Hatred Is the Coward's Revenge for Being Intimidated

I was watching the Oliver Stone film JFK the other day with my wife. In one of the first scenes of the movie, Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, goes to a restaurant to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news that President Kennedy has been assassinated. One of the other patrons in the bar applauds when he hears the news and Costner's character says, "God, I'm ashamed to be an American today."

That kind of sums up how I have felt this week watching people at McCain/Palin rallies. They have screamed "terrorist," "kill him," and "traitor" when Barack Obama's name is mentioned. They have hurled racial epithets at an African-American cameraman covering an event. And a woman told McCain to his face that Obama was an Arab. To his credit, McCain rebuked that comment, but it is too little too late for me.

In 1919, the United States Supreme Court ruled on Schenck v. United States. Oliver Wendell Holmes's opinion contained the line "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic..." This means that speech can only be banned when it was directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action. This is exactly what the McCain/Palin campaign has been doing this entire week with their insinuations that Obama is or has ties to a terrorist.

McCain and company must know that the word terrorist is pretty touchy in this country after 9/11. They must realize that they are running against someone with African name (some even call it a Muslim name). They certainly understand that by ignoring those profane comments coming from their supporters that they are only condoning it. They have to be aware that this is irresponsible and cowardly.

Well, Governor Palin certainly doesn't. She says, "With only 25 days to go, it's not negative and it's not mean-spirited." Really? How is it not mean-spirited? How can you knowingly slander a man and then say it's just good clean fun? Oh, I know. Because he won't talk about his relationship with Bill Ayers except with every news organization that asks him about it! He even called into a radio show in Philadelphia to talk about it. I guess Palin really doesn't read a newspaper.

Even fervent Republicans are dismissing this. Conservative columnist George Will wrote in the Washington Post, "the McCain-Palin charges have come just as ... many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts--telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans' accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain/Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal."

Conservative blogger Ross Douthat of the Atlantic has written, "I find the 'Ayersing' so frustrating: I suspect that the strategy won't just fail to help McCain, but will actually further weaken the GOP in down-ballot races, by fueling the perception that the party's deeply out of touch."

David Frum, former Bush speechwriter, recently wrote, "Does anybody really seriously believe that Barack Obama is a secret left-wing radical?"

Even the chief prosecutor of the Weather Underground in the 1970s, William C. Ibershof, wrote a letter to the New York Times. He wrote, "Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago."

The problem is that these people are smart and the people attending the rallies are not. I never like to say that people are ignorant, but I cannot resist when I see such stupidity and volatility arise from what amounts to as little more than a taunt. I have spent the last few hours jumping around conservative blogs and picking my jaw up off the floor when I read the racist and incendiary comments. These people are like wild animals on the trail of prey. They are eating it up and begging for more. They are convinced that these innuendos and aspersions will get their candidate to the White House.

This type of behavior makes me hope this other quote from JFK is true: "Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth."