Wow! Barack Obama must have an amazing ability to foresee the future.

The McCain campaign responded to the report on Sarah Palin's abuse of power as Governor in a completely appropriate manner until it got to the last paragraph of their statement. There, they accused Barack Obama of initiating the investigation for partisan political purposes.

Don't the people who write this stuff ever do their homework? As reported in the Anchorage Daily News today, "In authorizing the investigation on July 28, the members of the legislative council voted 'to investigate the circumstances and events surrounding the termination of former public safety commissioner Monegan, and potential abuses of power and/or improper actions by members of the executive branch'." If the Obama people really did initiate the investigation, they did so before John McCain was even nominated to run for the Presidency and long before Governor Palin was selected as his running mate. Beyond that, the panel that did the investigation was non-partisan and voted 12-0 in support of their final conclusions.

Why don't we just take this story and put it in the same trash can as the press releases by those same writers accusing Barack Obama of being a terrorist because he associated occasionally with a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois, who admits he was a radical anti-war activist when he was a college student, a time when Obama was only 8-years old. C'mon, let's get serious.

By the time Bill Ayers held a coffee in his house to introduce his neighbors to Obama in his first political campaign, Ayers was already a distinguished professor at the U of I and his wife, another youthful radical, had achieved similar academic prowess at the Northwestern law school. In fact, by the time Obama had his first association with Ayers, he was already a respected advisor to Mayor Richie Daley and Deputy Mayor for Education for the City of Chicago. I've seen accusations that Obama helped Ayers spend the $50 million Annenburg grant in training Chicago public grade-schoolers in radicalism. If the partisans had done their research, they'd find that Ayers was awarded the $50 million grant by a panel of three distinguished educators who included the President of Brown University, the former dean of the Harvard Business School, and a man who served as the Deputy Secretary of Education for President George H.W. Bush. Further, it wasn't a $50 million grant, it was a "matching" grant which was quickly matched with an additonal $100 million, half from private corporations and half from both the state and federal government. Ayers was a bad guy as a student, but was never convicted of anything. But by the time Obama had any association with him, he was a highly respected educator. Wow! What an awful guy....not even in the same class as Charles Keating, who did spend many years in prison. And John McCain's friendship with Keating was a whole lot closer than Obama's was with Ayers.

Both stories demonstrate very selective partisan research and neither is of sufficient concern to question the character of either Senator Obama or Governor Palin or their qualifications to hold high office in the U.S. government.

That's how I feel about it, but I'd be willing to bet that the partisans on both sides continue to try to make a big deal of both these stories. After all, if the campaign strategists can get the public to get worked up over these incidents, they figure we won't take time to think about what the candidates have to say about the important issues that will effect the country. How dumb do they think we are?

Ooops, I shouldn't have asked. Maybe the know how dumb we are.