Lately J-Mac has been reminding me of a pervy neighbor I knew when I was a little girl. He never molested me but I could totally tell he wanted to. It was something in the eyes, and the way he tried to build an intimacy between us that separated me from the people I trusted. Walnuts (as the cool kids like to call John McCain) has made it is singular mission in this world to scare me so I will turn to him. And yet again it isn't going to work. I will not let him into my private places. What has been bothering me the most is the scare tactic of associating him with terrorists. William Ayers was a 60's radical. Raise your hand if you wouldn't have been a radical in the 60's. I imagine there aren't all that many raised hands out there. Ayers was in his misguided way trying to fight injustice. He was opposed to the Vietnam War. (No doubt Johnny Mac wouldn't have minded that brouhaha ending a bit sooner.) He also went about righting domestic injustices in what I think we can all agree was the wrong way. His criminal activities are a prime example of what happens when young people don't feel like they can trust their government to do the right thing. Some stand in front of tanks some do something even more extreme. But the tactic of associating Obama with actions an acquaintance took while the Senator was in elementary school is beneath the Republican. But that's how the old man's mind works. If he associated with Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright we can't trust him. Just like your grandpa, he thinks who you're friends are is important. I'm more interested in who a man is himself. We all have associations we're not necessarily proud of. I once accidentally joined the communist party. All I know is that an incredibly good looking guy who was I admit dressed pretty drably asked me to take a survey. The survey consisted of questions about equality and fairness and the rights of the working man. I check "yes" that I agreed with a lot of the statements and at the end I signed my name. And Comrade Sexy shook my hand and said "Welcome to the Communist Party." I froze and then ran away. Issues of the Socialist Worker arrived regularly in the mail for almost a year. It took many letters and phone calls to formally leave the Communist Party, but I did. I joined something without knowing what I was doing, and that will likely follow me around a bit if I enter politics. Something similar happened to John McCain. In 1981 he joined the U.S. Council for World Freedom as a board member. He was new to Washington and joined something without really investigating it. On the surface they supplied arms and funds to paramilitary groups in Latin America. But if he'd really looked closer he would've discovered that according to the Anti-Defamation League at the time it was affiliated with the Anti-Communist League which was a gathering place for extremists, racists, and anti-Semites. J-Mac has a lot of faults but he isn't a racist or an anti-Semite as far as I can tell. But once upon a time he associated with some. That is definitely in my opinion a better scary campfire story than serving on an education board with a FORMER 60's radical.
Recently McCain formed his Presidential transition team and chose William Timmons to head it up. Again if you don't look too close just anther Washington Lobbyist. You know the kind Grandaddy Mac despises. But if you scratch the D.C. vanish on Timmons you learn that he worked with Saddam Hussein after the first Iraq war to lessen the sanctions against Iraq. Which means we can't link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 but we can link him to John McCain. In one step. There are more degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and Miley Cyrus (It can be done in three steps but I won't tell you). We all make friends. And we don't always choose them carefully enough. Sometimes you just have to look into someone's eyes just like McCain claims he has done with Vladamir Putin, and just trust your instincts. And when J-Mac's eyes meet mine through the TV screen I see a little old man trying to confuse me so I'll give him what he wants. Right now it's just my vote. But what's next?
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