'Kill him!'? Silence as McCain/Palin Response is Deafening

Dissonance
is the soundtrack of any faltering political campaign. Things get said
to jar the ear and maybe shock the conscience. It grabs attention that
reasonable coherence alone couldn't deliver. Sometimes it works. It did
four years ago, when an incompetent president defeated his challenger
by conjuring up fears and slanders that played into what was left of
the electorate's 9/11 stupor. Look what it got us.

The re-elected
incompetence proved worse than even George W. Bush's core supporters
could imagine, now that he's officially less liked than Richard Nixon
at his impeachable lowest. His heirs, Sarah Palin and John McCain,
aren't proposing much more than a change of accents and actuarial risks
in the White House even as the whole country begins to get a sense of
what it must've been like to be in the New Orleans Superdome after
Katrina. With all their chatter about cleaning Washington, the same
Washington McCain spent the past 25 years furnishing, McCain and Palin
sound like a pair of Hoovers vacuuming the luxury deck of the Titanic
while it sinks. Since their poll numbers have been sinking along,
they've reverted to conjuring fears and slanders of their own --
nothing unexpected, nothing we didn't see coming from reactionaries
enraged at the notion of a black liberal with an African first name, an
Arab middle name and a drumroll of a last name vaulting to their
no-longer-white-only presidency.

Prepared for it or not, the
flammable can burn. Palin rallies have become accelerants of
inflammatory hate that, in Florida last week, turned dangerous when she
linked Obama to Bill Ayers, the Chicago university professor whose
Weather Underground organization set off a few bombs around 1970, when
Obama was in elementary school. It's worth noting what's seldom said
about those bombs: They were preceded by evacuation warnings and set
off in the middle of the night in places like a deserted U.S. Capitol
toilet. The only people killed were three Underground members who set
one off accidentally in their basement. The bombs were intended to
protest bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia, paid for by every American
taxpayer and orchestrated by Palin pal Henry Kissinger, that massacred
civilians at the rate of about 500 a day while terrorizing millions.

Anyway,
all set up with her sordid little libel of Ayers, Palin went in for the
payoff against Obama: "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as
imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had
targeted his own country." Someone yelled out, "Kill him!" Palin went
on. When she sneered at the "kind of mainstream media," the crowd
turned on reporters covering the event, firing epithets that included
Jim Crow vocabulary directed at a black television crew member. The
word "terrorist" also is being thrown around in reference to Obama.
Palin and McCain have yet to condemn the goons. Their silence condones
it. Let's not suggest that what spouts out of their rally props is out
of their control. As David Gergen, the bipolar Republican and
Democratic operative, put it on CNN on Thursday, "yes, you can" control
it, "and it is up to Sarah Palin at her rally and for John McCain to
tell her if she doesn't start doing this, to stop right there and take
issue with what's been said."

But they haven't. More to the point: How could they not
condemn the merest suggestion from their supporters, let alone an
explicitly murderous threat, that Obama should be assassinated, when
the prospects of an Obama assassination have been openly anguished
over? "There is," The New York Times reported on its front page in
February, "a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator
Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to
rally: Will he be safe?" Not when his opponent's ticket puts a silencer
on its own minimum standards of civility.

"And I am just so
fearful," Palin could still say of Obama at the very same "Kill him!"
rally in Jacksonville, "that this is not a man who sees America the way
that you and I see America."

She's right.
The America she sees, the America she wants, the America Bush
transformed and the America Palin inflames at her rallies is not at all
the way most of us see America. Nor is it the way most of the world had
ever imagined America could become, though it's the kind of America the
world, and most of us, have been enduring. The only thing to fear, is
if that era were not to end come Election Day.