by Eric Martin
One of the more curious reactions to last night's debate comes courtesty of Andrew McCarthy in a post at The Corner. McCarthy, in a fit of rage, calls his fellow Cornerites "nuts" for not properly labeling McCain's performance a "disaster." But McCarthy does not feel that McCain's poor performance was the result of his meandering oratory, his failure to address policy specifics, his irascible demeanor or his disrespectful digs and failed attempts at humor. Rather, McCarthy's frustration stems from his belief that McCain did not, get this, go full bore on the William Ayers non-story.
Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left?...Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? [...]
Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.
Pretty stark choice. Rather black and white. I wonder if that standard is applied evenly to both candidates (more on that in a minute). First, though, what is this talk of Obama being "pals" with Ayers? This is the extent of the documented relationship, and it hardly rises the already low bar of "pal." From Paul Campos:
In fact, Obama doesn't appear to have met Ayers at any time in the past six years. When Obama was running for the Illinois legislature in 1995, Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Obama at his house, and they later served on the board of a community anti-poverty group.
Also serving on that board were stalwart Republicans. Would they, then, fall into the category of terrorist sympathizer when pushed through the binary meat grinder wielded by McCarthy? Let's be clear: Obama's interactions with Ayers are limited and tangential, and even then, the most significant of those limited contacts occured over a decade ago.
It is incontrovertible that Obama has no formal relationship with Ayers. Ayers is not an official advisor, informal advisor, confidant or, in the parlance of the day, a pal. Contrast Ayers' non-relation to Obama with that of, say, Henry Kissinger. As Campos recounts, "Kissinger is honorary co-chair of McCain's New York campaign, and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself."
Now let's compare some of the terrorist activities of, on the one hand, non-advisor, non-related William Ayers and, on the other hand, official adviser and honorary co-chair Henry Kissinger. Ayers:
...[A]s a member of the Weather Underground, [Ayers] set off several bombs that did some serious property damage. None of the bombings Ayers was involved with killed anyone, but several years later other members of the group took part in an armed robbery in which two police officers and a guard were killed.
Kissinger:
An abbreviated list of the events that have made it dangerous for Kissinger to travel overseas, because of the possibility he would be arrested as a war criminal, include: covertly sabotaging Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to help get Richard Nixon elected; playing a key role in convincing Nixon to launch illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia (the latter action helped create the conditions that led to the Cambodian genocide); helping to plan the overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government, which included numerous assassinations funded by the CIA (again, all this in direct violation of international law); and helping to facilitate the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which may have killed as many as 200,000 civilians.
Kissinger appears to have had every bit as much contempt for the law as Ayers, with the difference being that his brand of contempt led to millions of deaths.
Campos doesn't even mention Kissinger's involvement with Operation Condor. For those that don't know, here is a description of Operation Condor from one of my previous posts:
Operation Condor [was] an international state-sponsored terror network set up by the Pinochet regime to track and eliminate opponents living abroad with the cooperation of the governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and, later, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. US policymakers [including Kissinger] even knew that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States to carry out the infamous car bomb assassination on September 21, 1976 of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister and later minister of defense, who perished along with Ronni Moffitt, his American assistant. This brazen act of cross-border violence occurred in Washington DC less than fourteen blocks from the White House.
That post (link for those that want to read more about this episode) discussed a book review of Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability appearing in Foreign Affairs, and the wrath of Henry Kissinger directed at the author in the aftermath of the publication of the review. Here are some more interesting details:
Kornbluh discovered details pertaining to the CIA's involvement in a kidnapping that resulted in the murder of Chile's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, in 1970. Schneider's elimination, which came three years before the coup, according to Maxwell's review, "was regarded as essential by the Nixon administration, since Schneider was a strict constitutionalist and therefore an obstacle to U.S. efforts to promote a military intervention before Allende could take office."
...[D]ocuments released in the extensive declassification ordered by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000 [are] reprinted in Kornbluh's book. These documents include: transcripts of top-secret discussions among President Nixon, Kissinger, and other cabinet members on how "to bring Allende down"; minutes of secret meetings chaired by Kissinger to plan covert operations in Chile; new documentation of the notorious case of Charles Horman, an American murdered by the Chilean military and subject of the movie Missing; comprehensive documentation of the Letelier case and the extensive CIA, National Security Council, and State Department reports surrounding it; and U.S. intelligence reporting on Operation Condor.
In addition to the other morally reprehensible acts cited by Campos, and others that remain unmentioned still, Kissenger was complicit in, and oversaw, terrorist activities committed by foreign agents on US soil and abroad. He also oversaw terrorist acts committed by the CIA on behalf of aspiring, and later existing, South American dictatorships.
Kissinger has an official role in the McCain campaign.
So is John McCain a terrorist sympathizer? McCarthy labels Ayers a terrorist and connects Ayers' comparatively innocuous (though stil despicable) activies to Obama, and then from this concludes that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer. Using McCarthy's criteria, one could come to no other conclusion: John McCain is a terrorist sympathizer.
Nice De La Soul reference in the title, there. I dig.
Posted by: Stefan | October 08, 2008 at 12:41 PM
Yes, he is. Provided the terrorists are "on our side".
This has been simple answers to simple questions.
Posted by: Anarch | October 08, 2008 at 12:42 PM
...in the parlance of the day,....
Don't you mean "in the parlance of our times?"
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | October 08, 2008 at 12:52 PM
I don't see a fit of rage, there; more like frustration. But he is, IMO, greatly overplaying the terrorist-association bit. It doesn't logically follow that Obama's association with Ayers, for example, is going to have Obama having bin Laden over for a backyard barbecue.
Even if you find the Obama/Ayers connection noteworthy, which I do, to a certain extent, I don't think you can make that extension to posit a willingness to rub elbows with absolutely every other bad guy in the world.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | October 08, 2008 at 12:57 PM
Not only that but McCain, it turns out, has ties to Ayers, too. The Mrs. Annenberg, of Annenberg infamy has endorsed him. She is one of the terrorist supporters who let Ayers be on the board of the Annenberg Challenge.
Posted by: wonkie | October 08, 2008 at 12:58 PM
It's a lesser known principle akin to IOKIYAR:
I'ts Not Terrorism if the United States Does It.
See also:
I'ts Not Torture if the United States Does It
I'ts Not an Unprovoked War of Aggression if the United States Does It
I'ts Not Socialism if the United States Does It.
Posted by: Ugh | October 08, 2008 at 01:03 PM
I'ts not a Misplaced Apostrophe if the United State's Does It.
Posted by: Hob | October 08, 2008 at 01:12 PM
For many on the far-right, the fact that Kissinger caused millions of deaths in South American and Indochina is a feature, not a bug.
Posted by: Richard | October 08, 2008 at 01:14 PM
Even without getting into the arguments about whether there's any equivalency between Kissinger and Ayers, McCain has had closer associations with at least one analogous figure, David Ifshin. (Which I don't think should be used for an attack any more than Obama/Ayers should.)
Palin's associations with the Alaska separatists are *far* closer than any of the relationships McCain et al. have been trying to use against Obama. And the founder of the Alaska separatists proclaimed his loathing for the U.S. in far more certain terms than anyone from the Weather Underground.
Posted by: AndyK | October 08, 2008 at 01:31 PM
Doesn't anyone think that it's terrible, terrible, that McCain willingly appeared on live television last night together with a known prior occasional associate of an unrepentant domestic terrorist? There was some dispute earlier, but we can now reveal that McCain shook the fiend's hand! Has he no shame?
The transitive property in action, my friends!
Posted by: Warren Terra | October 08, 2008 at 01:36 PM
I'ts not a Misplaced Apostrophe if the United State's Does It.
bah!
Posted by: Ugh | October 08, 2008 at 01:41 PM
Don't you mean "in the parlance of our times?"
Dangit, that's exactly what I meant.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 01:59 PM
LOL, Warren.
Ugh nails it. Kissinger was Ours, therefore not a Them.
What's even stupider is how little basis there is for this furor about Teh Fundraiser in Ayers Own Home!!!.
AFAICT, Obama didn't know Ayers from a hole in the wall at the time. He says, and nobody disputes, that he was invited by his mentor State Senator Alice Palmer, who wanted to introduce him to a gathering of local Democratic Party stalwarts as her successor. What was he supposed to have done, tell her, no, thanks, I'd rather not have a career because I don't approve of your choice of hosts?
Anyway, he probably didn't even recognize their names. Believe it or not, Cornerites, most of us are not obsessed with the 60s, and the names of a bunch of spoiled, white, suburban, eastern radicals were not exactly central to a kid's life in Hawai'i and Indonesia. Heck, I'm from NYC and have studied the 60s, yet Ayers rang no bell for me when Clinton first mentioned him. He just wasn't important, historically. Dohrn I had heard of -- but if someone had invited me to a business event held by "Bill Ayers and his wife Bernie" or somesuch, I would not have made the connection. Obama being a pretty careful person, he may have done background research. Then again, he may not have. No google in 1995, you know.
Posted by: The Crafty Trilobite | October 08, 2008 at 02:07 PM
Heck, I'm from NYC and have studied the 60s, yet Ayers rang no bell for me when Clinton first mentioned him.
Me too, on each of those counts.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 02:10 PM
Look, as a pro-obama supporter, it seems clear to me that he likely attended a number of meetings with Ayers. How the annenberg challenge was organized still remains a mystery to me (I've read alot of articles who decry the association but also fail to give evidence of their relationship, instead relying on theories of how they 'might' have worked together).
It seems clear they had a working relationship, but I have not seen proof of more than that. It is certainly plausible they had a working relationship and never discussed personal politics or histories (Hell, if I'm in a meeting I PREFER it that way).
Still, relating Kissinger is not going to work. As appalling as some of his actions have been, most Americans are unfamiliar with them (and these things happened outside the country anyway... therefore they are less important to Americans).
Posted by: alchemist | October 08, 2008 at 02:11 PM
Still, relating Kissinger is not going to work. As appalling as some of his actions have been, most Americans are unfamiliar with them
But Americans are more familiar with Ayers and the Weather Underground?
(and these things happened outside the country anyway... therefore they are less important to Americans).
No, the terrorist bombing that killed Letelier and Moffitt (an American citizen) occurred in Washington DC, some 14 blocks from the White House.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 02:15 PM
Alchemist, no doubt most Americans are unfamiliar of Kissinger's actions, but they're at least as unfamiliar with Ayers. And the 1976 car bombing that took place at the spot now marked by a memorial in the city where I live did not take place outside the United States.
Posted by: KCinDC | October 08, 2008 at 02:17 PM
The Republican Party: Where Democracy goes to die.
Posted by: Benson & Hedges | October 08, 2008 at 02:22 PM
KCinDC.... so far it appears the public does see this as a politically motivated attack. I'm not saying I'm personally concerned about the association, I'm just always worried how the public will react to 'oversimplifications' by RNC that uses 'candidate' and 'terrorist' in the same sentence.
Posted by: alchemist | October 08, 2008 at 02:38 PM
Eric, did you read our discussion of McCarthy from last night, or of Ayers here and here?
Campos is wrong about it being a fundraiser, as I've pointed out in our previous discussion.
"Anyway, he probably didn't even recognize their names."
I already covered this here; as NPR reported:
(Continued in Pt. II so as to avoid too many links.)Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 02:45 PM
None of the bombings Ayers was involved with killed anyone, but several years later other members of the group took part in an armed robbery in which two police officers and a guard were killed.
Note that the armed robbery took place after Ayers and his wife surredered to the police.
Posted by: rea | October 08, 2008 at 02:48 PM
And as I pointed out here, quoting this:
I don't understand why people are speculating rather than simply researching the facts and presenting them. It isn't necessary to speculate.Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 02:49 PM
Still, relating Kissinger is not going to work.
I believe this post is commentary, not campaign advice. As commentary, it 'works' perfectly well. Henry is a terrorist, and enough people around the world (including in Europe) agree that he has to be careful about where he travels.
As campaign advice, no, it doesn't work. Neither will the Ayres thing, at least to any great extent.
BTW, playing the Ayres Card (sorry, couldn't resist the cliche) is one of the things which permanently changed my opinion of HRC for the worse. I can forgive but will never forget.
Posted by: jonnybutter | October 08, 2008 at 02:55 PM
Jonny, I'm grateful to Clinton for sacrificing her reputation to bring up Wright and Ayers during the primary. That means they're old news. They'd be much more damaging if McCain and Palin were introducing the public to them for the first time now.
Posted by: KCinDC | October 08, 2008 at 03:03 PM
I believe this post is commentary, not campaign advice.
Absolutely correct. But then, me and jb go back so far that he was one of the few commenting on the original Kissinger piece.
Gary: I did not see those threads where it was established that it was not a fundraiser. I did see the part where it was established that it did not launch his career or campaign.
I struggle, as always, to be aware of all ayers traditions. Alas, I am an imperfect vessel.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 03:05 PM
Should we have disqualified for national office any politicians in the 1980s who associated with Menachem Begin?
Posted by: Tillman Fan | October 08, 2008 at 03:21 PM
I don't understand why people are speculating rather than simply researching the facts and presenting them.
I'm surprised at you Gary. It should be obvious why people are speculating rather than doing research:
1) Speculation is much easier than research. Speculation lets you just run away with your ideas, while research requires minutes of tedious typing stuff into Google, clicking the search button, and reading boring articles.
2) Research requires that you deal with inconvenient facts. Suppose it turns out that Obama didn't do anything wrong. If you do the research, you'll have to give up making accusations. But if you just skip the research step and jump straight to speculation, you can just keep hammering away at your speculation without having to worry about whether there's any truth to it.
Posted by: Roger Moore | October 08, 2008 at 03:35 PM
Roger: It is also true that there is a swirl of information around Ayers at this point, and even if one does try to do cursory research, answers don't always abound. Further, one of Gary's sources is David Axelrod who has a dog in this fight and might not be the most reliable.
But still: I did not mention anything about a launch of the career. If it wasn't even a fundraiser, I stand corrected. Though I see little gained by the distinction. Is a meeting more innocuous?
I could see that argued both ways.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 03:38 PM
Hey, I've been pointing this out for quite some time!
I mean, how toxic is Ayers? A guy who works with both Republicans and Democrats for well over a decade? Who could get millions of dollars from a foundation founded by a Republican?
Doesn't sound very radical to me....
Posted by: gwangung | October 08, 2008 at 03:55 PM
Nothing to say other than that the title of this post is win.
Posted by: John Cole | October 08, 2008 at 03:56 PM
Hitting back on the enemy's front: why does John McCain hate the American flag?
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 04:20 PM
McCain, by the way, is having bizarre flashbacks.
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 04:48 PM
Why is Kissinger even credible? Even if you give him a pass on the war crimes, he was rarely successful. His two big successes were putting Suharto and Pinochet in power. And neither of those were really successes. It's just the best he's got. At the very best, Kissinger was a failure. In reality, he's a war criminal. Just ask the millions of people who died from his policies. Oh yeah, you can't ask them, can you? But you can ask their relatives. And they want to lynch him. With good reason. My attitude about Kissinger is simple: his eyes should gouged out, and he should be forced to beg on the streets of Phnom Penh. Yes, that's harsh, but there are already plenty of people doing that because of his policies. They were born with no eyes because of the Agent Orange dumped on their mothers. And I know the reader doesn't want to hear this. But our government did it at the request of Kissinger. We may think it's unseemly to talk about, but if that's the case, maybe we shouldn't do it.
Posted by: fostert | October 08, 2008 at 04:52 PM
"His two big successes were putting Suharto and Pinochet in power."
Actually, while Kissinger pushed the CIA like mad to make a coup to get Allende out of power, and the CIA did make various efforts, the final coup that did the trick was, in fact, native. I wouldn't point to this as proof, but rather my own extensive reading; however, it's a convenient cite, nonetheless. For first-hand sources, try here. It wasn't for lack of trying that the CIA wasn't directly responsible for the final success, to be sure.
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 05:15 PM
Agreed Gary, and the CIA created the necessary turmoil and set other conditions for the coup to succeed. Not necessarily by great skill or forethought, but just a relentless dedication to destabilize and roil the democratically elected Allende regime.
Posted by: Eric Martin | October 08, 2008 at 05:26 PM
This has nothing to do with Dr. Kissinger. For crying out loud, people forgave Vice President Cheney when he shot his hunting partner in the face. When conservatives bring up Dr. Ayers, they use him to make the point (so openly I can't really call it a dog whistle) that Senator Obama means it when he talks about change. Replying with comments about the terrorism in McCain's past, and that of his advisers, misses the point.
Look at it this way. Bill Ayers engaged in a bombing campaign as a last-ditch effort to stop a war he saw as genocidally destructive to Vietnam and to the soul of the United States. Leaving all other issues aside for the moment, would a Bill Ayers today have to try to bomb the Capitol to stop a war on Iran? No, because the current crisis has taken the military option pretty much off the table when it comes to Iran. Lower and middle-class Americans can't pay what a war with Iran would cost, and the rich won't. Events have caught up with the loose talk about a war with Iran. Now, I for one consider that wholly positive, but it doesn't change the underlying reality that events have dictated this to the American people, and with Senator McCain and Governor Palin, Americans would have to resign themselves to accepting what cam, to act as the stenographers of history. Senator Obama would at least have the willingness to try to rally Americans to claim control over their own destiny.
Posted by: John Spragge | October 08, 2008 at 05:30 PM
Gary,
I don't understand why people are speculating rather than simply researching the facts and presenting them. It isn't necessary to speculate.
To be fair, you are simply quoting Axelrod's spin on the story. While I love the guy, what he has to say is obviously not worth a whole lot in terms of getting to 'the facts'.
Posted by: byrningman | October 08, 2008 at 05:44 PM
"To be fair, you are simply quoting Axelrod's spin on the story."
The point is that Axelrod, and effectively Obama, are on the record now with this assertion; if some evidence turned up that Axelrod were lying, it would be somewhat damaging to Axelrod's and Obama's credibility.
Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 05:56 PM
i think this is a great analogy to tie in kissinger. yglesias made a similar pont about how you could "liberal hawks" as just as bad as ayers in that they express thier commitment through violence, etc.
one is socially acceptable, another isn't. but i sure don't see that much of a substantive difference. dead people are dead. blown up things are blown up
Posted by: publius | October 08, 2008 at 08:33 PM
Gary and Eric, you're right. I'm pretty sure that I've never before been accused of inflating Kissinger's achievements. Gotta love it.
Posted by: fostert | October 08, 2008 at 09:08 PM
Didn't Christopher Hitchens pen some nasty stuff about Kissinger? I wonder what he thinks of the good Docktor these days?
Posted by: bobbyp | October 08, 2008 at 09:37 PM
"Didn't Christopher Hitchens pen some nasty stuff about Kissinger?"
Kissinger has always been an obsession of C. Hitchens, and a reminder of back in the day when Hitchens was less addled. Hitchens wrote a short book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which was turned into a documentary. Highlights of the book here and here.
It starts off:
You probably get the idea.Posted by: Gary Farber | October 08, 2008 at 11:11 PM
In 1968, I worked in a minimum wage clerical job under terrible conditions (including a LOT of forced overtime by minimum wage staff that was neither recorded nor paid for). Somewhat quixotically (I was 18) I tried to start a labor union. Two colleagues joined me in this dangerous endeavor, one of whom was a card-carrying communist. I knew he was a communist, and I totally disagreed and condemned that, but I really wanted that union, and I was willing to work with a colleague who was in that way despicable. If I ran for office, and someone dug up the connection, doubtless that would make me too unpatriotic to run for president.
Twenty years later, in an engineering job, I had a colleague who had been convicted of having sex with a 14 year old under financially coercive conditions. I didn’t feel, and none of my other co-workers felt, that working with the creep made us complicit in his crimes.
Bottom line: this is one more case of Republicans inventing a new moral obligation that no one has ever heard of before (“Thou shalt not work with bad people”) and applying it exclusively to Democrats. (Likewise, in the 1990s, the Republicans discovered that marital fidelity was an absolute requirement in a president. That lasted until they wanted to run John McCain.)
And by the way, Kissinger isn’t the most persuasive example of McCain palling around with terrorists- G. Gordon Liddy is. Liddy plotted firebombing the Brookings Institute, and also plotted the murder of liberal journalist Jack Anderson. That’s terrorism in my book. (Liddy never actually carried out these plans, since he was told to desist by the Nixon administration, but Ayers never killed anyone either.) McCain has appeared on Liddy’s radio show, and told him he was “proud” of him. That, my friends, is palling around with terrorists. (Link: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/steve_chapman/2008/10/mccain-has-his.html)
Posted by: Anne E | October 09, 2008 at 12:16 AM
And of course, we mustn't forget that terrorism is a conveniently elastic concept. Or as Roger Woddis 'Ethics for Everyman' has it:
Throwing a bomb is bad,
Dropping a bomb is good;
Terror, no need to add,
Depends on who's wearing the hood.
The rest of the poem is still quite relevant as well.
(But then Woddis was a dangerous radical who never killed anyone that I know of).
Posted by: magistra | October 09, 2008 at 03:21 AM
Oh so sick of "terrorist"; so misused.
Ayers was a classic terrorist-- act of violence by an out-group member to draw attention to a cause.
Kissinger-- the deeds he was complicit in were either assassinations (the utility of the act was in the death of target, not the message sent) or state terror (coercive violence against the people to maintain the power of the state), or straight up war crimes.
Of course the low-cognitive american is going to hear "War criminal" as "American War" + "criminal" == not plausible.
Posted by: moonstone | October 09, 2008 at 11:27 PM