Pot, meet Kettle: McCain's Radical Pal, David Ifshin

Over the weekend Sarah Palin took the opening dive into the pre-election mudpit with her accusation that Obama has been guilty of "palling around with terrorists".
This was not a reference to Middle Eastern terrorists -- at least not overtly -- but derives from the fact that Obama once served on the same non-profit community board as former 60's radical Bill Ayers.

Back when Obama was a little boy, Ayers was one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a terrorist organization responsible for a number of bombings in the 60's. Since then, the Weather Underground has gone out of existance, and Ayers has become a university professor who once hosted a community fundraiser for Obama's campaign at his house. Obama, though he never knew Ayers in his radical days, has repeatedly denounced his radical, violent past.

But, according to Marc Cooper of the Huffington Post, McCain has a radical pal in his closet as well -- one of the most prominent of Vietnam-era student radicals, David Ifshin, the same David Ifshin who denounced America on Radio Hanoi as McCain sat locked up as a POW.
Ifshin led the takeover of his Syracuse university campus , aided radicals trying to shut down Washington DC with streets protests in May 1971, and went with folksinger Phil Ochs to Uruguay, where they joined a local university takeover, got arrested and were deported.

Like Ayers, Ifshin grew up and went mainstream following the 60's. Ayers became a university professor, whereas Ifshin went into politics and became General Counsel to the Bill Clinton campaign as well as a leader in pro-Israeli causes. Also like Ayers, Ifshin never renounced nor apologized for his radical past until the day he died in 1996, and apparently McCain had no problem with that.
Cooper writes:
"Senator John McCain forged a close personal friendship with Ifshin, as well as a working political alliance. Together they worked to establish the Institute for Democracy in Vietnam and partnered up on the issue of normalization of relations with Vietnam.

As recently as two years ago, speaking at Columbia College, McCain affectionately and warmly recalled his relationship with Ifshin saying:

"We worked together in an organization dedicated to promoting human rights
in the country where he and I had once come for different reasons. I came to
admire him for his generosity, his passion for his ideals, for the largeness of
his heart, and I realized he had not been my enemy, but my countryman . . . my
countryman ...and later my friend. His friendship honored me. We disagreed over
much. Our politics were often opposed, and we argued those disagreements. But we worked together for our shared ideals."

That John McCain is unrecognizable from the man who today stands behind the scurrilous attacks suggesting that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists because Bill Ayres - when Obama was literally eight years old--stupidly fancied himself an armed revolutionary.
The old John McCain was able to overcome his own repulsion against a young man who went on the radio station of the enemy who was holding and torturing him and built a warm friendship with him. If Obama were to run commercials today criticizing McCain for hanging out with the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam era, it would be nearly as execrable as the McCain campaign's current smears around Bill Ayres."

I agree.
In case you haven't noticed, folks, in the words of Tennessee Williams, there's "a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room... there ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity."

You can smell it, hanging all around this election and around Governor Palin in particular ... and yes, Tennessee, it smells like death.