Barack Obama and his minions have spent a lot of time decrying John McCain for "lying" in various ads, but Obama's Spanish language ad tying McCain to decades-old Rush Limbaugh parodies is completely deceitful.
Rush Limbaugh wrote a nice op-ed explaining the deception and its implications.
I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.
Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.
Here's the relevant part of the Spanish-language television commercial Mr. Obama is running in Hispanic communities:
"They want us to forget the insults we've put up with . . . the intolerance . . . they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much."
Then the commercial flashes two quotes from me: ". . . stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and "You shut your mouth or you get out!"
And then a voice says, "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote . . . and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain . . . more of the same old Republican tricks."
Much of the media that is uninterested in Mr. Obama's connections to unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright have so far gone along with the attempt to tie me to Mr. McCain. But Mr. McCain and I have not agreed on how to address illegal immigration. While I am heartened by his willingness to start by securing the borders, it is no secret that we have fundamental differences on illegal immigration.
And more to the point, these sound bites are a deception, and Mr. Obama knows it.
To say Limbaugh has differences with McCain on immigration is an understatement. In fact, as Betsy notes, McCain's immigration position very nearly lost him the nomination, and is yet another example of McCain's tendency to do what he thinks is right versus what the party wants. Yet, Obama's ad accuses McCain of anti-Latino sentiment that is completely false.
The ad is the sort of thing Obama should be ashamed of, particularly when his surrogates whines about racism when legitimate questions of his associations arise.
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