[Vision2020] The Crazies Love Palin

[No Weatherman]

Chas:

If I said the crazies love Obama, you and a few others would have
accused me of racism and a few other selected crimes against humanity.

Hypocrites all.


On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Chasuk <chasuk at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ei=5124&en=fde9fb7553a7403e&ex=1381464000&partner=digg&exprod=digg&pagewanted=print
>
> The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
> By FRANK RICH
>
> IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back
> when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious
> presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about
> Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.
>
> Some voters told reporters that they didn't want Obama to run, let
> alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have
> stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with
> Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave
> Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate
> in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first
> Democratic primaries.
>
> "I've got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying," Obama
> reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to
> his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that
> the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium
> speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like
> success. The fear receded.
>
> Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of
> "Treason!" and "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!"
> as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually
> something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable
> twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
>
> All's fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right
> to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor,
> even if Ayers's Weather Underground history dates back to Obama's
> childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have
> collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But
> it's not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game,
> however spurious, that's going on here. Don't for an instant believe
> the many mindlessly "even-handed" journalists who keep saying that the
> McCain campaign's use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of
> the Obama campaign's hammering on Charles Keating.
>
> What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage
> at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric,
> especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama "launched his
> political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist." He is
> "palling around with terrorists" (note the plural noun). Obama is "not
> a man who sees America the way you and I see America." Wielding a
> wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of
> American troops.
>
> By the time McCain asks the crowd "Who is the real Barack Obama?" it's
> no surprise that someone cries out "Terrorist!" The rhetorical
> conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further
> by the repeated invocation of Obama's middle name by surrogates
> introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at
> once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts
> and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers's Vietnam-era variety to
> the radical Islamic threats of today.
>
> That's a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a
> guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a
> potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. "Barack
> Obama's friend tried to kill my family" was how a McCain press release
> last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident
> from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
>
> We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even
> potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We
> all know how self-appointed "patriotic" martyrs always justify taking
> the law into their own hands.
>
> Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers's behavior 40 years
> ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility
> for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What's troubling
> here is not only the candidates' loose inflammatory talk but also
> their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds
> to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it
> exactly right when he expressed concern last week that "a leading
> American politician who might be vice president of the United States
> would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that." To stay
> silent is to pour gas on the fires.
>
> It wasn't always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated
> himself from a speaker who brayed "Barack Hussein Obama" when
> introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with
> tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets
> second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after
> ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when
> a Florida sheriff ranted about "Barack Hussein Obama" at a Palin rally
> while in full uniform.
>
> >From the start, there have always been two separate but equal
> questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in
> America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter
> what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the
> first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to
> the second: Yes.
>
> McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as
> Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican
> convention, with Rudy Giuliani's mocking dismissal of Obama as an
> "only in America" affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that
> the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than
> Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George
> W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains
> and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist
> rumors.
>
> No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin's
> convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising
> small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community
> organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist
> famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess.
> After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered
> Chicago's mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was "regrettable
> that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man." In the '60s, Pegler had a
> wish for Bobby Kennedy: "Some white patriot of the Southern tier will
> spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow
> falls."
>
> This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice
> president at a national political convention. It's astonishing there's
> been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign.
> Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or
> William Ayers — in Denver.
>
> The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever
> since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the
> McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant
> Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link
> between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain
> forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or
> his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad's
> visuals.
>
> There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to
> these tactics. There hasn't been a single black Republican governor,
> senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin
> can repeatedly declare that Alaska is "a microcosm of America" without
> anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny
> black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national
> average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that
> a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly
> ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in
> August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed
> his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly
> out of place.
>
> Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I've long been
> skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic)
> that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust
> Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans
> are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy.
> Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a
> reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a
> campaign "suspension," a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are
> as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
>
> To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On
> July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial
> politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that
> strategists of both parties agreed Obama's chances to win the state
> fell "between slim and none." Today, as Charlotte reels from the
> implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North
> Carolina and Helms's Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth
> Dole, is looking like a goner.
>
> But we're not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their
> final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain
> campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and
> inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is
> on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs,
> pit bulls and otherwise.
>
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