MoveOn.org Escalates Attacks on McCain

I've written quite a bit about the hard-left's shift to electoral politics as the means for launching the revolution (most recently, here).

A central faction within the radical electoral coalition is MoveOn.org. The group's launched a new round of attacks again John McCain and his top advisors, topped off with this ad slurring Charlie Black:

Marc Ambinder's commented on this, saying Black's earlier lobbying days were conducted above-board, within the U.S. framework, and with the knowledge of the federal government:

Say this for Mr. Black: he has been forthcoming about his associations.

He told me, as he has told other reporters, that his firm ran every potential foreign client by the State Department and/or the White House in whatever administration was in power and asked whether the scope of the work fit with American foreign policy goals.

"A lot of times it wasn't [within the scope], and we didn't do it," he said.

Black allowed that "in some cases, it went bad."

When Black took on Ferdinand Marcos as a client, the president of the Phillipines was democratically elected. "When he tried to steal the election, Reagan pulled the plug and we resigned the account the same day." Marcos, among other crimes, authorized the arrest of political opponents and was a kleptocrat.

On Mobuto Sese Seko, Black says that the State Department was encourarging him to hold parliamentary elections and his firm advised Sese Seko on how to conduct such elections. The election took place; Sese Seko didn't like the election results and he cancelled the election results and we quit." Sese Seko became a dictator.

Other examples cited by MoveOn and other critics: Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi and Ahmad Chalabi.

As Black points out, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly -- now BKSH and Associates, is a bipartisan firm; it's CEO, R. Scott Pastrick, is a former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a supporter of Hillary Clinton's. (It's now owned by Burston Marsteller, which, of course, is run by Mark Penn.)

I asked Black about McCain's new conflict of interest policy.

" I think it's mostly a clarification. McCain has had pretty high standards, always. I don't know of anyone who worked on the campaign who would have gone and tried to lobby Mccain and his staff."

The campaign supports Mr. Black -- aides say that he's an integral part of the team and will not be going anywhere anytime soon.

And Black insists that his lobbying days are over. "I'm a retired lobbyist," he says.

Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was a bipartisan firm, eh? Well, it certainly helps to get the facts out there.

Tigerhawk identifies MoveOn as the poisonous soul of the contemporary radical antiwar coalition. The new ad's goal is not to "fire Charlie Black," but to further the left's demonic delegitimization campaign against the GOP.