Association

The entries just keep coming! Check out this article from cnn.com. The word for the day is association. Barack Obama is continually being slammed by the Republican candidates for President and Vice President for his association with William Ayers, a 1960s radical; a terrorist. This article turns the table on Senator McCain and lists a few of his associates: Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Robert Byrd. Each of these men were racists, to such an extreme that one of them belonged to the Klu Klux Klan (definitely a terrorist organization) and all of them wholly supported the segregation and oppression of African Americans. Now, as the article points out, based on the logic of John McCain and Sarah Palin with Obama's association with Ayers, McCain is associated with . . . well, I painted the picture for you, and I'm sure you can see it clearly.

As I pointed out to my co-worker the other day, nobody truly knows their friends. You might have hung out with a great guy in high school, only to find out that he's a rapist. Your best friend might abuse her children. There might be a sex offender living in your neighborhood. By the (misguided) logic used by McCain and Palin, you (yes, a generalization that would make any English teacher . . . or school principal cringe) are guilty by . . . association. Since you knew the child abuser, rapist, or lived in the same neighborhood as the sex offender, you are - in the words of Sarah Palin - palling around with them. Don't you hate it when your words come back to bite you in the nether region????

In the end, as the article points out, the association argument is "weak and impotent" (where's Bob Dole when you need him - EDS commercial, people!).

Lastly, the best point of all of the article is: What I find to be more deplorable is to hear McCain advisers say they want to turn the page to anything but the issue number one -- the economy. (cnn.com - 10/08/2008)

Amen to that, my brother!!

S