I suppose most of us have done things in the past for which we carry deep regrets. The idealism of young hearts and minds is often degraded by their lack of wisdom gained through experience. So when the mistakes of the past come up, we are quick to acknowledge how utterly foolish we were. In other words, we express our regret. We repent. But not so with the now infamous Bill Ayers. Not only did he do something far worse than most of us (participate in the bombings of the Pentagon and the Capitol), he has expressed regrets as recently as 2001 that he didn't do enough (i.e. he should have done more bombings). Americans are forgiving people. When someone comes clean and seems genuinely sorrowful, we are willing to give them a second chance. But Barack Obama has palled around with this abhorent character for over ten years now knowing full-well, not only his "dispicable deeds" but also his lack of repentance. This is the issue John McCain should have brought up last night. How would Obama have answered if McCain had looked him in the eye and said, "Mr. Obama, while I was rotting in a Vietnamese prison camp, your friend Bill Ayres was bombing the Pentagon, an act for which he has never expressed the slightest remorse. You may consider him acceptable company, but I consider him to be a foul and loathsome traitor." Now that might have been enough to turn the tide.
3 comments:
Dave, as I glanced quickly at your post, I thought I read that McCain had actually made that statement to Obama. What a fool I was. McCain has loser written all over him. He's Bob Dole. All that is necessary for evil to triumph--and Obama is evil--is for good men to do nothing.
Dave: I appreciate your insights about remorse, contrition, and repentance. You're absolutely right that we've all done things for which we should be ashamed. And it's shame that is the prerequisite for remorse. What we have in the case of Ayers - and in my observation, in the case of liberals generally- is a fundamental want of shame.
That's why, among other things, when a Republican gets caught in an illicit affair, he resigns in shame; when a liberal gets caught being serviced in the Oval Office or having his boyfriend run a prostitution ring out of his condo, he's celebrated. Liberals in these cases talk about Republican hypocrisy; that's wrong. The issue is human fallibility and the shame that should go along with not living up to your standards. But that implies that you have standards, a concept alien to liberals. They, by their own definition, can never be hypocrites. isn't that convenient?
One would like to turn to Ayers - or Obama for that matter- and ask, "Have you, finally, sir, no sense of shame?" But such a question would be pointless, for it would not be understood. Shame? What's that?
This is, with apologies to John Edwards, the real meaning of the "Two Americas."
Full disclosure here: I don't watch the debates and haven't done so since the 1990s. Watching these charades is an exercise in frustration for me, something I don't need. I find no enlightenment, no insights, no wisdom and certainly no entertainment value. As I've grown older, I've learned, slowly, to stop watching stuff that makes me yell at the inanimate TV screen. ON debate night, I watched the Dodgers and Phillies, a much more satisfying way to spend an evening wife my dear wife, who has become a baseball fan, too. We know who we're voting for - and why - and no silver tongued devil (?) is going to change our minds. And I take it as a given that John McCain is going to disappoint me
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