Not just Obama's "Swift Boat"

From The Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Hillary Clinton's reference to a Chicago charitable organization may have flown over the heads of viewers of Wednesday's Democratic debate. But many in Washington wonder whether the Woods Fund could be the "swift boat" of this campaign.

The Woods Charitable Fund of Chicago is a touchstone in the latest controversy swirling around Sen. Obama's past associations. In this case, the association is with William Ayers, a 1970s radical turned college professor, whose tenure as a director of the charity overlapped with Sen. Obama's for three years ending in 2001.

Mr. Ayers is a familiar figure in the annals of radical politics: He was a lieutenant in the Weather Underground group, an organization that advocated acts of anarchy as a way to end the Vietnam War. Accused of taking part in a bomb-making exercise that blew apart a Manhattan townhouse and killed three members of the group, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, also of the Weather Underground, went into hiding for about a decade, later turning themselves in.

Correction: The Weathermen advocated and committed acts of terrorist violence.

[. . .]

Sen. Obama puts up no argument. "That was the rollout of the Republican campaign against me," Sen. Obama said Thursday of the debate, pledging to a North Carolina audience to respond "sharply and crisply" when it does arise.

But first Sen. Obama has begun with Sen. Clinton, noting during the debate that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, during the last days of his administration, commuted the sentences of two Weather Underground members, including Susan Rosenberg, who was involved in the 1981 heist of a Brinks armored truck in New York that left two policemen dead.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign, sidestepped a question about whether Sen. Clinton approved of her husband's pardoning Ms. Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, a Weather Underground member implicated in several bombings in the 1980s.

In addition to commuting the sentences of the two Weathermen Bill Clinton also pardoned a couple of Puerto Rican terrorists. He did this to curry favor with New York's Puerto Rican community in order to aid Hillary's Senate run.

Hillary bases her claim to be qualified for the presidency upon her "experience" but that claim is only valid if we assume that she was deeply involved with Bill in the governing of the nation as a kind of "co-president". This is, after all, how they presented themselves when Bill was campaigning for the White House.

However the march of time, with a great deal of help from talk radio and the blogosphere, has brought to light a great many unsavory details about the former Clinton administration and Hillary now finds herself harmed far more than helped by her past as "co-president".

Hillary's inability to fully exploit the Ayers case because of her and her husband's own dirty hands is just the latest example of a Clinton administration skeleton breaking out of the closet and parading itself before the world.

Remember all those years ago when everyone thought that Bill would be Hillary's greatest asset on her cakewalk into the Oval Office? Instead she is forced to wear him like Marley's ghost wore his chain.

The thing to remember here is that during the general election John McCain will not have Hillary Clinton's baggage weighing him down on this issue. The only thing holding him back will be this retarded obsession with running what he calls a "clean campaign". Every time you criticize either Clinton or Obama in any but the most bland and general terms McCain runs to the nearest microphone and denounces you while reassuring the public that both Clinton and Obama are fine honorable people each of which would make excellent, excellent presidents.

Since I don't care which of the three stooges wins this November I am not bothered by this. However if McCain wants to win he had better understand that the Democrat party has transformed politics, at least at the national level, into a knife fight in a sewer with the only rule being that the last person standing wins.