Democrats Have Developed Anti-Swift Boat Attack Weapons System

Sarah Palin and others have been talking about Obama's supposed close friendship with Bill Ayers, who back in the 60's was a member of the Weather Underground involved in anti-war bombings.

She doesn't mention that Ayers was never convicted of anything and is now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois - Chicago. The Washington Post Fact Checker looks at the whole story if you want more on this. As many have pointed out, Obama was eight years old when Ayers was in the Underground.

This sort of sniping from the Republicans - piecing together the flimsiest facts and blowing them up into a completely new and blatantly false, out of context, accusation - has a long history in US presidential campaigns, from Willie Horton, to Swift Boat, and to stuff like this.

What's new, is that the Democrats seem to have been ready for this and in response have released a very slick - music, shots, story - video about McCain's involvement in the Keating Five affair.




We'll see how the facts of this video play out, but the narrator was a banking regulator who was intimately involved in the trying to regulate Lincoln Savings. He's now a professor at the University of Kansas and the author of at least two books on this subject. Here are book reviews the University of Missouri Kansas City Law School Web Page on Black cites:

His book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (University of Texas Press 2005) has been called “a classic” by George Akerlof, the Nobel Laureate (Economics, 2001).

More directly related is this:

Robert Kuttner, in his Business Week column, proclaimed:


Black's book is partly the definitive history of the savings-and-loan industry scandals of the early 1980s. More important, it is a general theory of how dishonest CEOs, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time -- enough to create massive damage.

Just compare the Palin speech and accusations to the Obama campaign produced video with Professor William Black. You can't help but believe that Black knows a lot more about Keating and McCain than Palin knows about Ayers and Obama. And that Black's motivation seems a lot less self serving than does Palin's.

The real story in my mind, though, is the Obama campaign seems to have developed an anti-swiftboat weapon. Do they have others ready and waiting in case the McCain campaign decides to keep fabricating more stories about Obama?