Today Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) said McCain’s campaign was "sowing the seeds of hatred and division." Lewis went on to invoke George Wallace and the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. Now, John McCain didn’t like that, and he went back into his room, like Rocky Raccoon, and came out with his own version of Gideon’s Bible. Quoth McCain:
Congressman John Lewis’ comments represent a character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale...a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track."
He then called on Senator Obama to "immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments..."
Personally, the only possible criticism I might have of Rep. Lewis’ words might be his choice of a comparator. McCain and Palin’s latest rants about Obama’s consorting with terrorists, and Mrs. McCain’s heart-wrenching tale of her visceral anger and spine-tingling revulsion felt when Obama voted to deny her own son the equipment he needed to fight in Iraq reminded me of different far right demogogery that led to a different murder. I’m thinking of the far right in Israel insisting that Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor, that he had sold out G-d’s promise to Israel by signing the Oslo Accords. On 4 November 1995 the radical right-wing Orthodox Jew Yigal Amir rose to the challenge. taking it upon himself to defend the sacred Jewish homeland and destiny by putting a bullet in Rabin’s chest.
Today there are millions of angry white men in America whose incomes have been declining, whose pensions may be disappearing, who see immigrants and foreigners and blacks as displacing them in the workplace. If John McCain doesn’t think his repeated insistence that Obama consorts with terrorists and is dangerous for America might not stir up one or more of these angry white men to take it upon him/them selves to save the fatherland, then he’s not just reckless, he’s darn stupid, too.