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Originally posted at The Rant.
Does it get any better than this?
The only thing that Johnny and Gidget have to run on at this stage in the game is the issue (or non-issue, really) of the character of Barack Obama. Watching the people at the Reichstag....I mean, rallies.... will be remembered as classic moments in the history of unintentional comedy; a virtual treasure trove example of the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American people:
"I ain't votin' fer no nigger A- Rab!"
Nice! No, it doesn't get any weirder than that. It really doesn't!
But there is something which is also very disturbing and deeply ominous about the McCain/Palin events - the visceral shouts from the crowd, implying threatened violence:
"Kill him!"
"Off with his head!"
"Terrorist!"
"Bomb Obama!"
All of these choice nuggets of electoral discourse were captured by the microphones of MSNBC this week. In an interview a few days ago with CNN's Anderson Cooper, David Gergen said:
"There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we're not far from that. I really worry when we get....the kind of rhetoric that you're getting at these rallies. I think it's really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down."
Your average McCain/Palin rally has all the look and feeling - not of your average campaign event - but of an out-of-control lynch mob! Middle America, as mythologized by Thornton Wilder in his literary masterpiece, Our Town, has lost it's fucking mind.
There is the malignant cancer of racism which affects the American body politic that Camp McCain is willing and eager to exploit. How else can you explain Sarah Palin's constant, suggestive inquiry, "Just who is Barack Obama"? All last week she has been trying to transform Senator Obama's casual acquaintance with former sixties radical William Ayers into a full fledged plot to blow up America.
Her desperation is quite touching, really. She is loyally following the tried and true Lee Attwater/Karl Rove playbook - the three D's: Divide, Distort and Distract. She is trying to hoodwink the American people into foolishly swallowing the fiction that the Republican party is the party of traditional middle class goals and values. That won't work any longer. Sure it will always work with the type of idiotic Nazi wannabes they were able to dredge up for their rallies in Wisconsin and Florida last week - but the grand old party is over. The era of half-witted, right wing ideological perversity which has polluted America's national political dialogue for nearly three decades is over.
The pendulum has swung - with a vengeance, baby!
I've been waiting for this moment since the day I picked up Dick Gregory's autobiography from the shelf of my high school's library one afternoon in the spring of 1974. I knew that an African American would make it to the White House in my lifetime. I can't explain to you how I knew it; it was just a feeling I had. Call it intuition; call it prophecy; call it Degan's dumb, Irish luck - But I knew it, Buster!
The irony is that I always thought that the first black man to live in the White House would be a centrist Republican. (Let's face facts: Middle America would never have sent a black woman to the White House at this point in time, no matter how bad things were.) Even a slightly left-of-center black Democrat traditionally scares the shit out of Middle America. A Black Democrat in the White House? It'll never happen, I thought.
