| This is what happens when you tell your supporters that your opponent is a terrorist. This is what happens when you condone having your supporters scream "kill him!" and "terrorist" at your rallies.
Now I recognize the irony of talking about McCain/Palin calling Obama a terrorist as I accuse them of sitting idly by while they allow their rhetoric to motivate people to violence. But the difference is that we aren't saying that there's no difference between McCain and Osama bin Laden. We haven't called for the death of McCain. And we're not physically attacking other people.
The McCain-Palin backers are scared of Obama because of the hate that's no longer restricted to talk radio and right-wing blogs, and is being said by McCain and Palin themselves. They're scared because they've been told that Obama will turn America over to Al Queda and Hamas, while turning America into a Soviet state at the same time.
They're doing what anyone would do when they feel their homeland is being attacked. They're fighting.
They're fighting us because they're being told by the McCain campaign that we're not "real Americans". Sarah Palin said:
"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."
McCain's senior advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer called south Virginia "real Virginia". McCain's brother called northern VA "Communist country".
John McCain is allowing his surrogates to say that his non-supporters aren't "real Americans", that we hate America, that we're socialist, etc. It's easy to attack another American when you're being told that those "other Americans" are out to destroy you.
Of course McCain is going to continue to defend these attacks. Because he doesn't want to go against his base. He tried once to stop the hate that he helped create, and he was booed for it. He's more scared of what his base thinks of him than he is of preventing domestic terrorist attacks. It's sad that a war veteran is so unwilling to put country before political aspirations.
If Obama wins, these attacks will continue, and they will get worse. People may even be killed. Yet they will also marginalize conservatism. In the same way that 9/11 only created a desire to destroy a terrorist we had been hunting for years, conservative terrorists are only going to create a backlash against conservatism.
If McCain really wants to save the political ideology he's fought for for decades, he'd be well served by telling his supporters to knock it off. Otherwise he's helping destroy his own movement. |
