Obama and Palin and Terrorist Connections

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I have never seen such hypocrisy as that being demonstrated by Republican vice presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin, in her obviously coached attempts to link Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama with former Weather Underground fugitive William Ayers.

Not only was the Obama-Ayers connection a very loose and tenuous one, but neither was it a long-standing friendship or affiliation. Governor Palin would have us believe that Senator Obama was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ayers and other Weathermen during their violent acts in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality of the situation is two-fold.

First, Ayers was never convicted of any terrorist acts though he definitely espoused domestic terrorist views and slogans more than 40 years ago, and admitted participating in several bombings of government buildings back then. Lest we forget, Obama was just eight years old when Ayers was opposing the U.S. government role in the Vietnam War. Today, Ayers is a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and is a renowned national leader in fostering educational and social reform and in developing new techniques for teaching inner-city children.

Most important, and what neither Governor Palin nor Republican presidential candidate John McCain have ever pointed out, in 2001 Ayers published articles that renounced and condemned terrorism in all forms, but he again repeated such condemnations in 2004. Senator Obama has himself strongly denounced Ayers’ 40-year-old actions.

The second reality, and where the true hypocrisy arises, is in the recent revelations that Governor Palin effusively praised the radical Alaskan Independence Party (AIP) and provided a welcoming video for its 2008 convention in Fairbanks, Alaska. In that tape, she emphasized the fact that she fully agreed with their political beliefs and activities and wished them luck in their political endeavors. In 1994, she attended the party’s convention, and in 2006, she delivered the keynote address at the AIP state convention while serving as mayor of her hometown, Wasilla. Her husband, Alaska’s “First Dude,” Todd Palin, was a member of AIP for more than seven years and only very recently resigned that membership. Governor Palin’s affiliations with the AIP were praised back then by its leaders and even again today in a statement released by an AIP spokesperson in Alaska.

The Alaska Independence Party’s basic mantra calls for the state’s ultimate independence from the “colonial bureaucracy in Washington” and declares the 1959 Alaska statehood as illegal and in violation of the United Nation’s charter and international law. In other words, AIP is a secessionist organization advocating treason against our country, and Governor Palin seemingly supports its tenets and goals.

AIP founder and longtime leader, Joe Vogler, was an ardent anti-Americanist who renounced his allegiance to the United States in 1992, stating, “I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions! The fires of Hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government.” (Hmmm, I wonder where Rev. Jeremiah Wright was in 1992?)

Interestingly, Vogler was killed in 1993 during an illegal buy of plastic explosives. Barely one year later, Sarah Palin attended the AIP convention! This was not something that happened while she was only eight years old

But nothing has changed. Even current AIP chairperson Lynette Clark recently declared that Alaska should be independent from the United States. And, to date, Palin has never renounced the goals of AIP nor her close ties to it and its secessionist leaders, many of whom live in her hometown of Wasilla.

Isn’t it time that Governor Palin and her mentor, Senator McCain (who disingenuously harped on Obama’s so-called connection to Ayers in the final presidential candidates’ debate) be asked to explain this interesting conundrum? It would seem to me that Palin deserves to be held accountable for her own more obvious terroristic affiliations and told to stop trying to create phantom links between Obama and Ayers.

There’s been a lot of talk that putting lipstick on a pig does not change the fact that it is still a pig. But I think the possibility of the American people buying a pig in a poke is an even more troubling analogy. Who is she, really?

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