It’s become a campaign issue that one of the Presidential candidates has been close with a domestic terrorist. So let’s look at the facts.

G. Gordon Liddy is a convicted burglar and domestic terrorist. He was also the host, in his home, for a 1998 fundraiser for John McCain’s Senate re-election campaign. McCain was on Liddy’s radio show in May 2007, where he praised Liddy’s values and proclaimed himself proud of Liddy and his “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great”:

During the same period that Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, Gordon Liddy was making plans to firebomb a Washington think tank, assassinate a prominent journalist, undertake the Watergate burglary, break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and kidnap anti-war protesters at the 1972 Republican convention.

Re: Liddy’s “continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great:” Did McCain mean to include Liddy’s instructions to listeners of his radio show in 1994 (around the time Ayres and Obama were on a board together discussing education programs and other plots) on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents (aim for the head)?

If ATF agents attempt to curtail a citizen’s gun ownership, Liddy counseled, “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.”

More recently, Liddy explained making the Clintons objects of shooting practice: “I did relate that on the 4th of July of last year, when I and my family and some friends were out firing away at a properly-constructed rifle range and we ran out of targets, and so we – I drew some stick figure targets and I thought we ought to give them names. So I named them Bill and Hillary, thought it might improve my aim. It didn’t. My aim is good anyway. Now, having said that, I accept no responsibility for somebody shooting up the White House.” (Carl Bernstein, HuffPo)

We don’t condone people who bomb civilian targets, either. It doesn’t matter whether they do it from a safehouse or from 15,000 feet in an airplane. A terrorist is a terrorist regardless of his sponsor. Or aren’t we supposed to say that?