Army of Dog

Reading through the Letters section of the local paper, I came across this letter decrying the tarring of the Obamessiah with the sins of his associates (Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, et al.). 

Of guilt by association

Rod Dreher’s piece on Barack Obama is another attempt at the guilt-by-association tack many conservatives have taken. Lacking any other means of painting Mr. Obama as unworthy of our highest office, they stoop to this.

I have come in contact with many unsavory, radical or just plain wacky characters in my life. Am I defined by them? No. I’m still a family man with a career and life of my own. I make my own decisions and take responsibility for them.

What Mr. Dreher and those like him fail to realize is that those of us of Mr. Obama’s generation are intelligent enough to listen to the previous generation and take their cries for justice and equality, strip them of their anger and pain and transform them into something all our own. The idealism of the ’60s isn’t lost on us, just the radicalism.

Charles Mikkelsen, Dallas

Mr. Mikkelsen makes the standard Obamapoligist argument that anyone who brings up the fact that his pet candidate is associated with this racist pastor or that former enemy of the state is just attempting “guilt by association.”  Well, yes.  The salient fact in Obama’s case is that these are not simply cases of loose association.  Anyone, including a public figure, has the right not to be tarred with the sins of acquaintances with whom they share nothing more than a coincidental encounter or relationships in common.  However, in Obama’s case we’re not talking about people he ran into once on the street or happened to attend a function with.  We’re talking about people with whom Barack Obama chose to be associated, in Wright’s case at the deepest social and spiritual levels for more than two decades, knowing full well what their views on this country were.  At that point, he is guilty by association.

What we’re being asked to believe is that Obama shares his life with a woman whose view of this country is overwhelmingly negative, that the pastor who mentors him utters some of the most virulent anti-American rhetoric most people have ever heard in a pulpit, and that he served on the board of the Woods Foundation with a man who set bombs trying to kill United States Army officers, but none of the hard-left politics and anti-Americanism that these people espouse rubbed off on him.  A man who asks you to believe that either thinks you’re an idiot, or is one.