Since the last debate the McCain-Palin campaign has embarked on the lowest, most incendiary round of negative attacks I've ever seen. Palin in particular has been stoking the fires of race hatred and extremism at her rallies. Her baseless accusations that Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist or that he thinks it's OK to "attack the pentagon" because he had some nominal connections to a former member of the Weather Underground (a member who far from being an "unrepentant terrorist" turned himself in and encouraged his wife and friends in the group to do so as well). McCain supporters are turning into angry mobs like this one and this one (this one is like a time warp to the street conflicts between hard hats and hippies in the sixties) and members of crowd shout back to either Palin or McCain that Obama was a traitor or a terrorist or shouting "kill him!" There have been calls from senior moderate Republicans like former Michigan governor Miliken, for McCain to get a hold of the situation and calm people down before violence breaks out - yes people were serious worried about violence (there are rumors that reporters at McCain-Palin events had been physically threatened by angry crowd members). Yesterday, McCain finally tried to put the toothpaste back in the tube. As far as these latest efforts go, good for McCain. But he incited this national riot in the first place. He needs to do more than a simple one line response. Especially when his campaign continues with the incendiary attacks. Perhaps his motives for backing off the attacks partially is due to with this. The attacks aren't working.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
John McCain Tries To Put Hate Mongering Toothpaste Back In the Tube
Posted by Raised By Republicans at 5:31 AM
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6 comments:
Despite this single request for a modicum of dignity, McCain ads are the dirtiest in memory and now McCain himself is trying to talk up Ayers. The attack is not working because there's no substance to it and nobody cares. This Ayers nonsense is older and weaker than your grandmother's Lipton. Just remember: the Ayers connection is so lame that not even the Clintons bothered to use it :-)
I agree that it's not working. It is old news. And it is patently absurd to say that the then 8 year old Obama was involved with the Weathermen.
Of course though a big reason this is old news is because the Clintons did bring it up a lot in the later stages of the primaries. So in that regard, Dr S was correct in his earlier arguments about the benefits of a long, hotly contested primary fight between Hillary and Obama. In effect, Hillary's largely negative campaign in the final phases of her primary fight inoculated Obama against similar attacks in the general.
I googled it quickly, and RbR is right: Hillary did mention the Ayers issue. (The only quote from Hillary I could find regarding Ayers in my admittedly lax search was from an earlier Democratic debate when Stephanopolous asked her about it--but I'm sure there must have been other remarks either from her or her various surrogates.) Unlike Obama's connections to Rev. Wright, or Rezko, however--which Hillary pushed hard--few of us ever heard of Ayers before the Republicans tried to make this an issue a couple of weeks ago. Of course, since the Clintons also had tenuous connections to Ayers, which might have been part of the reason they did not push it. But at any rate, nobody except the already-committed really seem to care about Obama's six degrees of separation with Ayers... Everyone else seems to grasp that Chicago politics was both hardball and incestuous--like politics everywhere, really, only more so. The Palin fiasco should help dump this Ayers nonsense off the front pages, I hope!
Yeah, no one will be asking about Ayers. It will all be requests for responses on the report from Alaska.
The Secret Service is launching an investigation into the calls for Obama's death. Chants of "kill him" sound almost Biblical. "Give us Barabbas!" should be the next chant.
These people are sick.
There are 300 ballots in New York state that have been printed with "Osama" rather than "Obama. They say it is a typo. On my Keyboard, the S and the B are on separate rows and pretty far apart.
McCain has decided to pursue a "Southern Strategy". And he is now being compared to George Wallace who as a judge was quite liberal. But when asked why he starting stoking racist fires he said, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." For those of our readers who don't know about George Wallace, it's worth a little research.
If this is what McCain is doing, he should be ashamed and the Southerns should be angry with his campaign. It feeds into the stereotype of the uneducated, racist Southerner. It is being stoked by Northern outsiders. And the composition of the South has changed so much over the years, that the stereotype no longer fits.
Carl Rove at his worst never instigated crowds to such levels.
I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess that those 300 ballots were someone's idea of a funny practical joke. If it were a deliberate ploy, they just would have "accidentally" printed his middle name :-)
It's a funny looking ballot, with each candidate listed more than once. And what's with the stars and eagles?
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