Presidential elections bring out the worst in us. This year is no different. Barack Obama represents the new face of American politics. John McCain is the old face. McCain has no positive message, so he is attacking Obama's character at a time when the country is falling apart brick by brick. Somehow McCain's people think this will work. The tragedy will be that it does work.

For months, right-wing commentators have been screaming about Obama's relationship with a former radical, William Ayers, who used to belong to the Weather Underground, a late 1960's-early 1970's organization that protested the Vietnam war and other injustices with violence of its own. Ayers is now a respected college professor. Obama was a little kid when Ayers was advocating violence against American institutions, but who cares? The way the conservatives see it, Obama should not have anything to do with Ayers at all. True, Obama knows him, sat on some boards with him and used Ayers to launch his political career a decade ago, but does that make Obama any differerent from any other politician who belongs to organizations or boards with diverse personalities?

The rhetorical questions that I outlined above are legitimate questions, but they do not go to the heart of what is wrong with the Obama-Ayers angle, which the media has picked upon so much that the New York Times ran a front-page story last weekend exploring the true nature of the Obama-Ayers relationship. The conclusion is that there is not much to that relationship. No matter. McCain's shallow cheerleader and vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has incorporated the Ayers connection in her stump speeches, bringing out the worst in her audiences which have shouted out violent responses during these campaign rallies.

The real question is: how do we judge a candidate's associations? It remains off-limits for national candidates to have left-wing associations. We know that to be true. The red-baiting bullshit of the Cold-War era has never really left American culture. There is something wrong with opposing imperialistic wars and advocating the redistribution of wealth toward the middle class and poor. You cannot be too right-wing in this culture. No one is punished for repeatedly wrapping himself in the flag, supporting the troops no matter what they are doing abroad and proclaiming that capitalism and free enterprise remain the best economic models for mankind. It's when a candidate is liberal and asks too many questions about the inequities of American society that he is tarnished as anti-American and "not one of us." Our refusal to take social and economic problems seriously is precisely why American society is falling apart, brick by brick.

What about McCain's associations? It is no secret that he has relied on the foreign policy advice of Henry Kissinger, regarded as a statesman in polite society and the former Secretary of State under President Nixon. Associating with William Ayers is one thing. Associating with Henry Kissinger is quite another. Kissinger is probably responsible for more deaths and home and abroad than any other living American. He should be avoided like the plague. His role in prolonging the Vietnam war and its offshoots into Cambodia and Laos killed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia. These wars were illegal, and by any definition of the word, Kissinger is a terrorist for his role in these nightmares. Not to mention Kissinger's role in overthrowing the elected governments of countries like Chile in 1973, where he famously said that the U.S. government should not sit idly by when a foreign country elects the wrong person. The overthrow in Chile ushered in a vicious military dictator, Pinochet, who killed thousands of people and made Saddam Hussein look like a nice guy.

So why is McCain getting away with his association with Kissinger? Because American culture does not punish anyone for being too militaristic and violent -- so long as the militarism and violence is the name of the United States. Wholesale violence on behalf of the American government is legitimate. Retail violence against the American government -- like that practiced by Ayers -- is not. Obama cannot mention any of this during the campain. The American people do not have the intellectual infrastructure to appreciate these arguments, and even if they did, there is no way that the limited formate of the televised debates would allow for an intelligent discussion of these issues.