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]

That said, waging war in Vietnam was far worse a crime than any perpetrated by the Weather Underground.

It is a "crime" to come to the aid of an ally under attack?

If flying to the other side of the world, and dropping napalm on poor men, women and children, and burning their food and homes, is not terrorism, then nothing is.

Separating and answering your (implicit) propositions:

(1) Why does the fact that the ally under attack was on the "other side of the world" render coming to the defense of that ally immoral? Might this same argument be used against, for instance, intervention in Darfur (which is also located at such distances)?

(2) You wrongly characterize the Vietnam War as "dropping napalm on poor men, women and children." This is a common misstatement, but it betrays a considerable ignorance of the military history of the war. In fact, American attacks were far more precisely targetted than was common in 1960's warfighting. What makes your statement especially disgusting is that we were fighting an enemy which

Re: See Things As They Are

[jordan179]

You continue to insist that I should propose an alternative social structure. In the meantime, you are critiquing something broad and vague, "anarchy," which I have not proposed

[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