Been thinking a lot today about Josh Marshall’s post about the grand GOP strategery for dealing with Obama:
Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can’t.
But that’s not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we’ll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They’re like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it’s the score that’s the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.
Here in Cincy the airwaves are full of commercials for Obama, Clinton and McCain. Willie Cunningham has been slinging crap on WLW since the mid-80’s, and Marshall’s observation is correct.
But I have to ask “What the hell did you expect them to do, Josh?” In all seriousness, why is this news to anybody? Have people not been paying attention to several thousand years of human history? What about basic American history for the last 300 years?
Of course they’re going to push Obama as the evil darkie terrorist. The rank and file state and local GOP guys are all going to come out and do this, and then McCain’s coming out and saying “Well that’s just unfortunate, please stop that” in the mildest possible terms. I like Josh Marshall, I read TPM quite a bit, but he does us a moderate disservice by stopping short of the logical endpoint of this.
Because after months and months of this, somebody’s going to actually buy into this so much that they make an attempt on Obama’s life. I absolutely believe this, and it’s time we did more than just say “Well the GOP are slimeballs and they are running a vile political campaign.”
They are trying to make sure serious harm comes to Barack Obama. This is what America is all about now in 2008, what the neocons and Bush have wrought, a party so steeped in hate that it’s not only accepted that they operate purely on the trade of bigotry and divisive rhetoric as acceptable “industry best practices” for political campaigning, but that they aren’t being called it because their evil is apparently too banal to give a damn about. It’s expected of them to be hateful, bile-throwing racists that are attacking a candidate on his middle name, and yet, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s just the GOP being the GOP.
When does this start violating hate speech laws, folks? When do we start getting disgusted enough to start calling for this to end, before or after the inevitable assassination attempt on Obama’s life? When do we begin to assign culpability and responsibility for what the Republican Party is doing, has done, and will continue to do to this country should we allow them to do so?
If we don’t push back on this, if we don’t immediately identify this behavior as wrong, unacceptable, and fundamentally incompatible with America, then it will become standard practice every single time.
This plausible deniability bullshit must. End. Now. McCain needs to be made to feel the heat on this. He must be asked at every juncture “Do you approve of this, and if you do not, what are you doing to stop this?” He must be asked “How can you run as the candidate of a party that not only tolerates this but actively encourages it?” He must be asked “What is your campaign going to do about this behavior?”
Because right now McCain’s GOP lackeys are trying to stir up so much hatred that it may very well lead to the death of a man because of his middle name. That will be our America. That will be our legacy, our place in history.
We either stop this or we enable it with our silence. We either advance as a country, as a people, as an ideal, or we plunge back into darkness and hatred. The right-wingers have every intention of doing this so they maintain control.
America’s about to be undone by these assholes, and we’re going to let them do it? I don’t think so.
They have to be exposed for what they are: hatemongers. Period. Every time.
