When Barack Obama emerged as the Democrat Party’s nominee for US president, his Republican opponent John McCain and McCain’s Boogie Man Steve Schmidt launched a reprehensible attack on the character of Obama. As the attacks intensified, the smear tactics became eerily reminiscent of the character assassination campaign waged by Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush against his Democratic opponent Bill Clinton in 1990.

The 2008 copy-cat character assassination scheme isn’t the result of a simple twist of fate, but of the political machinations of longtime Republican alliances. Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager, is the protégé of Karl Rove. Rove, a visible presence and voice in the administration of President George W. Bush for nearly eight years, cut his political teeth in the spin rooms of Lee Atwater, the GOP’s grand master of negative campaigning.

Atwater is best remembered as the architect of the slimy racist, fear-mongering Willie Horton attack-ad that effectively neutralized Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in his run against Republican candidate George H.W. Bush, former CIA director and two-term US vice president.

Curiously, what neither Barack Obama nor John McCain have spoken of (in public, at least) is a significant bit of political history that most Americans don’t seem to remember: Damning allegations created by Lee Atwater and voiced by President George H. W. Bush that his 1990 presidential opponent, Bill Clinton, had once worked as a spy for the Soviet Union.

In that race, Bush found himself ineffective in attacking Clinton on the issues, so instead he began the vicious attack on his opponent’s character: While Clinton had been a college student in the later 1960s, Bush charged, he served as a spy for the communist USSR. Put simply, Bush charged the former governor of Arkansas with an act of treason.

In the current contest for the White House, John McCain launched an almost identical attack on Barack Obama. McCain charged his 47-year-old Democratic opponent with having ties to ‘60s/’70s domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, a former leader of the radical ‘60s/’70s Weather Underground movement that claimed responsibility for political bombings in protest of the unpopular War in Vietnam.

When they launched their scurrilous attacks on the character of Barack Obama, it was clear that McCain, Schmidt, and Rove hoped the collective memory of American voters would draw a blank vis a vis the GOP’s smear campaign against Bill Clinton 18 years earlier.

What wasn’t clear is why former President Bill Clinton, a key Obama supporter, remained silent about the smarmy tactics used by the Republicans to discredit not only Obama’s character, but also his own.

Another thing that wasn’t clear was why John McCain didn’t attack Bill Clinton for his support of a presidential candidate who, according to McCain and Palin, allegedly “pals around with terrorists.”

Perhaps that’s because it was President Bill Clinton who, before leaving office, bestowed executive pardons and prison commutations upon convicted and imprisoned domestic terrorists Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, both former members of the Weather Underground with longtime direct ties to Bill Ayers, and both of whom were arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for their participation in the violent 1981 armed attack on a Brinks security truck in Nyack, NY. Unlike the Vietnam War era bombings of political buildings by Ayers and others WU members, the acts of domestic terrorism for which Rosenberg and Evans were convicted and imprisoned resulted in the shooting deaths of two police officers and a Brinks guard.

The former president no doubt found it politically more expedient to remain silent on the issue of GOP character assassination than to have his wife face defending – or denying knowledge of – her husband’s past political decisions and personal association with domestic terrorists.

When Senator Hillary Clinton again runs for US president, will she be targeted for guilt by association with her husband who, as one of his final acts as president of the United States, issued pardons and commutations to two convicted domestic terrorists whose admitted goal was the violent overthrow of the US?

Obama associate Bill Ayers had plans to overthrow America and conquer capitalism. He is still a proud communist, and proud of being a terrorist. Obama has gone completely unscarred by this friendship and he still hasn’t disowned that relationsh…