by Damozel | Yeah. TChris at Talk Left calls it a "skewering." Certainly Letterman asks some of the questions we've been wanting someone to ask on TV. Here's a summary.
Letterman asks:
McCain walked right into Letterman's blistering cross-examination about his campaign tactics. With the ease and skill of an experienced courtroom advocate, Letterman exposed McCain's hypocrisy...
Letterman questioned [McCain] about Palin's claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama "palled around with terrorists," and McCain backed her up, saying his opponent need to better explain his relationship with former Weather Underground activist William Ayers.
"Did you not have a relationship with Gordon Liddy?" Letterman asked about Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy.
McCain said he knew him. Then, after a commercial break, McCain said, "I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison ... I'm not in any way embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy."
"You understand the same case could be made of your relationship with him as is being made with William Ayers?" Letterman said.
Game over. If Obama didn't take the sting out of the Ayers nonsense in last night's debate, Letterman just did it for him. Aren't these the kinds of questions that journalists should be asking?...
Letterman, on the other hand, didn't let McCain walk away from Ayers. McCain tried to fudge the comparison to Liddy by arguing that he's been open about that relationship -- implying that Obama has a deeper hidden relationship with Ayers.
Letterman appeared to ridicule McCain about the implication that Obama and Ayers had a relationship.
"Are they double-dating, are they going to dinner, what are they doing?" Letterman asked. "Are they driving across country?"
"Maybe going to Denny's," McCain said.
Letterman said that Obama was 8 when Ayers was 29, and McCain appeared exasperated. "There's millions of words said in a campaign. C'mon, Dave," he said.
That's the problem: just too many words. McCain might want to take the rest of the week off to recover from the Letterman interview.(TalkLeft; more)
Just to be clear: I don't personally care if McCain is friends with a washed-up old burglar and I don't care whether Obama knows Ayers socially or through his business connections. I just don't care. Events have a context and if you look back at them through present-day filters they mean something completely different than they meant at the time. I think what both Ayers and Liddy got up to was reprehensible for different reasons, but what they did was a long time ago and (for all practical purposes) in another country. I wouldn't mind hearing whatever stories they have to tell. I don't understand the argument that people are somehow polluted by association. What about people who work in outreach programs? What about priests or doctors?
The whole issue for me is the hypocrisy of McCain---who has had in the course of a long political career plenty of acquaintances who later turned out to be sketchy---trying to turn Ayers into an attack on Obama's character. Speaking as a Quaker, I can assure you and the whole "base" that only Rovian Jesus thinks that this is okay. Christ specifically said that only God gets to decide what traits allow you to write some other human being off as unworthy. He also said you shouldn't throw stones at fellow sinners. You can dislike someone and you can even say so, but you don't get to present another person as worthless. People who aren't claiming to be Christian are free to cast the first stone---somebody's got to.
But those who purport to be waving the flag for Jesus don't have that option. Make a virtue and a selling point of your faith if you must; but don't do that and simultaneously violate some of Christ's most basic tenets.
That, to me, is where McCain and Palin went wrong.
This concludes today's lesson. Let us pray....for an Obama win. In the meantime, I can't wait till this whole thing is over.
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Very well said. Thank you.
Posted by: Bob | October 26, 2008 at 04:52 AM