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[hiromichi]

What does "pall around with" mean?


And there was some degree of anticipation over whether Mr. McCain would do so this time. He did, though only after a bit of prompting from Mr. Schieffer, who, in a question about the tone of the campaign directed at both men, asked Mr. McCain specifically, “Your running mate said he palled around with terrorists.”
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Hiromichi

[CP]

A pal is a friend. To pal around with someone means to spend time with that person as a friend. In the past tense, you would have to spell it with a double-l, because the vowel is not a long a.

Now the context of the quoted material. John McCain (Republican) is running against Barack Obama (Democrat) for the presidency of the U.S.A. Their running mates, as vice-presidential candidates, are Sarah Palin (R) and Joseph Biden (D). In their only debate, Palin said to Biden that Obama palled around with terrorists, and she has repeated that in speeches ever since. That is what Bob Schieffer (moderator for the third presidential debate) was referring to.

It is all a big lie on the part of the Republicans to try to frighten people into voting for McCain and not for Obama. They want people to believe he is friends with terrorists. Not true. Obama was once on the board of a charitable organization, and so was a man named Bill Ayers. They both live in the same city, and their children attend the same schools, although Ayers's children are much older than Obama's. They were not pals then and are not pals now.

Ayers is now a college professor, but 40 years ago, when Obama was 8 years old, Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical anti-establishment group that targeted government buildings with bombs. He was a fugitive from justice in the 1970s. Obama has publicly denounced Ayers for his past actions and has said that there is no close connection or friendship between them.

But the truth is not helpful to McCain and Palin, so they continue to spread the lie that Obama pals around with terrorists, knowing that some people will believe it, some will at least have their doubts, and some will be afraid to vote for Obama. There are, at the same time, whisper campaigns that Obama is Muslim -- again, not true. Some people always refer to him as Barak Hussein Obama, knowing that people will think of Saddam Hussein, and Muslim, and terrorism. They hope those people will be afraid to take the chance that our next president is someone who might easily have helped fly a jet into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.

It's disgusting, but these are desperate people.

McCain is behind in the polls, ever more so as we get closer to election day, and people are favoring Obama's policies and plans (and personality) over McCain's more every day. McCain cannot change his positions this late in the day to get more votes, and he cannot keep repeating the same positions, because people don't want what he is selling. So it will be nonstop character assassination from here on out -- indeed, 100% of McCain's political ads are negative. What he doesn't understand is that people are sick of negative ads, and so those are hurting him, too.
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You live a new life for every new language you speak. -Czech proverb

[hiromichi]

CP, Thank you. I should have noticed pal-led.
I enjoyed reading your additional comment.
McCain is just this:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
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Hiromichi

[CP]