After weeks of going negative, according to one source, 100% of McCain's national ads are now negative, the tone of McCain-Palin rallies this week turned brutal. One reporter, yes, I heard him on MSNBC, on Keith Olbermann's Countdown, said that only "wingnuts" were showing up at McCain-Palin rallies now. He is attracting the angry and the ignorant.
But this is what is frightening me. When an older woman took the microphone yesterday and said that she was afraid of Obama because he was an "Arab," McCain didn't try to correct her misunderstanding at its core. Check out the CNN footage on YouTube. He retorted by saying that Obama is a "decent man," implying that Arabs aren't decent people. He never even thought to correct her racial profiling, her use of the word "Arab" as a synonym for "terrorist." Yet this is the kind of hatred that is coming out as a result of the negative campaign, the insistence that Obama's full name, including the dreaded "Hussein" be included, every time they speak, compounded by saying that Obama pals around with domestic terrorists.
In the past, when rumors went flying around the Internet, aimed at Jews, especially Jews living in Florida, that Obama was Muslim, no one in either campaign stopped to say: Hey, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim. We can't use shorthand to condemn an entire religion because of its most extreme branches. That's what infuriates me, and as you can see, from my post on Religulous, Bill Maher's new film, I understand the problems with faith held with too much certitude.
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