A desperate McCain to opt for low road in final debate

An obviously desperate John McCain has decided to resort to character attacks in the final Presidential debate tomorrow with Barack Obama. McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds has told Fox News "I expect John McCain will ask Barack Obama to speak truthfully about his relationship with friend and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers." And today McCain seems to want to blame Obama for bringing up the subject, because, according to what McCain told a reporter in St. Louis today, Obama said McCain "didn't have the guts" to talk about William Ayers in the final debate.

I don't know if Obama said that or not, but I sure hope he did. Because that obviously means the Democratic nominee is setting a trap for the foundering McCain and the Arizona senator is blindly walking right into it. If, on the other hand, Obama didn't say that, then McCain is simply and out and out liar. He may distort the truth -- both candidates have been guilty of that -- but I can't see McCain sinking lower than he alredy has.

Both McCain and his hatchet-woman running mate Sarah Palin were attacking Obama viciously on this topic last week, much to the delight of their core supporters but much to the chagrin of the rest of the American public. When the inevitable backlash began, they scaled back or, in the words of a campaign official, they put "gloves back on." But Bounds is now hinting the gloves are off again because not only will McCain bring up this irrelevant subject during the debate, but Bounds said, the American television viewing public should brace themselves for a host of new attack ads on Ayers.

For those not keeping up with the William Ayers subject, he is a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, is a professor at Northwestern University's school of law. In the mid-1990s, Ayers and Dohrn hosted a meet-and-greet party to introduce Obama to their neighbors when Obama was making his first run for the Illinois Senate. Ayers contributed $200 to that Obama campaign. Between 1999 and 2002, both Ayers and Obama served on the board of a not-for-profit foundation called the Woods Fund. That board met four times a year. Ayers and Obama also interacted in their roles with the Annenberg Challenge, a program in Chicago involved in school reform issues.

The issue here, however, is what Ayers did before he met Obama -- before, in fact, he underwent somewhat of a political and personal transformation. Ayers, 63, and Dohrn were members of an anti-Vietnam War organization called the "Weather Underground," which the FBI categorized at the time as a "domestic terrorist group." They spent 10 years as fugitives until they surrendered in 1980. Federal charges against them, however, were dropped.

So McCain and Palin are out their busy linking Obama to Ayers -- not the respected college professor and school reform advocate Ayers, but the "domestic terrorist" Ayers. It just shows how low a man will go when he's only interested in winning at any cost (which was evident when he selected Palin as his running mate).