Best article about the election thus far comes from ... London?

Melanie Philips of the UK Daily Mail offers the most lucid, compelling article I've yet come across about the election. Not a ringing endorsement of McCain but a hot steaming cup of wake the fuck up about the free ride Obama has gotten and the savagery with which the left has gone after Palin.

Everyone is out to destroy Palin - but it's Obama's past we should examine


With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth - the United States. We ignore it at our peril.

From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you'd think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama's media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.

Inquiry

Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska's legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin's former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.

This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry's conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner's firing.

And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.

Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor's sister's ex-husband. But shouldn't the real question be why such a man was not fired?

What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama's connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.

This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.

Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.

Obama's own political career was actually launched in Ayers's Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.

Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers's revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.

Obama now says he didn't know of Ayers's terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn't know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: 'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'

The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was 'the motor-force of revolution'. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers' book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.

Read her full article here.