More examples of "guilt by association" charges
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EARLY in his 1980 campaign for president, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. In the course of remarks dealing mostly with economics and education, he said: "I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level."
Reagan should have known better than to use a phrase like "states' rights," however innocuously, in a place like Mississippi. His campaign appearance wasn't a veiled appeal to segregationists - Reagan was no racist - but for more than a quarter-century, that is how his detractors on the left have spun it. Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times last year that Reagan went to Mississippi "to assure the bigots that he was with them."
It's an ugly calumny - and a good example of guilt by association at its most poisonous.
A more recent example occurred in 2000, when George W. Bush made a campaign stop at Bob Jones University, a school known for anti-Catholicism and a ban on interracial dating. Other than that single brief visit, Bush had no tie to Bob Jones. He hadn't studied there, never supported it financially, didn't share its racial or religious views. Nevertheless, he was sharply criticized for his appearance. The media declared it a "defining moment" of Bush's campaign, and many of his critics (including then-rival John McCain) pronounced him guilty by association of aligning himself with Bob Jones's noxious teachings.
One other illustration: the bludgeoning of Samuel Alito during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2006. Senate Democrats led by Ted Kennedy pummeled Alito over his membership in the long-defunct Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative group in which Alito had never played an active role. A former ROTC cadet, he had joined the organization in support of its call for restoring the military program to Princeton. But because it had also blasted racial and gender preferences in admissions, Kennedy and other Democrats insinuated that Alito must be a bigot...
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