Feb

Local Talk Show Host, McCain, and Barack’s Middle Name

Cincinnati’s Bill Cunningham, talk show host on WLW-700 radio, was “repudiated” by John McCain today for his remarks linking Obama to Chicago’s corrupt political machine and for mentioning Barack’s middle name, “Hussein.”

After his campaign rally in Cincinnati today, Republican presidential candidate John McCain apologized for remarks by conservative WLW talk show host Bill Cunningham that McCain said he thought were offensive to Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

“I take responsibility and I repudiate what he said,” McCain told reporters after the rally.

Cunningham came out on stage to whip up the crowd as he often does at Republican campaign events in Cincinnati.

He repeatedly referred to Obama using his middle name — Hussein — and said that Obama was a product of the “Chicago-Daley mob.” McCain was not on stage when these remarks were made but was told of them later.
“I will not tolerate anything in this campaign that denigrates either Sen. Obama or Sen. (Hillary) Clinton,” McCain said. Read more….

Look, no one here thinks running a national campaign against Obama making an issue out of his middle name is a good idea, BUT….

Isn’t Hussein his middle name? So now we can’t say his middle name?!! So we’ve never heard Ronald Wilson Reagan, William Jefferson Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George Walker Bush?

Yes using Hussein is pejorative, but so is calling President Bush, “Dubya”, a weak play on his middle name, to make him out as stupid and uneducated.

Additionally, Cunningham was criticized for pointing out Obama’s penchant for associating with shady characters. It is what it is and to me, it does seem shady:

Meanwhile in Chicago, a federal judge has ordered the jailing of one of Obama’s former top fundraisers, Antoin Rezko. Rezko was indicted in 2006 on charges of business fraud and influence peddling but had been free on bond. On Monday a judge revoked bond and ordered him to be held in jail. Rezko has raised as much as $200,000 for Obama since 1996 and helped Obama purchase his home. Link

On top of that, Obama bought property through Rezko at far below market prices. A quid pro quo?

Additionally, do you associate with terrorists? Most decent people shun criminals. Obama didn’t and willingly associated with members of the Weather Undeground, an American 1960s radical group.

Character? No, character requires that you not associate with radical, dangerous, threats to America.

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”

Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides. Read more….

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