My new column, “Barack and the Bomber,” is up on The Hill website. During the debate last night, I, like Jonah, was taken aback at Sen. Barack Obama’s casual comparison of Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers with Obama’s Republican colleague Sen. Tom Coburn. When it was noted that Obama was “friendly” with Ayers, Obama said, “The fact is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.” In the column, I go through the history of Coburn’s remark, and then:
Wouldn’t Coburn be more comparable to Ayers if he, Coburn, had bombed abortion clinics in the past — and then said that he not only did not regret bombing the clinics but wished that he had done more? And then, after bombing abortion clinics and refusing to express regret, he held a political event in his home for Barack Obama, which Obama attended?
And if all that had happened, would Obama say it wasn’t a problem because Coburn had bombed those clinics a long time ago, when Obama was just 8 years old?