Talk About Domestic Terrorist Politics, Is She SO Ignorant of Actual American History??

7 10 2008

The secessionist’s wife was “campaigning” in my state yesterday.

Her carefully crafted all-white image with all-white populist rhetoric to match was eerily familiar to those of us who ACTUALLY lived through the 60s in the South, and the reaction of her carefully constructed crowd of conservative admirers criminally predictable.

Palin herself of course, living in her own carefully constructed reality-free Palinworld, shows no fear that her character assassination politics may provoke ACTUAL assassination — the clearest sign yet of how dangerously ignorant and devoid of ACTUAL RESPONSIBILITY she really is?

All she needs now is the hood.

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

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7 10 2008
JJ (09:16:41) :

In advance of tonight’s debate (also in the South, of course) –

“Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future, or you’re not ready to articulate it.”

That was John McCain in 2000, commenting on the disgusting attacks against him by Karl Rove, George Bush, and a few of the people now doing their very dirty work for him.

. . .Making his disappearing act all the more tragic is the fact that the noble McCain is still around, lurking inside the corrupted candidate, occasionally bubbling to the surface before being shoved back into hiding by his baser instincts.

For instance, it was just this past April when McCain took a principled stand against the muck being flung at Obama over his association with Rev. Wright, saying “there’s no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don’t want it.”

A little over five months, and an increasingly blue electoral map later, McCain now stands on the sidelines while Palin unabashedly gives the American people what McCain knew they don’t want.

Despite its best efforts, the McCain camp’s sneering attacks are not proving that Barack Obama is not like the rest of us. They are proving that John McCain is not like the rest of us.

Americans are hungry for a serious conversation about the multiple crises we are facing. And by ignoring that conversation in favor of yet another round of fear-mongering, McCain is showing himself to be the candidate who is “not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

The most revealing thing about the nature of McCain’s attacks isn’t the contempt he has for Obama (that’s been on display for a while now) — it’s the contempt he has for the country he claims to be putting first.

7 10 2008
JJ (09:32:37) :

More about the campaign-acknowledged “inappropriate” rhetoric at her rally here:

From CBS News’ Scott Conroy:

Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott took the stage moments ago as one of the introductory speakers at a rally here for Sarah Palin. After delivering brief remarks in support of Palin, Sheriff Scott flipped the switch and used Barack Obama’s middle name in order to incite the crowd of thousands of people who have already gathered here.

“On Nov. 4, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened,” the law enforcement officer said.

UPDATE: Palin campaign spokesperson Tracey Schmitt issued the following statement on Sherriff Scott’s remarks: “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November.”

According to his web site, Scott became sheriff in 2005.

“People could say running for sheriff took either courage, ignorance, or a combination of both,” Scott said on the web site.

Many of the thousands of people in attendance roared their approval at Sheriff Scott’s dig at the Democratic nominee, whose Kenyan father shared the same exact name as his son.

After Sheriff Scott left the podium, local radio host Mandy Connell took the stage next. She too drew a loud ovation when she said Obama “hangs around with terrorists.”

7 10 2008
JJ (10:22:07) :

Perhaps the worst action went down at another Palin event in Florida, this time in Fort Myers:

In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

Excellent! So, the once-suppressed white rage that has festered for so long has finally been released not only on Obama, but on all black people! God bless America and its backward, idiotic denizens.

A (black) reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat was singled out and ejected from the state press area at a McCain appearance a few months back. When a female reporter vouched for him, she was put out along with him. The campaign apologized the next day and the black reporter formally accepted that apology, didn’t make a fuss, but there was never any explanation or correction of how this could have happened. At the time I thought it was a little creepy but probably just a paranoid staff mistake, not engineered racism. Who would expect that in this day and age, right? — but now, it looks more like the start of a conscious battle strategy.

7 10 2008
Crimson Wife (12:29:22) :

So Bill Ayers is NOT a terrorist in your POV? This is a guy involved in several bomb attacks whose girlfriend died while making a bomb. He told the New York Times in an interview coincidentally published on 9/11/01 that “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough”. Then in 2004, he told a PBS documentarian, “Did we do something that was horrendous, awful? … I don’t think so.”

There is *NO* excuse for this kind of violence- huge numbers of others during the same time period managed to express their fierce opposition to the Vietnam War in a completely peaceful manner.

While Sen. Obama clearly had no involvement with Ayers during his Weatherman days, I think it calls into serious question Obama’s judgment for accepting assistance in launching his political career from someone like that.

7 10 2008
Nance Confer (15:25:04) :

Maybe if you had sources outside of Fox News, you’d have a different opinion. Maybe not. But here’s a link to NPR’s take on this sad business if you’d like a reality check.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95442902 –

Regardless of his background, it was never a problem for anyone — including Republicans and Chicago’s most powerful business leaders — to work with Ayers on Chicago’s public schools. In fact, Ayers is widely respected in the field of urban education.

“It was never a concern by any of us in the Chicago school reform movement that he had led a fugitive life years earlier,” said former Illinois state Republican Rep. Diana Nelson, who worked with both Obama and Ayers over the years. “It’s ridiculous. There is no reason at all to smear Barack Obama with this association. It’s nonsensical, and it just makes me crazy. It’s so silly.”

Nelson says her fellow Republicans “might snort when they hear the name Bill Ayers, because they know he comes from a wealthy family, they know he became a radical activist early in his life … but beyond just snorting, I don’t think anyone gives it another thought.”

“I don’t remember ever hearing anyone raise concerns or questions or concerns about [Ayers'] background,” says Anne Hallett, who has worked closely with Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge grant and with Obama on education and other community and legislative matters. “And that included everybody I was engaged with,” including prominent Republicans, and corporate and civic leaders in Chicago, Hallett adds.

Hallett calls this attack on Obama’s association with Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge by further association, “a smear campaign. It’s a political diatribe that has no basis in fact. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was an extremely positive initiative. It was well-vetted, thorough, and the fact that it is now is being used for political purposes is, in my opinion, outrageous.”

Nance

7 10 2008
boremetotears (18:24:19) :

Well, I’m just happy that Michelle Obama has never played an active role in, oh, a group advocating the secession of her state from the United States. Further imagine if Barack Obama had actually attended and spoken at those (anti-American) events. Yikes. Talk about being unfit for public office :O

7 10 2008
boremetotears (18:32:23) :

The most revealing thing about the nature of McCain’s attacks isn’t the contempt he has for Obama (that’s been on display for a while now) — it’s the contempt he has for the country he claims to be putting first.

What a fraud! “Putting his country first.” “Serving a cause greater than himself.” For one, if he had given a rip about this country he would have never tapped Palin (especially given the very serious problems we face); and, if Palin had given a rip about her country she would have responded, “No, I’m not qualified. It’s too big a job for me.” Doing so would have shown real integrity, which neither have.

Can’t wait to send them both packing.

7 10 2008
Nance Confer (18:48:04) :

The debate tonight should be interesting. We’ll see if McCain can hold his temper.

Nance

7 10 2008
Nance Confer (18:49:19) :

Palin declining the invite would have been classy. Good point.

Nance

7 10 2008
Crimson Wife (21:34:19) :

So it’s okay to be a terrorist and plant bombs so long as no one happens to die as a result of the attacks? Sometimes you liberals just plain make me sick…

7 10 2008
Debby (22:23:48) :

CW: As an former Chicagoian, let me assure you William Ayres is very prominent and mainstream in Chicago civic life, especially in education oriented stuff. He was never convicted (the charges were dropped) and regrets many of his previous actions. What more do you want?

I’ve served on the boards of three charities (suicide hotline, private school, and reading program) and know little or nothing of what the members were doing when I was 8 years old. I barely knew what they did outside of the board meetings. And it doesn’t seem reasonable that thier actions should reflect on me.

Of course, if you really think the Obama-Ayers connection makes Obama unfit for president then I’m out too. My best friend in high school was an african-american girl. We both lived on the south side and I stayed the night at her house many times…and her father was a former BLACK PANTHER!!!!! who became a Chicago public teacher and football coach. He was even at my wedding…that’s me, supporting terrorists by accepting gifts. *insert eye roll here*

7 10 2008
JJ (23:15:28) :

Patti Hearst comes to mind.

Debby, do I remember right that the reason the charges were dropped had to do with illegal FBI wiretapping?

Maybe this is a generational thing. Many adults with young children now, weren’t even born back in the 60s when I felt as a girl that the world was ending and I probably wouldn’t grow up to have kids of my own. (If the social upheaval in every possible part of my life didn’t get me, the Cuban missles would!)

I look back now and think the times made me fatalistic as a child. EVERYBODY was radical one way or another and most of it was terrifying and harmful to other living creatures. That’s the way it seemed to me, and maybe to many of us who lived through the years of terror of the lynchings and school riots and police dogs and water hoses and church bombings and assassinations of the 60s, draft dodgers and deserters and militant military who had turned against the war too, not to mention back alley abortions and drug overdoses.

Government wrong-doing of the FBI and all the president’s men just fit in . . .

7 10 2008
JJ (23:28:03) :

Paul Begala is quoting the AP right now on CNN post-debate coverage, saying that what Sarah Palin is doing now is in fact race-baiting and SO dangerous.

Here’s what I found Googling it:

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

The fact is that when racism creeps into the discussion, it serves a purpose for McCain. . .

8 10 2008
JJ (00:09:48) :

Obama’s communications director Robert Gibbs was just interviewed post-debate by Sean Hannity of FOX, flogging home the Ayers charge. How dare Obama sit on a board with an unrepentant terrorist etc, because he, Sean, would never do such a thing.

Gibbs took an interesting tack, asking Hannity if he were an anti-Semite and then quoting some radical with repugnant views, around whom Hannity had built a whole show.

But I work with all kinds of views and people, protested Hannity, that’s my job!

The mild-mannered Mr. Gibbs looked very pleased with himself. :)

8 10 2008
Nance Confer (08:34:48) :

Who said anything close to that, CW?

Nance

8 10 2008
Nance Confer (08:37:52) :

Yes but . . . I was not entertained! The debate was boring!

And that’s the important thing. :)

Nance

8 10 2008
JJ (09:00:18) :

Nance, wasn’t it near the end when Hillary Clinton was obviously losing but refusing to go gentle into that good-night, that she resorted to reminding us of assassination as a sort of oblique last hope for her to still be president? Seems like the same thing is happening here for pretty much the same motivation . . .

8 10 2008
JJ (10:02:34) :

We talk often here about the grievous thinking error of taking isolated factoids and even individual words so literally, as if there were no such thing as ambiguity or nuance or context. Ignorant, incurious literalism (that breeds intolerance of those who don’t share it) is my main concern with religious beliefs, and why literalism is a HUGE problem where religion and politics intersect. Hence my main problem with Sarah Palin as any sort of national leader. Zeroing in on one small aspect of any issue and magnifying it to fill the whole frame of vision, distorts reality, even the reality of the one thing you’re trying to see clearly, much less the larger picture into which it fits.

Check this out from Time to see how it applies to Palin’s pentecostal populism: Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess

Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are “worthy of having more and doing more and being more.” In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.

But Walton suggests that a decade’s worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity’s bloodstream. “The economic boom ’90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message,” he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. “Narratives of how ‘God blessed me with my first house despite my credit’ were common. Sermons declaring ‘It’s your season to overflow’ supplanted messages of economic sobriety,” and “little attention was paid to … the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations.”

With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants’ fortunes. Says Walton: “You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology.” But he predicts they will persevere, since God’s earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.

A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer’s note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped.

“Last Sunday,” it read, “You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace.”

And pray that the credit market doesn’t tighten any further.

8 10 2008
Nance Confer (10:50:25) :

Yes, to both of these last comments, JJ. Desperation breeds all sorts of bad and magical thinking. The horrendous part, to me, is the church leader or politician who takes advantage of this fear and ignorance.

Nance

8 10 2008
Crimson Wife (11:39:40) :

There’s a great quote from today’s Investor’s Business Daily about Tom Brokaw’s identifying Bill Ayers as an “educational reformer”: “Ayers is a school reformer in the same sense as Joe Stalin was an agricultural reformer.”

Let’s turn it around a bit- how would you all feel about a Republican presidential candidate who had accepted assistance in launching his/her political career from the unrepentant co-founder of a group involved in bombing abortion clinics?

Terrorism is NEVER justified, regardless of whether it’s done by extremists on the right or on the left. But somehow a large percentage of the elite in this country are so morally relativistic that they can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge this fact. Some things really ARE black-or-white with no shades of gray, and terrorism is one of them.

8 10 2008
COD (11:59:05) :

CW apparently doesn’t watch Battlestar Galactica. There was an amazing series of shows at the beginning of season 2 in which the last remaining survivors of the human race were living under Cylon occupation and resorted to, wait for it…., suicide bombings against their human hybrid captors. It directly addressed the point that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

Personally, I see Obama’s willingness to work with people that he may not particularly agree with or even like as a benefit, not a bug. Being President involves working with all sorts, and the Bush / McCain “our way or we invade your country” approach clearly does not work.

8 10 2008
Nance Confer (13:16:28) :

“Terrorism is NEVER justified. . .”

As Chris points out, terrorism can be in the eye of the beholder.

But the point in this situation is that Obama has never justified any of Ayers’ actions from the 1960s. When Obama was a child.

Is this all that the Republicans can point to? Is this the debased level of politics that the Republican party is reduced to?

How about discussing McCain’s membership in the Keating 5 as it relates to his views on deregulation?

That would be relevant and involve the truth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five
http://www.azcentral.com/news/election/mccain/articles/2007/03/01/20070301mccainbio-chapter7.html
http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

The hateful flinging of words like terrorist and Stalin and Palin’s “he’s different from us” garbage is beneath the dignity needed to address the serious problems the next President, and all of us, will have to face.

Nance

8 10 2008
boremetotears (19:29:12) :

Of course, back in 1994, G. Gordon Liddy (who served time in prison for his role in Watergate), following the tragedy in Waco, Texas, told his listeners: “Now 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 … Kill the sons of bitches.”

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend.” McCain responded, “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family.” “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

I’m concerned, JJ. This relationship clearly says a lot about McCain’s lack of character and judgment and yet somehow a large percentage of the conservative elite in this country are so morally relativistic that they can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge. I’m just glad that McCain is going to lose the election. Whew.

8 10 2008
boremetotears (19:36:05) :

McCain also actively sought Pastor John Hagee’s association and endorsement just very recently. I’ll spare CW Hagee quotes (comparing the Catholic Church to whores, for example), but it’s clear that McCain turns a blind eye when choosing his friends and allies.

I gotta run, so I don’t have time for another McCain bedfellow, Charles Keating…

8 10 2008
JJ (22:14:39) :

CW asks:
“Let’s turn it around a bit- how would you all feel about a Republican presidential candidate who had accepted assistance in launching his/her political career from the unrepentant co-founder of a group involved in bombing abortion clinics?”

Actually, it’s being reported that McCain DID attend a fundraiser with, behave quite cordially to, and accept political support without voicing the slightest disapproval, from the well-connected friends and admirers of someone who shot a doctor who had performed legal abortions (a former Navy flight surgeon no less! Did McCain care?) — and not when he was wet behind the ears and starting out in politics but after he was an established U.S. Senator and should have known better, politically at least if not ethically?

Which makes me think Mcain must be a real gambler (and a real cynic) to know that guilt by association’s in his own record and yet to have his campaign attacking his opponent for same. I guess he’s counting on Obama being the more prudent and presidential candidate, and restraining his campaign from countering with this?

At the Portland fundraiser. . .Marylin Shannon, the vice chairwoman of the Oregon GOP, had a spot on the program to give an opening prayer. In short order, she praised the Grants Pass woman accused of shooting an abortion doctor in Wichita and thanked the Lord “for Lon Mabon and the vision you put in his heart.”

Shannon, the GOP chairwoman, referred to the accused shooter of the abortion doctor as a “fine lady,” who shouldn’t be judged solely based on the single act of violence, according to a letter she wrote to The Oregonian, which was accessed via Lexis Nexis. While she did not endorse violence against abortion providers, she wrote, she recognized the “debate stirring within the anti-abortion movement” over whether killing abortion providers was a “just cause.”

. . .There’s no indication that McCain took issue with Shannon’s comments, and it’s unclear whether any group members lobbied him regarding the abortion clinic protection bill. A search of the Congressional Record in 1993 and 1994 indicates McCain did not speak during debate over the bill, and McCain’s campaign did not immediately return RAW STORY’s request for comment. Shannon traveled to the Republican convention as a McCain delegate, and she proclaimed herself a huge fan of Palin as McCain’s VP pick. She could not be reached for comment.

To be sure, there is nothing to suggest that McCain supports bombing abortion clinics. But there’s also nothing to suggest Obama supports the Weather Underground bombings, which by the way were carried out when he was 8 years old. McCain at least was a sitting member of Congress who took a legislative position on clinic bombings when they were a current issue.

Olbermann reported that the woman McCain was consorting with was a Bush delegate in 2004 and showed a picture of her wearing the purple heart band-aid on her cheek, mocking John Kerry’s Viet Nam service as making him (like Obama now?) “unfit for command.” Then she was a McCain delegate in August.

Btw, the shooter was convicted (unlike Ayers) and at her sentencing, the judge told her she “did wrong” and called her a terrorist.

9 10 2008
Nance Confer (08:39:08) :

I think McCain is counting on old politics where followers do as they are told and nobody has access to the Google and isn’t paying attention much or doing any reading that conflicts with the campaign message.

His time has come and gone. Too bad for him he missed his chance. He was a team player who waited in line and now he’s going to lose. Good news for the rest of us.

And here’s a happy thought I’ve been thinking lately.

First, I start thinking: “I hope Obama and team are thinking ahead and will be all set to start doing the right things on day one.”

Then I think: “Of course they are. :) ”

Nance

9 10 2008
JJ (10:24:39) :

There’s a lot of good clear thinking and fresh hope for the future in this campaign, I agree, but don’t forget, there’s nothing more dangerous than a pitbull bred by both nature and nurture to fight to the death, thrown into the pit for one last fight by an old broken-down gambler who’s losing big and bets everything on that last chance.

What I find a cold chill through my body is that even Cindy McCain is openly snarling for blood now, you betcha!

Btw, what does Sarah Palin mean when she says at her rally:
“Bless your heart, sir, you know what? My son’s in Iraq right now fighting for your right to protest. . .”

How stupid (and/or cynical) would any demagogue have to be, to still defend the war for oil in Iraq as some holy kind of freedom-fighting that protects individual American free speech and the right to dissent! Even George Bush talked about spreading democracy to others, not defending it for ourselves at home. These folks have truly jumped the shark, like they threw all the empty platitudes into a big gumball jar like the little numbered lottery balls, and pull out five or six per night to put on tv for the folks.

9 10 2008
Nance Confer (11:24:51) :

Right — it’s no time to be complacent. After all, we haven’t actually had the election yet! DH wants to mail his vote in but I want to go stand in the line and enjoy voting for Obama in real-time. Silly but. . .

I can’t help being encouraged by this though –

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/08/obama-mccain-transition-e_n_132976.html

“As the 2008 campaign nears its conclusion, the presidential transition efforts of the two major candidates have become a study in contrasts: Sen. Barack Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election.”

Nance

9 10 2008
Crimson Wife (20:37:11) :

Actually, it’s interesting that you bring up Battlestar Galactica because that’s one of the handful of television series I watch (on DVD since we don’t have cable/satellite). And I had a discussion with my DH about how the ends didn’t justify the means when it came to the human resistance against the Cylon occupation on New Caprica and then later the vigilante justice against the collaborators. Sure, I might be sympathetic to their goals, but their methods were simply not morally justifiable.

9 10 2008
Crimson Wife (20:45:37) :

Did Ms. Shannon physically harm anyone? Did Sen. McCain ever have any DIRECT contact with the abortion clinic shooter?

I’m sure we could hunt down any number of individuals connected to both of the candidates who’ve made distasteful statements at one time or the other. But actually accepting assistance from a terrorist, that’s a different story…

10 10 2008
JJ (00:05:33) :

Except that not what it’s about, according to McCain-Palin. :)

McCain himself said on tv today that he “doesn’t care about an old terrorist” but only whether Obama is being completely TRUTHFUL about it.

[aside -- does this mean McCain doesn't care about the old broken-down terrorist Osama bin Laden either?]

10 10 2008
JJ (00:45:54) :

From reporter Martin Kasindorf’s blogpost:

When a presidential candidate tells fired-up supporters that their conduct is out of line, they retreat to a grudging civility out of respect for the candidate and the office.
George H. W. Bush showed class by moderating his base-igniting tactic, though it was a close thing that somebody didn’t get badly injured. It’s past time for McCain and Palin to follow the Bush lead and to stop rousing the Limbaugh-indoctrinated Rottweilers to “sic ‘em” in Kristallnacht fashion. We are not living in a sweaty banana republic, where elections routinely lead to violence and murder.
Or are we?

10 10 2008
COD (13:21:17) :

We might be this year. Some of these people scare me.

10 10 2008
Nance Confer (15:22:00) :

CW, these are crazy people. And McCain supports their activities.

If you can’t see how that is unsettling, regardless of Obama, what can anyone say to shine light on this situation?

If that is your idea of a man who should be President, what’s the point in trying to discuss anything rationally?

Palin and McCain have descended to new and frightening depths and if you are comfortable with that, what’s left to say?

Nance

10 10 2008
boremetotears (18:25:14) :

COD: “Some of these people [in the video] scare me.”

Those who share the views of the sidewalk mobbers, but speak in complete sentences, concern me too.

11 10 2008
Betty Malone (07:14:36) :

I gained back a small smidgeon of my past respect for John McCain, the real maverick he used to be, before he let his overwhelming zeal to win the presidency over rule his basic decency, no matter how much of his soul he had to sacrifice to do so, …last night when I watched him shake his head in disbelief, and remove the microphone from a rather “crazy” women in the audience who said she was afraid of Obama..because he’s an Arab…and finally, finally,….the man who once had principle, came out….and said, No, No..shaking his head…and admitting…that Obama is a decent family man, who no one should be afraid of becoming President, just that He, McCain..would be a better president..

Finally…and I hope and pray with all my little progressive Christian heart..that the crazed and wacked out mob that McCain and Palin have nurtured into insanity…listen to the man who they would have be President.

As a teen in the late 60’s, I must agree with JJ..the horror and sorrow of that time..still bring tears to my eyes, watching Kennedy, Kennedy, and King…dead before my innocent eyes,,on that little screen in our living rooms. Just because hateful men..and women…refused to allow the social change that needed to occur happen.

And now..the fearful mob..of white majority rule, refusing to admit..that their time is passing..and that a new American…of mutiple races..of mixed marriages, of a “different” look and different culture…will be the American citizen and voter in the 21st century.

My granddaughters, the product of a marriage between an Argentinia Jewish mother and my son, a white Anglo-Saxon Irish German …have produced the beautiful mix that our future holds for us. I want the future to reflect the melting pot of our promise…not hold on to the hateful memories of an America that had to change..to fulfill its promise. To let go of the racial hatred of our past..to embrace the change that is coming..Will it be easy, Will someone die to lead the way, Does someone have to die..to make us see what we couldn’t see without their sacrifice..just like K…and K…and K…..Those three K’s…not the Klu Klux Klan K’s..but the amazing K’s..The men whose deaths placed me firmly on my “liberal” progressive path, who inspired me..as a young girl of 17 to become an activist..who …could have so easily succumbed and become the Ayers of that time..We were so full of desire to change what we saw as pure injustice..It’s one man’s terrorist…another young girls hero..

Do we “hang’ in the court of public opinion..the hate mongers of that southern past..no..we elect them to public office in the south and let years of public service redeem their rhetoric and their actions…just as Bill Ayers..has become a legal citizen..and no, he doesn’t regret that at a pivotal time in history, he chose to use what means he could to fight what he saw as a young man as great crime and injustice..

You forget Crimson Wife…that our country is founded on such “terrorism”..After all the Boston TEa Part men….used to tar and feather their Tory sympathizers…You do know what that did to a man don’t you..? Violence against the standing order …unfortunately is sometimes used…to make the point..in times of extreme ordeals..and remembering that bloody decade or two..it was a violent expression of the rage we often felt as Americans that such injustice could be condoned in our country..that what we knew to be terrible deeds..both the Viet Nam War..and the Civil Rights injustices..We fought..however we could..me on college campuses, watching my fellow “fighter’s” die at Kent State..watching real action..instead of sitting in front of a computer screen…”blogging” and blabbing..instead of marching…We need more of the latter I think..more marchers, more demonstrations to fight the injustice of this war..of this time..not less.

I have to stop…because …my liberal rage is spouting isn’t it!

11 10 2008
Nance Confer (13:50:15) :

Rage on, Betty, rage on!

It’s a lot more informative and informed than the rage from the McCain mob.

Nance

12 10 2008
JJ (00:01:10) :

Driving home from the theatre late tonight, FavD and I were listening to NPR and heard a program we weren’t familiar with, called West Coast Live. An author named Ann Lamont (I think) was lamenting quite literately with a sort of testimonial about their last visit before she died, that Texan Mollie Ivins hadn’t lived to laugh at Sarah Palin every day in every way.

Then as we pulled into the driveway, an Oxford European history professor was saying that “America is the world’s soap opera” . . .

12 10 2008
JJ (00:05:30) :

Oh, the other thing we learned from West Coast Live tonight, is that Bill Buckley’s writer son Christopher, says it’s probably a good thing his parents have passed away, so they won’t be here to see him endorsing Obama (or maybe others are saying that, it wasn’t clear.)

So I just Googled it and here’s his rant, conservative heir but also pragmatic patriot style:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. . .

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

12 10 2008
Betty Malone (06:21:12) :

Now that’s an endorsement worth it’s weight, because I was and always shall be…a Bill Buckley fan! I pulled the lever a couple of times in my life for the Republican choice in large part to my faith that Bill Buckley knew what he was doing..I wonder if what we’re not seeing, is perhaps a shift in party political belief. I feel as though in the past few weeks, what we’re seeing is the death of the true financial conservative..and all that will be left in the Republican party is the moral conservatives..who without the financial intellectual conservatives, can’t sustain a majority of American beliefs..even though they think that they represent the majority view…they don’t…not morally or politcally.

Anyway..here’s to the Buckleys..I can still hear and see that Buckley grin..and that Buckley deep deep voice..He too, was a voice of my conscience in the 70’s. A truly great man. I don’t think that Obama is a Buckley…but I know, without hesitation that he is the man our country needs right now to lead us..into this new world.
\Friday at work, I overheard one of my fellow employees, a department head like myself, espousing to an office employee, who was black, that she couldn’t vote for Obama,….because he was the anti-Christ. ….She was serious.

12 10 2008
Nance Confer (09:31:13) :

Wouldn’t that speed the end-times — electing the anti-Christ?

Too bad these folks get no practice in logic. If they did they’d see the wisdom in voting for Obama. :)

Nance

12 10 2008
JJ (09:48:43) :

Me too, Betty — lifelong fan of Bill Buckley. I like David Gergen too, and Peggy Noonan et al. The smart, literate grownups!

12 10 2008
Betty Malone (17:14:50) :

REmembering or trying to remember, my endtime theology…I think…that the Anti Christ comes after the rapture, not before it….I think…so…electing him wouldn’t make any difference..unless the Rapture occurs when he’s elected..and you’re right. in your logic Nance…You’d think they’d be very happy and hurry and elect him so we could get on with the great ending…You’d think? Huh?

13 10 2008
JJ (09:45:55) :

I happily admit I’m not qualified to debate the end times even if I feel like I can almost see them from my house! ;-)

“Radical” education change though, yeah, I’m more a national expert on that than Palin is on energy. McCain-Palin claim to feel smeared by radical 60s-era race dissent, after they build a whole strategy around smearing Obama for radical 60s-era war dissent? How is that kind of sophistry inciting new dissent good for education, not to mention domestic tranquility, our country’s general welfare or common defense? And it’s not the “victory” they’re always yammering about but retreat and defeat, surrender of the future to the bad old days.

Here’s Politifact’s dissection of why the Ayers 60s-era smear itself is more radical terrorism, than the 90s-era Annenberg education foundation being smeared:

. . . the vast majority of the foundation’s external partners were not remotely controversial. Here are a few examples: the Chicago Symphony, the University of Chicago, Loyola University, Northwestern University, the Chicago Children’s Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association.

Had Kurtz chosen to accuse Obama of carrying water for the conservative Annenberg, he might have written: “CAC disbursed money to various business-friendly entities, such as the Museum of Science and Industry and the Commercial Club of Chicago.”

See how easy it is?

The programs the foundation funded were designed to allow individuals from the “external partners” – whether the musicians in the symphony or the business leaders in the commercial club – to help improve student achievement. They were along the lines of mentoring by artists, literacy instruction, professional development for teachers and administrators, and training for parents in everything from computer skills to helping their children with homework to advocating for their children at school.

This last activity – something suburban parents practice with zeal – is also suspect in Kurtz’s view: “CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents ‘organized’ by community groups might be viewed by school principals ‘as a political threat.’” That is typical of Kurtz’s essay – relatively innocuous facts cast in the worst possible light. That’s appropriate for an opinion piece, perhaps, but hardly grounds for a purportedly factual political ad accusing the group of radicalism.

We could go on and on with evidence that the Chicago Annenberg Challenger was a rather vanilla charitable group. For example, under the deal with Annenberg every dollar from him had to be matched by two from elsewhere. The co-funders were a host of respected, mainstream institutions, such as the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Chicago Public Schools.

In short, this was a mainstream foundation funded by a mainstream, Republican business leader and led by an overwhelmingly mainstream, civic-minded group of individuals. Ayers’ involvement in its inception and on an advisory committee do not make it radical – nor does the funding of programs involving the United Nations and African-American studies.

This attack is false, but it’s more than that – it’s malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there’s ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism.

That’s Pants on Fire wrong.

13 10 2008
JJ (09:53:16) :

So did McCain repent last week of his inciting, or is he still at it? Here’s what he said on Virginia radio Sunday afternoon:

WARREN: “WE HAVE A COUPLE OF SECOND REMAINING, THE CHAIR OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IN VIRGINIA HAS SAID, QUOTE IN TIME MAGAZINE, “BOTH BARACK OBAMA AND OSAMA BIN LADEN HAVE FRIENDS THAT HAVE BOMBED THE PENTAGON. THAT IS SCARY.” IS THAT APPROPRIATE FOR A STATE PARTY CHAIR TO BE SAYING?”

MCCAIN: “I have to look at the context of his remarks. I have always repudiated any comments that have been made that were inappropriate about Senator Obama. The fact is that William Ayers was a terrorist and bomber and unrepentant. I don’t care about that. But, Sen. Obama ought be the candid and truthful about his relationship with Mr. Ayers in whose living room Sen. Obama launched his campaign and Sen. Obama said he was just a guy in the neighborhood.”

13 10 2008
JJ (10:04:26) :

Meanwhile, via Sam Stein’s huffpost, John McCain and his campaign staff can’t even manage straight talk about its own smears.

Damning as an appeal for context may be, in actuality McCain seemingly didn’t know that his own spokeswoman had condemned the remarks as “not appropriate.”

“While Barack Obama is associated with domestic terrorist William Ayers, the McCain campaign disagrees with the comparison that Jeff Frederick made,” said Gail Gitcho.

13 10 2008
COD (15:14:49) :

The downside to the McCain campaign implosion is that after all the analysis the neocons will determine that McCain’s campaign was the problem, not their ideas. That might be good in the short term for democratic electoral prospects, but in the long run the country is best served by an intelligent two sided debate.

13 10 2008
JJ (21:45:49) :

Or better yet, an intelligent collaborative debate, focused on the issues and not the individuals! :)

13 10 2008
JJ (22:17:40) :

Although — I should add this from Christopher Hitchens in Slate, about issues rather than individual personalities:

Vote for Obama
McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president.
And Palin is simply a disgrace.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 13, 2008

I used to nod wisely when people said: “Let’s discuss issues rather than personalities.” It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent’s personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.

At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should “tackle the ball and not the man.” I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the “personality” of one of the candidates was itself an “issue.” In later years, I had little cause to revise my view that Bill Clinton’s abysmal character was such as to be a “game changer” in itself, at least as important as his claim to be a “new Democrat.” To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact—if it happens to be a fact—that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.

On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn’t a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience.

McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him. . .

13 10 2008
JJ (22:26:59) :

And more about “individuals” when there is the greater good of “Country” at stake:

The more serious question raised by a slogan like “putting country first” is “ahead of what?” . . .

There are, of course, times when “putting country first” is an honorable thing to do. All of the people in the military who have made great sacrifices particularly those who have been injured and killed while serving their country, regardless of the wisdom of the war itself, have “put country first” and should be recognized for doing that. Clearly McCain’s individual heroism while a POW in Vietnam was a similar case of “putting country first”.

In civilian life, however, the notion of “putting country first” is somewhat more troubling. To a great extent, the whole point of the USA, and the source of much of its greatness, is that we don’t put country first. We put individuals, social and group goods, and even specific national goals first but these are different than the abstract idea of “putting country first”.

If we were to, as a society, put country first, who would define what “country” is or what putting it “first” might mean. The answer presumably is John McCain, but this opens the door for a style of governance that would likely be intolerant of dissent and would accuse all dissenters of not “putting country first”.

We saw where this approach got us during the last eight years. Perhaps all of us, particularly the country McCain seeks to put first, would be better served by putting rational decision making, a better understanding of the world, or the rule of law first.

The notion of “putting country first” also suggests the presence of a greater good, or that we should all be working for the glory of our country above all individual desires and needs. The strength of American style democracy is that it is not about seeking greater goods, but about individuals seeking to pursue their own goals within the context of freedom, equality and rule of law. In many respects, part of the true genius of James Madison and others was to rid our democracy of the goal of achieving a greater good, but to instead focus on avoiding the tyranny often results from seeking this greater good. It is indeed shocking that a Republican candidate for president doesn’t understand this.

While patriotism and sacrifice are values that are central to good governance, democracy and to what has made our country great, “putting country first” has historically been the approach not of those who would celebrate the individual’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as our founding fathers put it, but of those who would take these things away in the name of an abstract idea like “country”.

14 10 2008
JJ (21:26:55) :

McCain’s own palling around with terrorist profiteers RIGHT NOW, by hiring them to head his transition team??

15 10 2008
Betty Malone (06:14:28) :

Just read “What is America”, by Ronald Wright which gave me new thoughts to ponder. He writes about the 500 years of conquest and resistance in the Americas, both north and south, but this book especially focuses on North America. Talk about abstract ideas..of what is our country..

He sums up his book, “The Columbia Age was built on colonial attitudes: on taming the wilderness, civilizing the savage, and the American Dream of endless plenty. Now there is nothing left to colonize. Half a millennium of expansion has run out of room. Mankind will either share the Earth or fight over it. a war nobody can win…”

The book made me think about our warrior, explorer, conquistadore mentality..and how we now want to spread our “superior ideas” to the Middle East and countries beyond. It seems to me that Europe is ahead of us…and perhaps that is because they’ve done their spreading of ideas…to us and other colonies..and now they are trying to civilize themselves…

Which is part of his summary..”For civilization to continue, we must civilize ourselves.”

Kathleen Parker, last night on Colbert, hinted at her vote choice, by saying that she didn’t care for the appeal to our lower selves in politics…And it seems to me..that that is still Obama’s highest offering..He appeals to our higher images, even if they are sometimes airy fairy as Chris Buckley says. I watched Chris Buckley on TV last night..and he said he sees in Obama..a decent man with a first class brain.

15 10 2008
JJ (09:09:18) :

So then you probably know the not-so-classy folks with merely middling brains at the magazine that represents the intellectual movement his own dad founded, unceremoniously dumped him for it? (And longtime readers will know that Terri Schiavo was my own eye-opening radicalization moment.)
We sure live in interesting times . . .

. . . it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case. So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Thanks, anyway, for the memories, and here’s to happier days and with any luck, a bit less fresh hell.

15 10 2008
JJ (10:25:49) :

Michael Scherer’s take in Time is headlined
“Stepping Back From the Brink”:

This election is going to end ugly. But let’s hope it’s the kind of ugly that democracies like ours are able to handle in stride, the kind where candidates and parties fight fiercely, and even unfairly, for their teams, without forgetting the basic human respect that unites us all.

That ugly may be contemptible, but it does not offend our most basic ideals.

The sort of ugly that McCain was forced to knock down on Friday, the sort that showed up Saturday in Iowa, that stuff is another matter altogether.

15 10 2008
Nance Confer (11:06:28) :

This kind of scary ugly –

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/myfox/pages/News/Politics/Detail;jsessionid=589A8C331016E5F367B7FBF9A45B0D42?contentId=7644286&version=11&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.14.1&sflg=1

– is what McCain and crew do not seem to understand they are encouraging.

“PHILADELPHIA — There was a scare Tuesday at the South Philadelphia campaign headquarters of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

“The office at 15th and Christian streets was filled with volunteers around 5 p.m. when one of them brought in the mail and opened a letter that had a note and a powdery substance on it that immediately set off alarms.”

Let’s hope we make it to election day without too many crazies getting mobilized.

Nance

18 10 2008
JJ (14:56:19) :

Nance, it was worth hoping but alas –

FavD and I saw the crazy Minnesota Congresswoman channeling Joe the Senate RedBaiter (McCarthy) on the Chris Matthews show late yesterday afternoon, and we sat here through the whole interview with our mouths hanging open. You know FavD has studied and written extensively about both the Salem Witch Trials and the McCarthy era (and The Crucible, about both.) Now we have Sarah Palin with her LITERALLY witch-hunting pastor and her LITERALLY McCarthyite Congressional surrogate on tv calling for the media to invesitigate and expose “anti-American” attitudes among our sitting national leaders. Talk about destroying the fabric of democracy!

Hateful attitudes and words incite hateful actions, and the desperate candidates have gone too far to claim their hands are clean or their intentions honorable, not even as comedy. Not funny. Not legal. Not leadership.

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Fri, Oct. 17, 2008
Death threat, vandalism hit ACORN after McCain
Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.

Attorneys for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now were notifying the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division of the incidents, said Brian Kettenring, a Florida-based spokesman for the group.

Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain, have verbally attacked the group repeatedly in recent days, alleging a widespread vote-fraud scheme, although they’ve provided little proof. It was disclosed Thursday that the FBI is examining whether thousands of fraudulent voter-registration applications submitted by some ACORN workers were part of a systematic effort or isolated incidents.

Kettenring said that a senior ACORN staffer in Cleveland, after appearing on television this week, got an e-mail that said she “is going to have her life ended.”

A female staffer in Providence, R.I., got a threatening call from someone who said words to the effect of “We know you get off work at 9,” then uttered racial epithets, he said.

McClatchy is withholding the women’s names because of the threats.

Separately, vandals broke into the group’s Boston and Seattle offices and stole computers, Kettenring said.

The incidents came the day after McCain charged in the final presidential debate that ACORN’s voter-registration drive “may be perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and may be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”

McCain’s comments provoked a response from ACORN.

“I would not say that Senator McCain is inciting violence,” Kettenring said, “but I would say that his statements about the role of this manufactured scandal were totally outlandish. We would call on Senator McCain to tamp down the fringe elements in his party.”

McCain’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kettenring said that ACORN had received growing amounts of hate mail in recent weeks, but “the campaign debate sort of tipped it over to a scary point, where raising allegations of voter fraud went from a cynical campaign ploy to really inciting racial violence.”

Since McCain’s remarks, ACORN’s 87 offices across the country have received hundreds of hostile e-mails, many of them containing racial slurs, Kettenring said. “We believe that these are specifically McCain supporters” sending the messages, he said.

The e-mail to the Cleveland employee was traced to a Facebook Web page in the name of a Baltimore man. It featured a photo of a McCain-Palin sign.

Kettenring said that the bulk of the e-mails had been either “flat-out racist” or had racial overtones. Most of the group’s 400 members and about 80 percent of the 13,000 voter-registration canvassers are African-American or Latino.

It’s unclear whether the alleged threats violated federal law, but Jonah Goldman, the director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan, nonprofit legal organization that battles discrimination, argued that the Voting Rights Act should apply.

“A real concern is the impact that these terrible acts have on the people who registered through these registration drives,” Goldman said. “Legitimate, eligible voters who sign up through these registration drives may be understandably intimidated and choose not to show up at the polls, and the Voting Rights Act prevents voter intimidation.”

18 10 2008
JJ (18:25:17) :

And there’s wacko militia politics to worry about, too:

With all the focus on Bill Ayers, it is a good time to remember that the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history was committed not by 1960s radicals in Chicago but 1990s militia members in Oklahoma City.

The militia movement of the Clinton years was never dismantled by legal authorities. Some of their members stepped back from the horror of Oklahoma City, but what finally drove them from the political scene was the election of GW. You just couldn’t get any political traction ranting about an imagined United Nations takeover of the United States while Bush was running over the UN on his way to invading Iraq .

Now the tables have turned. What is truly dangerous is how the garbage spewed out by the McCain/Palin campaign is such ideal fodder for the paranoia that was the meat-and-potatoes of the militia movement. Republican strategists don’t really believe that Obama is a terrorist or that ACORN is going to steal the election. They just hope that innuendos in that direction will sow enough doubt in the minds of independents and conservative Democrats that when they finally get alone in the voting booth they will vote their prejudice.

Thus far, polls show that this campaign of fear is having the opposite effect.

But what about the hard core true believers? The ones who take McCain and Palin’s words and ads at face value, because they provide “official” confirmation for what they already believe. The ones who will believe that Obama actually is a terrorist who really will steal the election. Ask yourself: what would you do if you really, truly believed that a terrorist was about to steal a presidential election?

22 10 2008
JJ (11:19:21) :

ACTUAL domestic terrorism from ACTUAL anti-Americans emboldened by John McCain, Sarah Palin and surrogates like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann:

[Secretary of State Jennifer] Brunner said the Ohio Highway Patrol is investigating the hack, the calls and e-mails, as well as a suspicious package with a message that said “Death to Obama supporters” and an unidentified powder. That package, addressed to an old office building, was delivered by her office by mail last week, she said.

The secretary attributed the troubles to the “contentious nature” of the litigation begun by the Ohio Republican Party. . .

22 10 2008
JJ (14:05:16) :

Go to the link to see this trash in full um, black-and-white. Republican race-baiting right out in the open, in your mail box:

Swift Boat funder Robert Perry, a top national Republican donor, is funding overtly racist attack mail this cycle. It’s not Swift Boating. It’s Race Boating.

A group called “Empower Texans,” chaired by Tim Dunn of Midland, an associate of Republican Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, attacked Democratic state House candidate Joel Redmond of Pasadena with a direct mail piece featuring fuzzy images of black and Hispanic lawmakers (plus Barack Obama), several black birds resembling crows, and a picture of the white Redmund. The tag line: “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Anyone with any racial sensitivity gets the meaning of the mailer: Redmond has betrayed whites by befriending people of color. He can’t be trusted.

23 10 2008
JJ (14:57:07) :

LOL, even in the South with other BEAUTY QUEENS, it isn’t working anymore:

They’ve done it. The McCain campaign has gone and pissed off Miss Virginia.

When McCain senior adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer divided Virginia into the DC suburbs and “real Virginia,” Kristi Lauren Glakas felt extremely disappointed. Glakas, a recent three-time Miss Virginia title holder and whip-smart University of Virginia scholarship honor student, said the comments were divisive.

“What offended me and made me sad about those comments,” said Glakas, a resident for many years in northern Virginia, “is that I’ve been to every county, every part of this state.

What’s best about Virginia is its diversity.

The people, the geography. We have every class, every race, an amazing immigrant population… Virginia is the birthplace of America. To say that part of Virginia is not part of the real America is just offensive.”

5 11 2008
Smart President Both Fun-ny and Serious « Cocking A Snook! (18:52:41) :

[...] for example, that smart folks knew must be true at the time though it wasn’t being reported; JJ blogged it October 7, see? And stupid people who didn’t know or wouldn’t admit it, are not funny. The Obama [...]

19 11 2008
JJ (09:46:40) :

Unbelievable (or I wish it were) that now the right-wing race-baiters and Prop 8 homophobes — Glenn Beck’s a proud Mormon, right? — claim to be the innocent victims, not the culture-poisoning perps and they are shocked, shocked to find that words DO matter, enough to create very real danger:

I wanted to say, I think you have me mistaken for someone else, but I knew he knew who I was and he just hated me for who I was. You conservatives that have destroyed this country! And the hatred was so deep, it was breath taking.

Luckily the swat team was there and I just separated myself from him and he just shouted through other people and there were children in the restaurant and he blamed me for everything, I believe including the Holocaust, and the hatred was palpable.

The guy screamed at the restaurant, you better not let me see you in the parking lot because I’ve got a truck and I’ll run your ass over! Wow. Is this who we’ve become? Is this who we’ve become?

19 11 2008
JJ (09:54:52) :

Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald this morning, Don’t Let Fear Trump Hope:

They’ll be back. Count on it.

Indeed, they are already plotting their return, pundits and polls debating the best way of regaining favor.

. . . Allow me to insert into the discussion one tiny hope. Namely, that the GOP will plot a path back to power that does not require stepping on scapegoats to get there.

Ever since Richard Nixon’s infamous ”Southern strategy” of 1968, Republicans have won power largely by convincing voters that strange and exotic others were to blame for all their ills. It’s the feminists’ fault, they said. Or the blacks. Or the Hispanics, the Muslims or the gays.

The names change, but the playbook remains the same, the appeal to fear unchanging: Your way of life is threatened by these people and only we, the GOP, can save you.

That was the message when Jesse Helms ran a TV ad showing a white man’s hands crumpling a rejection letter for a job that had to be given ”to a minority because of a racial quota,” and when George H.W. Bush ran for office against a black career criminal named Willie Horton. It was the message during the debate over illegal immigration, and it was the message when Rep. Tom Tancredo advocated bombing Mecca and called Miami a Third World city.

It was the message when President George W. Bush thought the Constitution needed amending because of the threat posed by gay people in love.

Indeed, ”let us save you from them” has been arguably the GOP’s most enduring message for four decades, a promise to people shaken by change that the party will repeal the ’60s and reinstate the ’50s.

And never mind that this would mean returning women to the kitchen, Muslims to invisibility, gays to the closet and blacks to the back of the bus. Never mind that it was about as likely as returning toothpaste to the tube.

. . .Even the archest of arch conservatives must realize this by now.

That multicultural coalition celebrating Barack Obama’s victory in a Chicago park two weeks ago underscores this and underscores, too, that hope will always, eventually, triumph over fear. As Christmas once came to Whoville regardless of the machinations of the Grinch, the future has come to America regardless of GOP promises to restore sepia yesterdays.

It is past time the party recognized this, that it chucked the old playbook and evolved a new strategy that asks people to vote for their hopes and not just against their fears.

20 11 2008
Nance Confer (08:48:03) :

A new strategy to get people to vote against their own interests? That’s a tough one.

But it would be peachy if some Rs like Beck could realize they have screwed the country but good for the past 8 years. The working stiff in the Wendy’s is angry for good reason. Beck gets to run away and hide in his book tour bus and never worry about paying a bill but the truck stop guy doesn’t get to hide from the chaos that Beck and friends have created.

When he squeals “let’s not hate” he’s really calling for all of us to forget, not punch him, move on and let the Rs get on with planning their next assault.

Let’s not forget and let’s hate being taken advantage of and those who try it again and again. And have the nerve to hide on their bus and complain that they are going to waste the next weeks doing nothing at their desk jobs. Asshats who have no idea how many people have lost their desk jobs and would be happy for a meal at Wendy’s.

Nance

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