Why Obama's Association with Bill Ayers should disqualify him from the Presidency

[jordan179]

I've heard several people claim that it is unfair for John McCain and Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama over his association with Bill Ayers. They say alternately that the association was not a close one, or that Bill Ayers is a perfectly respectable figure in Chicago politics who many people associated with

Comments

[jordan179]

Even according to your own terms, your argument makes no sense, because the American state's alliance with the South Vietnamese state was un-Constitutional. There is no power granted Congress to give Americans' money to foreign governments, or to provide for their defense.

Article II, Section 2:

"He [the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur ..."

Treaties, both in the time of the Founders and at every point since, including in 1954 and the present day, include treaties of alliance and of foreign aid, among other things. The Constitution does not spell out every possible treaty that might be made, for the obvious reason that this would be futile: the Founders assumed that the President, Legislature and Judiciary would have at least minimal commmon sense when it came to reading the clause.

(If you don't know why the power of treaty-making is relevant to this discussion, you should recuse yourself from it on grounds of ignorance of the history being discussed).

(Or do you believe in the "living document" theory?)

Nope. It's spelled out right there in the document as written. Isn't even an Amendment, it's one of the basic Articles.

Are Southeast Asians real to me? Yes, real enough that I don't cheerlead their slaughter for stupid ideological reasons, or to uphold political abstractions, or to enrich the military contractors.

Then why are you arguing that it was right to abandon them to the Communists, and that in fact we should have done so earlier?

You have done a fine job pointing out the evils of the North Vietnamese government. Now tell me how those evils are rectified by stealing money from Americans, enslaving over 2 million of them (aka the draft) ...

I disagree with the Constitutionality, and the morality, of the draft. I disagree even more with the morality of treason committed against a liberal democracy to benefit a totalitarian dictatorship.

... and sending them to kill more Vietnamese, including between 50,000 and several million civilians,

"Between 50,000 and several million" ...? That's a fairly wide range. What are you counting as a "civlian?" And why do you fail to distinguish between North and South Vietnamese?

Are you, perchance, arguing that every South Vietnamese civilian murdered by the North Vietnamese was our fault, because we failed to let South Vietnam fall faster?

... while suffering over 200,000 casualties (dead and wounded) themselves.

Casualties are normal in war.

It is you who are blind to the millions of lives shattered and destroyed by this war. It's all about "alliances" to you. How simple. How easy to see this as a lesser evil than a few bombs that didn't kill anyone -- nay, as a positive good!

How would the war have been avoided if we had failed to defend South Vietnam? The war would have happened anyway; the only difference is that South Vietnam would have fallen faster. There is no reason to believe that the Communist warlords would have then chosen to kill less civilians.

I am unmoved by the self-serving mythology of the state. Thus, I am unmoved by arguments, like yours, that proceed from an uncritical acceptance of that mythology.

"Uncritical?"

Ok, what's your superior organizational solution, implementable in one country, to the needs of police, defense and justice for which states exist? (It has to be in implementable in one country, since to be practical it has to be able to be an evolutionarily stable solution).