assassins, Clinton pardoned 16 members of the FALN terror organization who’d set off scores of bombs in the United States. How better to lock up the Puerto Rican vote …. in an election Hillary could have won with no Puerto Rican votes?
That, though, was little-league stuff. On the last day of his presidency — that is, on his way out the door, with no debts to pay and no groundwork to lay — Bill Clinton decided it was time to use his raw, unreviewable power to make his bones with the Communist radicals he’d always admired but lacked the courage to join.
The embassy bombings were almost a distant memory. Not three months had passed since terrorists bombed the U.S.S. Cole, murdering 17 American sailors and nearly sinking a U.S. destroyer. No matter. Clinton’s last official acts in office included the pardons of Susan Rosenberg, a Weatherman terrorist serving a richly deserved 58-year sentence, and Linda Sue Evans, a Weatherman terrorist serving a richly deserved 40-year sentence.
Barack Obama has an inexplicable relationship with Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers — and Ayers’s wife, the equally disgusting Weatherman terrorist Bernadine Dohrn. It’s a disqualifying relationship. All that needed to happen was for Obama’s opponent to point it out.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t point it out.
You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.