WorldNetDaily's Favorite Domestic Terrorist

Klein offered little evidence, however, that he made any effort to verify those signatures. Indeed, of the two alleged signatories he claimed to have contacted, one "said he is not involved in any Obama advocacy" and the other "declined to speak on the record to WND." So Klein, in fact, has no evidence to show that any of the names on that petition are legitimate.

Related articles on ConWebWatch: Aaron Klein's Terrorist Buddies Anti-Obama Frenzy: The Case of Aaron Klein Schmoozing with Smearmongers WorldNetDaily's Secret Pro-McCain Agenda Joseph Farah vs. WorldNetDaily

Nevertheless, Klein's boss, WND editor Joseph Farah, accepted these claims as undisputed fact, asserting in an Oct. 2 column: "I no longer expect my colleagues in the press to question Obama about any of this. They've shown they believe it is irrelevant to the question of who will become the next president of the United States. But now you know the truth. Help me spread it far and wide."

For all of WND's fulmination about domestic terrorists, there is one domestic terrorist who is near and dear to its collective hearts: G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy is best known for his actions in the Watergate scandal, in which he engineered political dirty tricks, participated in the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office complex and was a conspirator in the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg. Liddy served four and a half years in prison.

But as Media Matters documented, Liddy has also been involved in numerous acts of planned domestic terrorism, including:

• Plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson.
• Being prepared to kill someone "if necessary " in the Ellsberg break-in.
• Plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder fellow Republican operative E. Howard Hunt.
• Plotting to "firebomb" the Brookings Institution think tank.
• Borrowing terminology from the Nazis in outlining plan to thwart a purported "attack" by "leftist guerillas."
• Saying on his radio show in 1994: "Well, if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests."
• Acknowledged naming shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Media Matters also documents the extensive support Liddy has given to John McCain over the years, from donations to hosting fundraisers to having McCain as a guest numerous times on his radio show.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman put it, Liddy is McCain's "own Bill Ayers," pointing that Liddy played a key role in the Nixon White House's efforts "to subvert the Constitution" and adding: "Given Liddy's record, it's hard to see why McCain would touch him with a 10-foot pole. On the contrary, he should be returning his donations and shunning his show. Yet the senator shows no qualms about associating with Liddy -- or celebrating his service to their common cause." In a Tribune blog post, Chapman further stated: "If Obama needs to answer questions about Ayers, McCain has the same obligation regarding Liddy."

With McCain's extensive ties to this domestic terrorist, you'd think WND would be all over that like it is regarding Obama and Ayers -- but you'd be wrong.

Why? Two reasons. First, as ConWebWatch has detailed, for all of Farah's assertions that he doesn't want McCain to win, his website is undeniably in the tank for McCain.

Second: WND and Liddy are close buddies.

Farah as has made numerous appearances on Liddy's radio show, both as a guest and a guest host. One joint appearance was taped for showing on C-SPAN on Oct. 1. WND employees Klein, Jerome Corsi and David Kupelian have also appeared on Liddy's show, as have WND authors Kathleen Willey, Kyle Williams and Tom Tancredo. WND published a 2006 column by Franklin Raff, executive producer of Liddy's radio show.

Liddy was also one of the guests on WND's early-2008 cruise. In promoting Liddy's appearance in a November 2007 article, WND not only carefully airbrushed any hint of Liddy's terrorism, it proclaimed him a "bon vivant, raconteur and general all-around nice guy":

At the White House, Liddy had oversight responsibility for Treasury policy on firearms and explosives and authored the memorandum that led to the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Subsequently he was assigned additional special duties as a member of the top secret White House Special Investigations Group. Liddy resigned his White House post to accept the positions of general counsel of the 1972 Republican presidential campaign and the campaign finance committee, with additional duties as campaign political intelligence director.

The rest, as they say, is history. For his role in Watergate, and for refusing steadfastly to implicate others, Liddy was sentenced to over 20 years in prison. He served nearly five years, many in maximum security, including 106 days of solitary confinement, before his release by President Carter "in the interests of justice."

There's no admission that Liddy committed the crimes he was accused of (aside from a mention of him being an "ex-con") and certain no mention whatsoever that Liddy plotted to kill numerous people. Liddy's "refusing steadfastly to implicate others" is portrayed as a positive quality instead of the uncooperativeness it would normally be were Liddy not such a prominent conservative -- as well as the same unrepentant attitude WND condemns in Ayers.

Klein's 2007 book, "Schmoozing With Terrorists," not only offered a shout-out to Liddy in the acknowledgements section -- "looking forward to many more Mideast adventures together" -- he begins one chapter by recounting one such "adventure" with Liddy, awestruck by how damn studly the guy is:

"They put me in a small box and poured in masses of roaches and all kind of insects to freak me out, but that didn't much bother me," said G. Gordon Liddy, the popular U.S. radio talk host, actor and notorious mastermind of the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972.

"I don't have any problem with insects because I used to sleep with them in prison. Once while incarcerated I woke up at night feeling there was a blanket on me. I determined the blanket was made of live cockroaches. I brushed them off and went to bed," related Liddy, who was the former chief operative for President Richard Nixon's White House Plumbers unit. He served four and a half years of a twenty-year sentence for his role in Watergate, later being commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

"Next they heated the little box and I was fine with that," Liddy said in his trademark calm, quiet demeanor. "Afterwards they threw in some electric shocks and piped in all sorts of fowl [sic] smelling odors, but it didn't faze me. You've never smelled a terrible odor until you've spent time in our federal prison system."

Liddy, myself, Liddy's feisty, trigger-happy Canadian producer, Franklin Raff, and my translator Ali were cruising in my Land Rover on a slightly chilly Friday morning in December up the coast of Israel toward the border with Syria and Lebanon.

[...]

Liddy is kind enough to feature me on his radio show regularly. When he visits Israel, we spend time together and he accompanies me on some of my adventures.

On the long drive to the northern tip of Israel, Liddy regaled us with his experience competing a few months earlier in NBC's Celebrity Fear Factor. Liddy, who was seventy-five during the show's taping, beat out contestants one-third his age, winning all challenges except the final competition, which required good night vision.

"You must have the mindset that you will win," said Liddy. "Not that you'll survive but that you will prevail. If you think you will win, you probably will. This is the problem with the Israeli government. They lost their victory mentality of the past and now it's all about staying in power and surviving the next crisis." [pp. 153-154]

Klein is too busy writing this mash note to bother to mention Liddy's history of domestic terrorism -- the kind he purports to be so bothered by in Ayers. And he's too busy dredging whatever tenuous tie between Ayers and Obama he can find to get around to documenting McCain's ties to Liddy, even though it would help fulfill his boss' purported mission of keeping McCain from getting elected.

Klein does have a history of whitewashing violent extremists when doing so fits his right-wing agenda. He downplayed the shooting of four Arabs on a bus by Eden Natan-Zada, an AWOL Israeli soldier, Klein portrayed Zada as a victim, claiming he was "murdered" by a "mob of Palestinians." He never described Natan-Zada's victims as having been "murdered." Klein described one West Bank activist, Yekutel Ben Yaacov, only as a "northern Samaria resident," failing to note that he has another name -- Mike Guzovsky, a one-time leader of the U.S. wing of the outlawed-in-Israel Kahane Chai (a successor to the Kach movement founded by right-wing Israeli extremist Meir Kahane) who has expressed his support for Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane follower who in 1994 massacred approximately 30 Arabs at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs, as well as praising the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

If Klein, Farah, and the rest of the WND crew are so outraged by Ayers' actions as a 1960s radical, shouldn't they be similarly outraged by Liddy's 1970s plan for mayhem? Of course -- but they're not.

The fact that Klein and Farah don't just tolerate but actively embrace a thug and unrepentant terrorist like Liddy illustrates the moral bankruptcy in the hearts of the self-proclaimed Christians who run WorldNetDaily.

If the WND crew questioned McCain's relationship with Libby, they would also have to question their own. And they have absolutely no interest in admitting their guilt by association.