The ugly truth

Sheer madness is the best way I can describe how Palin and McCain’s surrogates and flacks have twisted the truth. In the same breath they poison the atmoshphere with incendiary lies as they charge Democrats and Obama of being untruthful.

What is worse is the widening discovery of who the true Republican base is — an angry, ignorant, prejudiced, and fearful lot. I am mad at them. I am mad at them because their language and beliefs bring me back to the dark history of immigrants that I have only read about in old, tattered books.

But I am more saddened that their toxin still lives.

Above, in full display, stands a roadside sign in West Plains, Missouri, according to BoingBoing.net. No further editorializing needed. The original source: Caricature prompts racism allegations: News-Leader.com, via Racist Obama Billboard Causes Outrage: Current).

For more examples of this bull$%!#, click “Obama Bin Lyin’” sign at McCain rally ; click also another example, and then here’s another, also according to BoingBoing.net.

Frank Rich in the NY Times this past weekend wrote:

“[W]hat has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.”