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29 Apr 2008 11:24 am

The New McCarthyism

And the Clintons are in the thick of it. Stanley Fish:

The literature the Clinton campaign is passing around about Obama and Ayers cannot be explained away or rationalized. It features bold heads proclaiming that Ayers doesn’t regret his Weathermen activities (what does that have to do with Obama? Are we required to repudiate things acquaintances of our have not said?), that Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s senatorial campaign (do you take money only from people of whose every action you approve?), that Obama admired Ayers’s 1997 book on the juvenile justice system, that Ayers and Obama participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life. That subversive event was sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals, an organization that also sponsored an evening conversation (moderated by me) between those notorious radicals Richard Rorty and Judge Richard Posner (also a neighbor of Ayers’s; maybe the Federalist Society should expel him).

Gasp. Alert Hewitt and Kristol. Richard Posner is a closet communist. Fish is too kind to the Clintons in the rest of his column. But I have to say that his observation about the tactics of this campaign - classic McCarthyite tactics long practised by Rove - is on the mark. And it's interesting to me that these smears have been aimed primarily at the most obvious agents of real change in this election: Ron Paul and now Barack Obama. When people have ideas and arguments that actually reach and move people, and you don't have a good argument in response, smearing is the logical next step. And smearing is what the neocons and the far right and the Clintons have been reveling in.

To which one can only respond: don't let these people smear your future away. It only works if you let them get away with it.

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