With little time left in the Presidential campaign, the McCain and Palin camp is unleashing all that they have left -- a campaign that relies on appealing to bigotry and harks back to the Bush fear mongering of our past two elections.
They have already laid the groundwork, using code words to stoke fear and bigotry, not just among their menacing and scary base voters showing up at their rallies, but, they hope, among folks that are otherwise leaning Obama or who are still undecided but who they believe may harbor some of these fears and prejudices. Here are some of the code words. I am sure you can think of more:
- “Terrorist Associations” – dark skin, scary, not like you.
- “Socialistic” – communist dictatorship.
- “Anti-American”, “Don’t think of America the way we do” – see numbers 1 and 2 above.
The problem is, at least so far, the code words have not been working. So, now, they are unleashing the Sarah Palin gone rogue theme....
Yes, I believe it is at least possible that the “leaks” and claims of tension within their campaign are a way to allow Palin to drop the code language and make the direct character assassinations, while allowing McCain and the rest of the campaign to maintain plausible deniability.
You see, Palin is not just ATTRACTING a lynch mob mentality, “Muslim, terrorist, communist, kill him” crowd, she IS ONE OF THEM. The McCain camp know this, so they have found a way to let her off her leash.
And sure enough, she goes there:
“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free.”
Obama will take your belongings and tell you what to do – he’s a communist.
So there it is – the McCain/Palin closing argument: “We know a lot of Americans are closet bigots and live fear-filled lives, so vote for us because we look like you. Go Sarah, we will pretend we do not like what you are saying.”
The bigotry and fear campaign – I don’t think it will work this time but watch for how far she goes in the coming week.