Guilt by association

"The Review" Editor Jonathan Shainin has an excellent editorial parsing the last-minute attacks of the McCain campaign on Obama for his "troubling" association with Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi. Shainin does a good job of calling out Obama for his equivocal stance in the face of these racist attacks: the way he deplored the attacks but didn't do enough to challenge their underlying logic (practically any Arab = radical = terrorist).