It’s very interesting that Al Qaeda just endorsed McCain. Maybe it’s because McCain referred to Bin Laden’s mujahideen as freedom fighters in both debates.  John McCain said, “After we were able to help the Afghan freedom fighters drive the Russians out of Afghanistan we washed our hands of the the region.”

Al Qaeda’s endorsement of McCain is significant in that both of them need each other for support. Al Qaeda needs McCain as the evil American to rally their jihad on and McCain needs Al Qaeda’s terrorist threat to keep America scared and submissive.

McCain has admitted to helping Bin Laden. These ‘freedom fighters’ were also known as mujahideen. The US and CIA trained and recruited Muslim extremists from all over the world. 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries would get training with the Afghan mujahideen. One of the first non Afghan volunteers to join the mujahideen was Osama bin Laden, a businessman from a wealthy Suadi family. Bin Laden would assist the mujahideen by recruiting over 4,000 Saudi nationals and working closely with the CIA to raise money from private Saudi citizens starting the Maktab al-Khidamar, an organization that sent money arms and fighter to the mujahideen.

By referring to the mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters,’ McCain exposes the root of his foreign policy, a misguided view on good and evil. Since the Russians were bad, the mujahideen must be freedom fighters. So in funding and helping the ‘freedom fighters’, we actually created Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This parallels his policy in Iraq since Al Qaeda is bad and Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army fighting them, the Mahdi army must be good and we should fund them, creating one villain to fight another villain.

In fact the mujahideen was mostly controlled by warlords who were fighting for their own land and power which the Soviets were threatening, not freedom and democracy at all. The mujahideen would engage in many acts that would be considered terrorism.  They would blow up government buildings, air terminals, hotels and cinemas, many of the tactics Al Qaeda uses today. They would also use land mines and enlist child-soldiers, assassinate government officials and shoot down commercial airliners. So McCain and his like were actually condoning and supporting the very acts of terrorism that would come back to hurt the US.

The outdated, interventionist US foreign policy has cost a lot of money an created many unjust regimes. McCain has once again shown how out of touch he is with reality by still calling the mujahideen, Freedom Fighters, when their leaders and members have gone on to form some of the most deadliest organizations on the planet. The mujahideen was not fighting for freedom, they were fighting for the same islamic extremism that threatens us now.

McCain has all but assured the public that he would bring up William Ayers in the third and final debate. We all wondered what exactly Obama’s response would be. Judging by our early predictions, Obama made the right decision.

Before the debate I wrote the Top 5 Ayers counter attacks that Obama could use when McCain brought up Ayers. In my belief Obama made the right decision. He combined our first two counter-attacks, moving on bringing up the financial crisis and the two wars, saying that McCain was ignoring the major issues and focusing his whole campaign on attacking Obama on Ayers. While he could have counter attacked McCain on his questionable associations, he played it safe

Watch Obama Counter McCain’s Ayers Attacks

Here Was Our Top 5 Ways for Obama to Counter Attack McCain on Ayers

1.    Move On: John, we are in the midst of a financial crisis and two wars. Why are we concerning ourselves with a man who did some despicable things when I was 8 years old and who I barely know today. John if you spent as much time trying to work on an economic plan as you have trying to tie me to Ayers, you might still have some credibility.
2.    Defend Ayers: John, 40 years ago we were in the midst of racial injustice, and an unjust war. William Ayers tried to combat that using sabotage to protest those things. He never harmed, hurt or killed another human being and believed that what he was doing was helping this country. While I don’t agree the tactics he used 40 years ago, he since has been a champion for education and poverty. If Ayers was such a bad evil man, why was he a professor at an esteemed university? Why did Walter Annenberg, a former ambassador under Nixon, whose wife recently endorsed you, put Ayers on the board for his Chicago Annenberg Challenge?
3.    Counter Attack AKIP: John, its funny you keep on bringing up my supposed radical ties, when your running mate and her husband were members and or strongly affiliated with the Radical Alaskan Secessionist group, AKIP. They saw America as imperfect enough to want to secede from the union, not exactly Country First, John. And John can we talk about the AKIP’s founder Joe Vogler, who said ‘The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government.’ And who died in a plastic explosives deal gone wrong.
4.   Counter Attack Bin Laden: John, why are we talking about a man who is a college professor who has changed his ideology many years ago. Why aren’t we talking about Bin Laden, the real terrorist who is responsible or 9/11? In the past two debates, why did you call Bin Laden and his Mujahideen ‘Freedom Fighters,’ who drove the Russians out of Afghanistan? Do you still believe Bin Laden is a freedom fighter?
5.    Counter Attack G Gordon Liddy: John in politics you meet a lot of different people from lots of different backgrounds with a lot of different views. I’ve gone into great length explaining to the American people my relationship with Ayers. Can you explain your relationship with G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy was convicted for conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping in the Watergate investigation, and was a  man who concocted plans to firebomb the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and to kidnap anti-war protesters. This is the same Liddy who advised his listeners to shoot at ATF officers after the WACO incident,  saying “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. ..Kill the sons of bitches.” Why do you continue to go on this man’s radio show why did you tell him “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family… 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.’ Why do you call this man a friend?

John McCain finds himself in a precarious but familiar position heading into Wednesday evening’s final presidential debate. Senator Barack Obama has decisive leads in several stronghold states, and in states that typically favored Republicans, polls indicate he is running close to Sen. McCain, within a few percentage points or even.

The tone of the campaign has turned both finicky and petulant in the McCain circle, with supporters crying for Obama’s head in more aggressive stump speech language, and media conservatives jumping ship at a crucial time. Governor Sarah Palin has remarkably remained below the radar since her lackluster debate performance, and anger-inciting rallies. Her closely huddled advisers have spirited her away until further notice, as truths about her involvement in an Alaska ethics scandal begin to emerge. Gov. Palin has falsely asserted that the investigation found that she made no unlawful decisions, and then in a turnabout claimed that the findings were fueled by partisan forces (a vast left-wing conspiracy?)

John McCain had established himself as an icon of the American cultural divide at one point, embracing the divisive language of his party’s base. The Virginia GOP chairman, Jeffrey Frederick, recently tied Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden saying both men were connected to people who bombed the Pentagon. McCain has not made gains with negative rhetoric, has openly rejected the notion that Sen. Obama was “unsafe” to lead Americans after being questioned about his supposed Arab origins at a rally, and only mildly pursued accusations about Barack Obama’s links to Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

But on the heels of a financial rescue, the public is less concerned about potential character flaws in the candidates, while maintaining grave concern about the state of our now state-sponsored economy.

The Economy Matters

Who is better equipped to manage the most volatile market in decades?

President George W. Bush has proven himself a novice in dealing with both the precipitous lending crisis, and the following market collapse. Barack Obama has never been responsible for such a large budget. John McCain made several curious decisions surrounding the crisis, including suspending his campaign to dismantle the initial talks between House Republicans and Democrats about the financial bailout.

The Obama Plan Versus The McCain Plan

Republican John McCain is looking to turnaround his fortunes in the final presidential debate with Democrat Barack Obama, a forum focused on pocketbook issues and domestic policy Wednesday night.

Both candidates released proposals this week designed to boost the economy as financial institutions wobble and voters feel the pinch of a faltering economy. The debate is at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., with the candidates seated at a table with moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS.

With the economic crisis fueling public unease, Obama has built leads nationally and in key states as the turmoil has returned the nation’s focus to the policies of the unpopular President Bush. The burden now is on McCain to try to reverse his slide.

To that end, the Arizona senator took a new approach this week, positioning himself as a fighter for the American middle class and easing off his most direct attacks on Obama, an Illinois senator. McCain also took pains to separate himself from Bush.

“We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change. … As president I intend to act, quickly and decisively,” McCain said Tuesday in battleground Pennsylvania.

He announced a $52.5 billion economic plan Tuesday that calls for halving the tax rate on capital gains and reducing the tax on withdrawals from retirement accounts, among other measures. A day earlier, Obama unveiled a $60 billion proposal that includes an extension of unemployment benefits, a 90-day freeze on home foreclosures, penalty-free withdrawals from retirement funds and a $3,000 tax credit for each new job.

Both candidates call for doing away with the tax on unemployment benefits.

McCain has suggested that he is likely to bring up Obama’s links to William Ayers, a radical during the Vietnam War era. Ayers was a member of the violent Weather Underground group but later became a university professor in Chicago and an expert on education. He and Obama both worked with some of the same charity foundations in Chicago, and Ayers hosted a reception for Obama when he first ran for the Illinois state Senate.

“We’re always prepared for him to be hyperaggressive in his attacks,” Obama campaign aide Robert Gibbs said of McCain. “I just think that doesn’t work in an environment where so many people are concerned about the issues in front of them, not scare tactics they don’t see as helping to pay the bills.”

He said Obama will try to project an aura of calm leadership during the debate, which Gibbs said he achieved in two previous debates with McCain.

Obama’s campaign also has taken some shots at McCain, increasingly labeling him “erratic” and “lurching” for solutions to the economic crisis. The words suggest unsteadiness by the four-term senator, who is 72.

Polls conducted after the earlier debates found that more people thought Obama had won both.

Meanwhile, McCain has had trouble finding support among swing voters. A recent Associated Press-GfK Poll showed independents about evenly divided between the two candidates, which is problematic for McCain because registered Democrats decisively outnumber registered Republicans this year.

CNN’s national poll of debate watchers found that 54 percent said Obama did
the best job, compared to 30 percent who said McCain performed better.
While 51 percent of those polled said they had a favorable opinion of
McCain, unchanged from before the debate started, 64 percent said they
had a favorable opinion of Obama, up 4 percentage points from before
the debate.

By more than a 2-1 margin, 65 percent to 28 percent, more people
said they found Obama more likable than McCain during the debate,
according to the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey.

On the question of who won the debate, a CBS News/Knowledge Networks
poll of uncommitted voters found a similar result. Forty percent said
Obama won, 26 percent said McCain won, and 34 percent thought it was a
tie.

Playing off the second debate, the Obama campaign
released a TV ad Wednesday that continued the criticism that McCain’s
health care plan included taxing employer-based health care benefits.
“Instead of fixing health care, he wants to tax it,” the ad says.

McCain’s campaign, in turn, put out a TV spot contending that Obama
promises nearly $1 trillion in new spending in the wake of the $700
billion financial rescue plan Congress approved. “Sound crazy? the ad
asks. “It is.”

It took just eight minutes into Tuesday’s presidential debate
for Republican candidate McCain to land the first blow, blaming Obama
and Democrats for the collapse of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and
Fannie Mae.

“They’re the ones that, with the encouragement of Sen. Obama
and his cronies and his friends in Washington, that went out and made
all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to
pay back,” McCain said.

Obama responded: “I’ve got to correct a little bit of Sen. McCain’s
history, not surprisingly. … In fact, Sen. McCain’s campaign
chairman’s firm was a lobbyist on behalf of Fannie Mae, not me.”

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis has a stake in a Washington lobbying firm that received thousands of dollars a month from Freddie Mac until recently.

Davis is one of the many figures in both campaigns and near them who
have been targeted as reasons why each should not be supported. As they
head back on the road Wednesday, both campaigns say those associations
would again be highlighted.

McCain running mate Sarah Palin has questioned Obama’s ties to William Ayers,
who 40 years ago was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical
group that claimed responsibility for a series of bombings. Obama had a
limited relationship with Ayers, who lives in the same neighborhood and
teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Democrats have criticized McCain for his role in a 1980s banking
scandal. He was one of five senators who had accepted contributions
from Charles Keating Jr.,
a real estate speculator and savings and loan owner. Keating’s
institution failed and cost many investors in uninsured financial
products their life savings.

Neither figure came up during Tuesday’s debate. Nor did either
candidate call the other a liar, a familiar charge in this contentious
campaign.

The closest: “You know, Sen. McCain, I think the Straight Talk Express lost a wheel on that one,” Obama said.

During a discussion of an energy bill McCain offered up a two-word phrase that drew a quick reaction from the Obama campaign.

“You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one,” McCain said, pointing at his opponent.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said after the debate, “John McCain was all over the map on the issues, and he is so angry about the state of his campaign that he referred to Barack Obama as ‘that one’ — last time he couldn’t look at Sen. Obama, this time he couldn’t say his name.”

McCain also suggested some evasiveness on Obama’s part: “Nailing down
Sen. Obama’s various tax proposals is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.
There has been five or six of them and if you wait long enough, there
will probably be another one.”

In one pointed confrontation on foreign policy, Obama bluntly
challenged McCain’s steadiness. “This is a guy who sang ‘bomb, bomb,
bomb Iran,’ who called for the annihilation of North Korea — that I
don’t think is an example of speaking softly.”

That came in response to McCain’s accusation that Obama had threatened to invade Pakistan.

McCain said his rival “was wrong about Iraq and the surge. He
was wrong about Russia when they committed aggression against Georgia.
And in his short career he does not understand our national security
challenges. We don’t have time for on-the-job training.”

Obama countered with a trace of sarcasm that he didn’t
understand some things — like how the United States could face the
challenge it does in Afghanistan after spending years and hundreds of
billions of dollars in Iraq.

During last nights presidential debate twice John McCain referred to Obama as ‘That One.’ Not as Senator Obama, Barack, he, that man or him but ‘That One.’ The term already turned off a number of pundits who believed that it it was demeaning, dehumanizing and mean spirited. Just as in the last debate, unlike his perky VP, McCain refused to call his opponent by his name or even look him in the eye.

In this debate McCain continued his detached, condescending attitude to Obama by not giving Obama the respect he deserved, not as a Senator or Presidential candidate but as a human being by calling him ‘That One.’ ‘That One’ is not a term civilized human beings use to refer to other humans beings. An object can be referred to as ‘That One’ as in ‘those are some nice apples, I’ll have that one.’ An animal may be referred to as ‘That One’ as in ‘Mommy, I want a dog, can I have that one.’ The only time I have previously heard a human being refer to another human being as ‘That One,’ it usually in a very misogynist way. As in, damn them strippers look good, I’ll try ‘That One.’

How can McCain claim to have the ability to reach across the aisle and work with democrats when he refers to his democratic opponent as ‘That One?’ How can we expect him to deal with leaders of foreign nations that he might not like, when he is calling his own fellow American presidential candidate ‘That One?’

Watch McCain Call Obama ‘That One’

Iraq.

When Senator Obama said recently that the surge had succeeded “beyond our wildest expectations,” he conceded far too much. For complex reasons, some of which pre-date the Spring 2007 escalation in US force presence, violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically in the past eighteen months. Whether this is a temporary blip, or a permanent new reality, remains to be seen. As Senator Biden observed after the debate, the surge was intended as a means to an end: reduce the violence long enough to provide breathing space for the political process to work.

Whether the surge has accomplished that larger goal remains very much an open question. But, it is extraordinary that John McCain portrays the success of the now-ended surge as a sign of his own good judgment, ignoring his full-throated support for the invasion, and all of its false premises in the first place.

Obama’s single strongest point of the night was the moment he called McCain on this bizarre implication-noting that the war did not start in 2007, listing all of the basic facts about which McCain was dead wrong going back to 2001 and 2002, and pointing out all the catastrophic consequences of those bad judgments since 2003.

Russia.

Obama’s position on Georgia-that it should be a NATO member-is unsurprising. He has nothing to gain politically by arguing otherwise, but it’s still lame. Among the Alice-in-Wonderland premises of American foreign policy doctrine is the idea that Russia has no legitimate interest in, or concern about, the expansion of an adversarial military alliance all along its borders. Would the US ever tolerate any remotely comparable development anywhere close to its own borders? Every adult American knows the answer to that question. Ever heard of the Monroe Doctrine?

It’s especially annoying to listen to our political leaders fulminate about Russia’s incursion into Georgia when those same leaders have let pass, with scarcely any comment, the fact that Russia has, in the course of two separate military invasions since the mid-1990s, killed perhaps 100,000 people in Chechnya.

And, speaking of mass murder of civilians in remote regions, did anyone hear the word “Darfur” uttered even once during the debate? The Russian/Georgian conflict resulted in a few hundred deaths. That’s a tragedy. But, it’s not genocide. To recap: Russia’s near-genocidal incursions into Chechnya are irrelevant. So, apparently, is the genocide in Darfur. But, a border skirmish that both sides are responsible for and that lasted for about a week merits chest-thumping and ill-considered policy pronouncements during a presidential debate? Welcome to America.

More War.

John McCain has surrounded himself with foreign policy advisers that include the most fanatical elements of the neo-conservative movement. His relish for further war-in Iran and Syria, as well as Iraq, is a fact.

Obama’s position on Afghanistan is also disturbing. Few people would have denied the US the right to respond militarily in Afghanistan after 9/11. But, seven years later, our escalating presence in that country is only driving it further back into the hands of the Taliban. American bombings there repeatedly kill Afghan civilians and our increasingly provocative incursions into Pakistan threaten to de-stabilize a nuclear-armed country that has strongly and fanatically anti-American elements. A major military escalation there-as Obama proposes-could well inflame the situation further.

Furthermore, it’s no longer clear what, if any strategic value, capturing or killing Bin Laden has, as Obama repeatedly vowed to do. Al Qaeda is a diffuse network in dozens of countries, as Obama himself pointed out. And, the 9/11 plotters mostly prepared for their attack in places like Florida.

In short, the answer to terrorism is not necessarily conventional military action. Obama may know this, but, he’s still unwilling to challenge the fundamental, disturbing prerogative at the heart of American foreign policy: our unique right to project military force anywhere in the world, regardless of the consequences for innocent civilians.

Obama offers depressingly little in the way of “change” here. Is his position politically necessary? Perhaps. Is it disturbing and insidious? Certainly.

Having said all of the above, the single most relevant distinction between McCain and Obama from a foreign policy standpoint is this: John McCain’s temperament is unpredictable. He is convinced of the greatness of his own character and judgment.

Convinced of the greatness of his own character and uniqueness of his experience, McCain appears to believe that Americans should simply trust his judgment in matters of war and peace. Such acquiescence will give him free reign to be as aggressive and belligerent as he deems necessary. Will voters forget that that kind has affected our international standing, our ability to address urgent needs at home and, most fundamentally, our own national security?

His policy positions suggest that such belligerence and war mongering will keep Americans safe. His terrible ordeal in Vietnam has allowed him to use words like “honor” and “sacrifice” to mask an appetite for ceaseless war. And, it is McCain’s seeming indifference to the potentially catastrophic consequences of war, which makes President Bush by contrast look like a model of prudence and restraint.

The foreign policy aspects of round one more than any else reveal how misleading political labels are this political season. The dangerous radical this round is the Republican. And the cautious conservative is the Democratic standard-bearer.

Watch video of the debate here: