…is a genie that doesn’t squeeze itself back into the bottle so easily:
Publius at Obsidian Wings credits McCain for doing “the right thing” in that clip and points out that on the campaign trail, the right thing often isn’t so easy to do. I can go with that and I’ll take the time to point out that I haven’t been afraid to credit McCain or Palin or defend them when it is appropriate to do so.
But this gesture does not pardon his culpability in fostering this hate. Ads like this one:
…and this one:
…and Sarah Palin’s open and explicit claims that Obama “pals around with terrorists” have cultivated and nourished a groundswell of suspicion and hate (yes hate) that manifests itself in the opinions of people you see in the first video linked in this post and in the two posts below this one with the same title. If you haven’t seen it already, please, watch the video in the post I submitted on October 9th below. It’s from outside a McCain rally in Strongville, OH. Understand that Strongville is not a rural backwater near the Kentucky border but a suburb just outside of Cleveland, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Ohio and part of a top 20 media market, ahead of such cities as San Diego, St Louis and Baltimore.
And I know that I’ve harped on it here before but the double standard cannot be stressed enough. We have a Vice Presidential candidate who openly associates with secessionists. There is no agenda – tacitly or explicitly, deliberately or extemporaneously – to label her a treasonist for these associations. Nor should there be! In fact, the political right has made Todd Palin, a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, a kind of folk hero, along with his wife Governor Palin. No politician who “pals around with” Oliver North is raked over for associating with an illegal arms dealer who supplied weapons to Iran, which even back then, was a terrorism sponsoring regime that just a few years earlier held dozens of American citizens hostage for over a year. In fact, the rightist media has given Oliver North his own forum in the form of a prime time television show on FOX News Channel.
You need to start numbering these, Joe!