In the last couple of days, the campaign between Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and his Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama, has gotten decidedly nasty.
It is not appropriate for any contender in a debate to attack his/her adversary in a demeaning way.
This occurs mainly when one of the interlocutors is out of argument related to the subject being discussed. A wise debater, however, should be prepared to answer any valid question asked in relation to the selected topics and not turn on the character or the past association of the opponent.
Since the first presidential debate and more intensely since the unique vice presidential debate that held on McCain’s down hill popularity, but did not slow down Obama’s ascendency, the McCain’s campaign have been bombarding the airways, the TV and the Internet with mean attacks against Obama, associating him with William Ayers, a college professor who co-founded the Weather Underground, when Obama was 8 years old, and years later worked on education reform in Chicago alongside Obama. Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event at his home when Obama first ran for public office in the mid-1990s.
This throwing of mud sling to nowhere has become the leitmotiv in all the speeches of the republican vice president designate who attacks like an Alaskan “pit bull with lipstick”.
Naturally that all she seems to know how to do as a limited informed maverick who can only repeat, with astute, what she is taught by the pundit of the republican campaign.
The democratic campaign did not stay put. It fought back as strongly. They publicized in the internet a video of the U.S. Senate’s sessions related to John McCain’s role in this country’s last major financial crisis and costly bailout: the Keating savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s. This short documentary about John McCain’s role in that financial crisis reveals “his failed economic philosophy and poor judgment” that has twice placed him on the wrong side of history, but is still the essence of his economic plans for the future of “his country”.
Another piece of information was given to Associated Pres by Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, founder of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair. The general said “McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group”.
McCain has said previously that he resigned from the council in 1984 and asked in 1986 to have his name removed from the group’s letterhead. “I didn’t know whether the group’s activity was legal or illegal, but I didn’t think I wanted to be associated with them,” McCain said in a newspaper interview in 1986. Singlaub does not recall any McCain resignation in 1984 or May 1986. Nor does Joyce Downey, who oversaw the group’s day-to-day activities.
Presidential Race Gets Down and Pretty Dirty
