The Long View

 The Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch earned his place in history when, responding to Senator McCarthy at the McCarthy hearings in the early nineteen-fifties, Welch said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” McCarthy was infamous for destroying lives and careers by using guilt-by-association insinuations and by claiming that he had lists of communists (whom he often refused to identify or refused to identify the sources of his information). See Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible to get a sense of that time.

Now McPain flack Michael Goldfarb has asserted in a CNN interview that Obama has a “long history” of associating with anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American people. Trouble is, he couldn’t name any of them. “We all know who they are” is all he could manage.

The controversy arises from Obama’s association with a university professor named Khalidi who supports the Palestinian cause. Trouble is, so apparently does Senator McCain and members of the Republican Party. McCain and an organization that he was heading up, the International Republican Institute, gave Khalidi a half million dollars for his Center for Palestine Research and Studies.

Girls in white dresses shouldn’t throw mud.