Andy McCarthy amps it up:

Not content to promote the bogus Ashley Todd "B for Barack" story, Andy McCarthy of the National Review has latched onto Stanley Kurtz' latest conspiracy theory. It's The Obama/Ayers/Khalidi Connection. Excerpts:

AMcC: I just caught up with an interview by one of my favorite guys, Hugh Hewitt, of another of my favorite guys, Stanley Kurtz.

Stanley, of course, has done singularly vital investigative work on Obama's background ... But Hugh's interview is a real primer for those who haven't delved into it much. It also spotlights an important point that has largely been missed. That is, while there has been focus on the Obama/Ayers tie and the Obama/Khalidi tie, no real attention has been paid to the Ayers/Khalidi tie — which is very strong and tightens the circle significantly.

FROM THE INTERVIEW

SK: Now if you lived just a few blocks away from someone, and you’ve been on a foundation together, and at least in the first year, you were on the board together, and then you’re on a panel together, when you run into each other, what are you going to be talking about? Here’s something I also haven’t mentioned. Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers were practically best friends. People don’t know this, and I’m actually saying this for the first time. I haven’t written about this. They were best friends, and we know that Obama had interactions with Khalidi, that Khalidi had held the coffee that kicked off his Congressional campaign, I believe. And Ayers and Khalidi were extremely close if you look at the acknowledgements in their books.

AMcC: ... these people were drawn to each other because they shared a revolutionary, anti-American ideology — these were not guys who just happened to know each other from the Hyde Park softball league.

And so it goes. McCarthy is convinced that Obama is an anti-American guy planning to hand over the country to Chavez or Putin or maybe ACORN. As Yglesias points out, McCarthy, Hewitt, and Kurtz, are all looking for what they want to see and ignoring reality. This is paranoid-conspiracy-land, for which there is an apt remark by Paul Johnson in his A History of the Jews. Writing about the blood libel: (p 211)

As with all conspiracy theories, once the first imaginative jump is made, the rest follows with intoxicating logic.

posted by Quiddity at 10/25/2008 07:31:00 PM