Drool radio

By now you must realize the service I provide by listening to conservative talk shows for you. Running my single daily errand to a doctor’s office, pharmacy, liquor store, donut shop or barber shop – that’s what old men do to fill the day – provides ample time to sample the reason de jour the country is going to hell in a hand basket, according to those who love freedom and liberty and checking on your roommates. Surely you know that for every hour spent in this quest for knowledge hidden from you by the mainstream media I age two, a great sacrifice that I make gladly.

Yesterday, guilt by association was the topic of choice across the right wing airways. Stung by the lack of traction in attempting to connect Barack Obama with William Ayers, the bloviaters are sputtering about the unfairness of it all. Obama’s campaign has created a video that describes John McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal and the windbags cannot fathom how it is unfair for them to be charged with dirty politics while Obama’s poll numbers rise, apparently unhurt by such unfair tactics.

I listened as one blathering blowhard lamented that Obama was getting away with past associations with a terrorist while McCain’s connections with a `banker’ was killing him. Naturally, the callers screamed their support for the show’s host and that poor innocent, John McCain, and they frothed over the unethical and near criminality of the dastardly Barack H. Obama. (The `H.’ is now the snide and winking shorthand smear after being chastised for using the full middle name of Obama.)

Let me stipulate that Obama’s connections with Ayers were not smart, especially if Barack had any inkling that he wanted a career in politics that might one day land him in Washington. But it is obviously silly to attempt to connect the terrorist activities of Ayers with an eight year old Obama living more than a continent away, and the public is not having any of it thus far. There can be no doubt that Obama’s explanations of the contacts and his present association with Ayers have been bought by the voters or at least trumped by the frightening economic situation. Still, young politicians should learn from this episode.

While Obama hasn’t made a great deal of the connection between McCain and Charles Keating, it is very clear that relations between the two men are far more relevant to voters today than the smear efforts being made against Obama and his connections with Ayers. McCain’s handlers can rail about the mainstream media’s greater concern with Keating than with Ayers, but there’s no getting around the fact that McCain’s poor judgment in connection with Keating bears on his views on banking, the only topic of the election at this moment.

Keating wined and dined five U.S. Senators, including John McCain, in an effort to get them to exert pressure on federal bank regulators to permit his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association to invest in very risky and highly leveraged investments. These investments, far in excess of regulatory maximums, ultimately failed bankrupting the S&L and resulting in the losses of billons of dollars in investments by unsuspecting depositors.

McCain paid back the tens of thousands of dollars in questionable perks from Keating but has admitted that his appearance in front of regulators gave the appearance impropriety. Since Senator McCain supported deregulation of S&Ls that led to an earlier financial debacle that cost taxpayers billions, and since he has many times supported similar deregulatory efforts of the financial sector since, and since even in the present presidential race he has called for the government to get out of the way of people trying to bring prosperity to the country, his views on regulation past and present is very relevant to his candidacy.

The illogical connection of the banker and the terrorist in presidential race is having little or no traction. The importance of the financial crisis has focused the attention of the mainstream media on what is truly the issue that is of concern to most voters, the economy. My only question is, if 100% of the callers on right wing talk shows drool their agreement that Obama and Ayers are a twosome, do you think this is a random sample of those actually dialing up the chatterers? Your humble servant is beginning to so think.

And I ain’t b.s.n’ ya.