McCain and G. Gordon Liddy
When I think about honor, integrity, and the principles that make America great, my thoughts turn naturally to Nixon administration apparatchiks. For some reason Steve Chapman doesn’t see things that way:
How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy’s home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator’s campaigns — including $1,000 this year.
Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend,” and McCain sounded like one. “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family,” he gushed. “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”
Liddy is, one should note, unrepentant for his crimes on behalf of Nixon.
41 Responses to “McCain and G. Gordon Liddy”
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October 5th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
How about the outright haunt of actual, unreconstructed WWII fascists, the World Anti-Communist League? Not like Reagan & his friends’ love of evangelical Guatemalan anti-Mayan genocidalists’ is worthy of any attention compared to that scourge of an entire generation, Bill Ayers.
October 5th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Ayers and Obama are not close they just happen to live in the same neighborhood,
October 5th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
“Liddy is, one should note, unrepentant for his crimes on behalf of Nixon.” (NatGeoChannel-type-scary music-here)
Puh-leeze. This winger has given plenty of good laughs. Don’t go all Chinese cultural revolution on us.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Nixon had the last revenge. I don’t know if there was a Reagan connection, but all the other Repubs of the last thirty years have benefited from Nixon WH veterans in their campaign to destroy America. Rove and his minions, Liddy et. al, Bush’s Lee Atwater, etc. etc.
Come to think of it, even Paulson, the creator of the biggest
financial disaster of the last fifty years, was a Nixon appointee.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Did you even read the article? Unless you’re an idiot, Steve Chapman is criticizing McCain for Liddy’s support; that he shouldn’t be appearing on his show or accepting his support in any way.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Liddy is toxic. See a couple of quotes below, from Wikipedia:
* August 26, 1994 – Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests.” … “They’ve got a big target on there, ATF. Don’t shoot at that, because they’ve got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots…. Kill the sons of bitches.
* September 15, 1994 – If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they’re wearing flak jackets and you’re better off shooting for the head.
Liddy excused these quotes by saying they referred to cases in which the ATF was acting illegitimately, but my sense is that those circumstances don’t absolve someone who uses deadly force against law enforcement officers.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Regarding McCain’s “honor and integrity”, there’s an absolutely explosive article in current issue of The Nation…which the editors were clearly too chicken to put on the cover…
Lots of related McCain stories floating around, privately confirmed to me by highly credible sources, but too “hot” for the American MSM to touch with a ten-foot pole…
October 5th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Isn’t he married to Bob Dole’s wife?
October 5th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Harry, you need to learn how to read sarcasm.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Re RKU
I haven’t read the Nation article but is Mr. RKU referring to the recurring claim that McCain has been and is being blackmailed by the Vietnamese Government because of allegedly bad behavior during his incarceration in the Hanoi Hilton? This claim appeared on counterpunch some months ago.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Whoa, the way to defend Obama is not to look for folks that may match Ayers’s resume…I mean, let’s be honest here, Ayers was a terrorist that was prepared to murder innocent people. Liddy was a two-bit crook.
The bottom line is that while Obama and Ayers may have crossed paths over the years, Obama has denounced him and his past actions. Unless one can find McCain associating with terrorists, I don’t think that one should go down this road.
October 5th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
>…Liddy was a two-bit crook.
An unrepentant crook who advocates killing federal agents. One way to terrorize the population is to target for killing, the authorities.
October 5th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
It should be obvious that BHO and Ayers were far closer than Steve Chapman pretends. I have no doubt that MattY is intellectually honest enough to recognize that and call Chapman out instead of simply quoting him approvingly (as he did above).
P.S. Looks like Ayers had a greater role in the board than previously known. The NYT knew that, but didn’t publish it.
October 5th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
24, you are such a silly little girl.
80% of Americans say America is on the wrong track. When asked to identify the most important issue to them, the majority say the economy, health care or the US military occupation of Iraq. Bill Ayers isn’t on the list.
Smarter trolls, please.
October 5th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Re: Bill Ayers isn’t on the list.
And quite a few Americans were born too late to have any memories of the 60s. The GOP’s endless waving of the tye-died hippie T-shirt, along with the latest version of “Amnesty, Acid and Abortion”, is playing to an steadily shrinking base. Running against the 60s makes about as much sense as running against the Great Depression did by the late 70s for the Democrats (and will work about as well). Imagine if in the election of 1908 people had accused Taft or Bryan of partying with some very obscure Confederate figure– they would have been laughed off the campaign stump.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Ed Smithe,
Liddy plotted to firebomb a public building, the Brookings building. That’s same thing Ayers did.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
JonF, it’s kind of interesting how the entire Republican campaign strategy gets up-ended when the Democrats nominate someone whose adult life began well after the 1960s were over.
October 5th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
The difference between John McCain and Bill Ayers is that John McCain’s bombs actually killed people.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I wonder if Sarah Palin is related to famous Alaskan Separatist Todd Palin?
October 5th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Whoa, the way to defend Obama is not to look for folks that may match Ayers’s resume…I mean, let’s be honest here, Ayers was a terrorist that was prepared to murder innocent people.
For what it’s worth, the Weathermen warned people to evacuate before most bombings. They killed more of their own members by accident than anyone else. Don’t get me wrong, they were terrorists, but we’d all be thrilled if today’s terrorists were as considerate and/or incompetent as them. The 1960s and 1970s must have been a very weird time.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Except for accidentally blowing themselves up, didn’t the Weathermen kill something like *two* innocent people?…
And during the same period, didn’t America kill something like 2,000,000+ Vietnamese, the bulk of them civilians?…
Seems to me that 2,000,000 is a whole lot bigger then 2…
October 5th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
“Liddy was a two-bit crook.”
The bombing in Brookings was supposed to be a very small charge–”blow the safe” implied that it was supposed to be used in a burglary. I’ve never heard anything about “firebombing” Brookings.
But Liddy was not just a burglar (a “two-bit crook”), he viewed himself as a hitman, too. He once left the White House with the impression that he had accepted a mission to kill Jack Anderson, and he admitted that he was willing to kill during the burglaries if anyone got in the way.
I used to listen to Liddy’s radio show all the time at work as a teenager (early 90s)–I had no choice, since I was a dishwasher and the cook set the station. I do remember the outrageous stuff he said about ATF, as well as the fact that all the “normal” conservative types would appear on his show.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Liddy is a nasty b—d. El Cid, thanks for bringing up his support for genocide in Central America.
The sundry Central American creeps that Reagan and his boys supported make Ayers look like a Sunday School teacher. This is why I’ve never voted Republican and don’t intend to start now.
October 5th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Let’s also not forget that immortal quote from Sen. Inouye during the Senate Watergate hearings about how “Mr. Liddy threatened to kill Mr. MacGruder, and Mr. MacGruder decided to terminate Mr. Liddy’s employment.”
(Or, for that matter, his insistence on making his post-sentencing statement to the court entirely in German.)
As for the Obama/Ayers flap: the most interesting thing I sw about it in the papers last night was that any attack on Obama’s (much closer) connection to Pastor Wright is apparently off limits because McCain explicitly declared such a strategy to be “immoral” in a speech last spring, and it’s now too late for him to back off. We can, I think, console ourselves that Obama’s connection to Wright — and McCain’s connections to Falwell and and Liddy — are standard-model cold-blooded political pragmatism; there’s no evidence that they actually share these creatures’ belief at all. Now, Sarah Palin and her pastor (complete with his denunciations of “witchcraft” and “evil python spirits”, and his continuing enthusiasm for the head of Jews For Jesus after the latter announced in his church that Israelis deserve to be slaughtered by Palestinians because they haven’t converted to Christianity, all of this while Palin st in the congregation (or actually had hands laid on her in the “anti-witchcraft” ceremony) — that may be a different matter. There’s a real chance that she actually believes some of this stuff.
October 6th, 2008 at 2:22 am
It’s a little known fact that there were more FBI men posing as Weathermen, than actual Weatherman.
October 6th, 2008 at 6:52 am
“One way to terrorize the population is to target for killing, the authorities.”
Correct – and any competent terrorist would do that. In fact, when the Russian political party “The People’s Will” invented the term “terrorism” (although of course the actual concept goes back to Biblical times and probably before – Jesus’ followers included Sicarii, who were the Jewish equivalent of Al Qaeda in their day, at least as far as the Romans and the Jewish collaborators were concerned), they specifically restricted the use of violence to the killing of state officials. As did I in my concept of terrorism, although I would have included numerous other power holders in society, such as certain corporate CEOs, certain media bloviators, etc.
I knew there was something about Liddy I liked – that and the fact that when he appeared several times on “Miami Vice”, he had it put in his contract that his character had to escape at the end of the show.
However, equating him with any sort of radical revolutionary is a bit much. I’m not talking about Ayers here, since the Weathermen were at best a joke compared to “real” terrorists (and most of them are jokes, if you’ve ever read a biography of Carlos the Jackal.)
I’m talking about Liddy basically being a fanatical gun rights person, which is where his dislike of ATF people comes in. That’s no where near the sort of ideology that actually recommends killing Federal personnel in general. Let’s not forget – Liddy WORKED FOR the government. He’s nothing like me. I would be fine with basically killing any Federal, state or local government employee for practically any reason, as long as it was effective and for a purpose.
So you can’t accuse Liddy of being a “terrorist”, unless you include specifically the concept of a “state terrorist”. And if you do, then naturally McCain thinks he’s a great guy.
OTOH, I would have put a bullet in his head if I ever ran across him back in the day when I was running my program.
Ayers was a nobody and the whole Weathermen movement was irrelevant, nothing but a bunch of suckers playing into the hands of the state. Pretty much the way the Palestinians have been playing into the hands of the Israelis for years by blowing up a bunch of civilians and not actually killing the head Zionists in Israel. Useless.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I find it ironic that Mixon was a much better president than we have had for the last 8 years though.
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