'Sleazy Attack Ads' Insult our Intelligence
The McCain campaign should stop its ridiculous attempt to suggest that Barack Obama is somehow connected to terrorism due to an association with 1960s antiwar activist Bill Ayers.
According to all credible reports, Obama's relationship with Ayers is tenuous at best. Although Ayers was involved in a radical group when Obama was a young child, Ayers was never convicted of a crime nor charged with anyone's murder.* Since then, Ayers has become a responsible citizen, serving on a charitable board and holding the title of distinguished professor at the University of Illinois. In 1997, Chicago awarded him its citizen of the year award for his work on public education reform.
If John McCain wants to keep Americans safe from terrorists, then why isn't he calling for the arrest and imprisonment of Ayers? Why isn't he calling for Ayers' charity to be shut down? Why isn't he calling for action against the University of Illinois for "harboring a known terrorist" like Ayers?
The reality is that the McCain campaign knows these allegations are nonsense. They are a desperate attempt to divert attention from the fact that the current economic disaster is a direct result of Bush-McCain economic policies and the deregulation promoted by McCain's economic adviser, Phil Gramm, who recently referred to America as a "nation of whiners" because people are upset about the economy. With high gasoline prices and dwindling 401(k) and home values, McCain needs to discuss how his economic plan will alleviate our pain instead of insulting our intelligence and wasting our time with irrelevant issues and sleazy attack ads.
Sarah Aziz
North Haven
Sarah Aziz is an accountant and a graduate of Rutgers University.
* EDITOR'S NOTE: The Justice Department, in response to a question about Ayers in 2001, told The New York Times there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted. Ayers went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. [Hoover had a penchant for pointing out so-called dangerous women, going back to the 1920's with feminist Emma Goldman.]
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