John McCain has run a campaign that has been nothing but attack ads, lies, smears and innuendo. That is what Republicans now do as a party. For this election, that is what John McCain and the Republicans do because they have nothing positive to offer. They have no answers for the future, because they are the past, and the past is eight years of failure by the worst administration in the history of this nation.

Again and again through this election cycle McCain and the Karl Rove neo-con thugs to whom he turned over control of his campaign have tried to find some line of attack that they could zero in on to distract the American people.

This week they tried linking Obama to a widely respected Middle East scholar named Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. After all, they refer to Obama as “Hussein”, his middle name, and “Rashid Khalidi”, how much more Muslim sounding and threatening can you get, right? That should work, let’s try it, was clearly their plan.

Drudge Report tried to start the ball rolling, but quickly pulled his latest contribution to the wing-nut hate and smear campaign when Huffington Post revealed that John McCain himself had been a huge contributor to Mr. Khalidi! McCain Funded Work Of Palestinian His Campaign Hopes To Tie To Obama

Today the Washington Post writes on this latest epic failure at negative attacks, instead of a positive message of what McCain and the Republicans have to offer for the future.

An ‘Idiot Wind’
John McCain’s latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism

Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A18

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.
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Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.