With the explosion of the Reverend Wright controversy, liberals are falling all over themselves to try to defend H. The first defense was the "guilt by association" card. They stated that it is not fair to judge H. by the company he keeps. "Guilt by association," they would say is simply not fair.

That hasn't really worked that well, as the issue is much more than that. H. is running a campaign based partly on his incredible judgment, as supposedly evidenced by his statement "I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning," or statements by his key supporters such as Bill Richardson, "He is ready. He has great judgment..." or his own "Judgment To Lead" Video. It turns out that his judgment isn't all that good, as he has spent years in the pew of a racially divisive pastor, associated with known terrorists such as Bill Ayers and his wife, and conducted deals with suspected criminals under indictment such as Tony Rezko.

So now, instead of trying to defend H. from the charges of questionable judgment, the liberal media spinners are now going after John McCain by digging up questionable contacts he has with supposedly nefarious persons, and charging... you guessed it.... "guilt by association!" Never mind the fact that they said it was an unfair tactice when (in their view) it was applied to H., now that they find themselves against a wall, they are trying to use it to taint John McCain.

Alan Colmes has repeatedly used this tactic throughout the Reverend Wright controversy when he would state that "it's a guilt by association game and it's not going to work." Then he would use the same tactic to try to attack McCain by mentioning McCain's "questionable associations." Way to maintain credibility, Alan.

Liberal columnist Stephen Chapman has also tried the "guilt by association" tactic in his column this week when he ties McCain to G. Gordon Liddy, the conservative who was convicted in the Watergate conspiracy three decades ago. Of course, that's really apples and oranges - while Liddy is unrepentant of his crime, he served his time for the crime, Ayers didn't, and the while Chapman tries to magnify the intensity of the actual crime, Liddy is not a terrorist bent on bringing down the government and more importantly, no one was killed by Liddy. I will give up the point that the association of McCain and Liddy is questionable but the magnitude of the association is hardly equal to H.'s aforementioned associations. And H's response to his associations is also telling, as it pulls back the curtain on H. and shows him to be just another politician, something he said he was not.

This current "guilt by association" backlash is probably why McCain tried to distance himself from this sort of politics from the beginning. We now are going to have any number of liberal H. defenders, who at first claimed that such a tactic was unfair, now poring through every aspect of McCain's life trying to find a similar brush as the one H. was tainted with. So far, it looks the brush used to taint H. is more like a house painting roller that covers broad expanses of H's persona, while the brush used on McCain is the kind people use to paint details on miniatures.

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