this was not a question to which "i don't know" was an acceptable answer...

i remember this one morning my freshman year in college better than any other from that period of time.

i was home sick with the flu and watching cnn. there were two major stories that they were following, the first was that bill cosby's son ennis had just tragically been found dead, killed in a carjacking. the other was that an "abortion clinic" had been bombed in atlanta. i remember watching the aerial helicopter footage and thinking that there was something vaguely familiar about the building that had apparently been attacked.

the more i watched, the more it was on the tip of my tongue that i just knew the building they were filming. it was so familiar to me. only when cnn switched the caption from "bomb goes off in atlanta, ga" to "bomb goes off in sandy springs, ga" did it all come together: the non- descript office building they were filming was my dentist's office, a place i'd been going to twice a year for almost all of my life. [apparently there was an abortion clinic in the same building.] i called my family and everyone was fine-- no one had been to the dentist that day. but still it was incredibly shocking to me [previously i frankly hadn't paid it too much mind-- this was just months after the centennial park bombings during the 1996 olympics] and it put the family tragedy that was the ennis cosby murder into an entirely new perspective.

[from daily kos...]

Palin: 'I Don't Know' If Abortion Clinic Bombers Are Terrorists

by Jed L

Fri Oct 24, 2008 at 09:45:02 AM PDT

The buffoonish nature of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy has mostly been a disaster for the McCain-Palin campaign, but it is has delivered at least one benefit: her foibles have helped obscure the true nature of her right-wing extremism.

But now, Sarah Palin's self-destructive behavior is threatening to expose even that. In an interview broadcast yesterday on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams asked Palin whether she felt abortion clinic bombers were terrorists.

Amazingly, she said that she didn't know. MSNBC reports (emphasis added):

Palin resisted the suggestion that if Ayers was a "domestic terrorist" — a standard line in her campaign addresses — then so were conservative religious activists who bombed abortion clinics.

"I don’t know if you’re going to use the word ‘terrorist’ there," she said.

Here's the video:

Links: This Post | Extended Version | YouTube | Digg

::: :::

Palin's answer is perhaps the single most incredible thing I've heard from any candidate during this entire general election campaign, and I don't make that statement lightly.

What makes it so incredible is that Sarah Palin was responding to one of the easiest questions that has been posed during this entire campaign. Her answer should have been simple: of course they are terrorists.

Instead, Palin balked, saying that while bombings were unacceptable, she didn't know if they were acts of terrorism. As Meteor Blades put it, Palin's answer was an obvious wink and a nod to right wing extremists, with whom she shares radical views, including opposition to reproductive freedom even in cases of rape or incest and advocacy of protests designed to disrupt access to abortion clinics.

This was not a question to which "I don't know" was an acceptable answer. There is no excuse for it, and it puts Sarah Palin well on the margins of this nation's political spectrum.

::: :::

There are now just eleven days left in this campaign. The flow of information is so overwhelming that it is impossible to keep up, and because of that, something like this could easily pass on by without notice -- unless we decide to make a stand.

So what I'd like to ask you to do is to take a couple of minutes out of your day to send this video (links above) to a one or two or three or more of your friends and family members. If you happen to know any reporters, or even bloggers, so much the better. Whatever you can do to spread the word will help make sure that Sarah Palin is forced to explain why she didn't know whether clinic bombers were terrorists.

A clear majority of people already realize that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be president, and with the revelation of the $150,000 shopping spree, they are learning that her "just a hockey mom" image was a total fraud.

Now it's time to finish the job and expose her extremist right-wing ideology once and for all. If enough people find out about this moment, I think we can do it.

~lee.