It's kind of hard to be shocked when McCain does something dishonest, but his attempt to capitalize on Obama's relationship with Palestinian professor and former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, and to accuse The Los Angeles Times of bias* for not releasing a tape of a farewell party Obama attended on his behalf has to be one of the most craven:
"The Los Angeles Times refuses to make that videotape public. I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?
In that case, John McCain has some explaining to do, because McCain distributed several hundred thousand dollars to Khalidi's Center for Palestine Research and Studies while he chaired the International Republican Institute. Scott Horton describes the work as promoting "civic consciousness and engagement and the development of democratic values in the West Bank," which sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Unfortunately, to McCain, it sounds like Nazism, which begs the question of why exactly he gave the group so much money, and whether McCain himself has been replaced by some kind of robot controlled by a right wing blogger in a secret compound somewhere.
All indications are that McCain's connections to Khalidi are much closer than Obama's. But if Obama's relationship to Khalidi is somehow disqualifying or dangerous, then McCain's is even more so, and reporters should ask him about it when he chooses to bring up Khalidi's name. Of course, it doesn't sound like Khalidi is a bad guy at all, and that the work he did and that McCain funded was completely worthwhile.
--A. Serwer
*The LA Times has said they were given the tape on condition it not be released, but they wrote an article describing it.
