Obama doesn’t screw around.

By noon today, the Obama campaign will be hitting McCain on his involvement in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal that nearly derailed his career in his first Senate term.  

Retaliating for what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ’80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

Obama is going on the attack after two straight days of that unctuous guttersnipe slandering him by saying he “pals around with a domestic terrorist.”  For anyone who doesn’t know this story yet, here is the readers digest version…

Early in his career, Barack Obama sat on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with William Ayers.  Ayers is now nearing the age he can collect social security and for nearly three decades he has been a professor of education at the University of Chicago.  But in his youth, he was a founding member of the Weather Underground, a radical organization that plotted bombings against government targets.  Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dorne, spent the entire decade of the seventies as fugitives before resurfacing in 1980.  He never faced any criminal penalties because the FBI violated any number of rules and regulations in attempting to build the case.  

At the time Ayers was a student radical, Obama was in elementary school.  By the time Obama even met him, he was a well-known and respected academic and citizen of the community.  

Other than the fact that they live in the same Chicago neighborhood and sat on the board of a couple of charities together, there is no indication that the two men even know one another particularly well.  And again, it isn’t like the eight year old Barack Obama was plotting with Ayers to bomb the Pentagon.  He didn’t even meet the man for at least another two decades.  

Hardly rises to the level that Palin is projecting when she says “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do – as the greatest force for good in the world.  This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country,” but bless their hearts, it’s all they’ve got, innit?  

But while we are examining past associations, lets talk about the irony of a vice presidential candidate that is running on a “country first” campaign slogan whose husband was a card-carrying member of the Alaskan Independence Party, right up to the time she ran for public office.  

The AIP is secessionist, and it was founded by a man named Joe Vogler who professed hatred for the United States, and declared proudly that he was an Alaskan, not an American, and had no use for America or “her damned institutions.”  Vogler met his demise when a “plastic explosives sale went bad” and he was murdered.  

Hmmm…hated America, cursed the country and the flag and died buying plastic fucking explosives.

And her husband was a member of the party founded by that proud, self-proclaimed “America hater” for years.  

Let’s have some commercials highlighting that, too.