October 30, 2008 01:09 AM UTC

The "idiot wind"

• 2 Comments
• by: Fidel's dirt nap

Sarah Palin is now sinking to falsely accusing a University of Columbia professor whom Obama knows, as being a spokesperson for the PLO, from the CNN article below.

I have bolded the response from the Professor, Rashid Khalidi.  So now I guess everyone who holds an opinion that is contrary to McCain/Palin is A) unpatriotic B) hates America, or C) might be a terrorist.

This is McCarthyism at its worst.  Haven’t we been through this before ? I think Khalidi’s response is so apropos.  There truly is an idiot wind passing through this country right now – I just can’t wait until it blows back to Wasilla.

(CNN) — Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday said Sen. Barack Obama has ties to a Columbia University professor who she said is “a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.”

Gov. Sarah Palin says it’s “not negative campaigning to call someone out on their record.”

The Obama campaign said on its Web site that “ugly insinuations about Barack Obama’s relationship with a former neighbor and university colleague … are completely false.” The professor has denied he was a PLO spokesman.

Palin said her assertion “is not negative campaigning to call someone out on their record.”

“It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years,” Palin said at an event in Bowling Green, Ohio.

“This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi … in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he’s a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.”

Sen. John McCain’s campaign repeatedly has sought to tie Obama to former 1960s radical William Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground. Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois.

Khalidi is a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, and he was a contemporary of Obama’s while on the faculty of the University of Chicago.

Khalidi has been a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and has accused the country of “occupying” Palestinian territories. But he has denied acting as a PLO spokesman during a seven-year period in the 1970s and 1980s.

Khalidi said Wednesday, “I am not speaking to the media at this time, and certainly not until this idiot wind passes.”