    
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 7254
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 30, 2008 - 04:21 pm: | 
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By Nick Juliano
It's a classic pattern in politics, isn't it? A young, fresh, charismatic, upstart candidate bursts onto the campaign trail to glowing reviews from the press that covers him only to have those same reporters and pundits aim their BB guns toward his rising balloon just as it's ready to crest the horizon.
While that arc seems to be playing out now for Barack Obama, whose faced relentless recrimination over his associations with controversial pastors and former radicals in recent weeks, the media largely let John McCain float by unscathed.
Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman explores McCain's "own radical friend."
"Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution," Chapman wrote. "The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: 'I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people.'"
"What McCain didn't mention," Chapman adds, "is that he has his own Bill Ayers—in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him."
Liddy didn't just have a role: he was the chief operative for Nixon's White House "plumbers" unit, who, along with E. Howard Hunt, masterminded the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel in 1972.
Following prison, Liddy started a countersurveillance private security firm. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1998. He entered talk radio in 1992, and is now syndicated in 160 markets as well as Sirius and XM satellite radio.
While right-wing blogs continue to fume over Obama's connection to the former anti-war radical, little has been written about Liddy and McCain, who appear to be much better friends. Liddy has donated $5,000 to McCain's political campaigns since 1998 -- sending 25 times as much money to the Arizona senator than Ayers did to Obama.
Liddy also greeted McCain as "an old friend" when hosting the candidate on his talk radio show, Chapman writes, and McCain gushed at the "pleasure" he took in appearing and praised Liddy's "adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."
Muses Chapman, "Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn't disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?"
The Obama-Ayers connection has not received near the amount of coverage as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but it continues to roil the conservative blogosphere. ABC's George Stephanopoulos thrust Ayers into the spotlight during last month's Democratic debate asking a question suggested by at least two conservative talk-show hosts. Whether the crimes of Watergate will be revisited in any serious way as they relate to McCain remains to be seen.
full article: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/McCains_questionable_associations_remain_untouched _while_0505.html |
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