This week the presidential campaign took an ugly, nasty turn beginning with John McCain's attack ads painting Barack Obama as dangerous and too different to be trusted, followed by Sarah Palin's remarks touting Obama as a terrorist and using words like "fearful" and "afraid" when describing the Democratic candidate and accusing him of "palling around with terrorists," to Tuesday night's spectacle of McCain pointing in the direction of Obama, when contrasting how he and Obama voted on an energy bill that came up in Congress, and saying, "You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one."
Where is the line in the sand? When is enough enough? When does a campaign come up with one despicable tactic too many, one smear too many, one distortion too many? One thrown stone too many.
Negative campaigning is one thing.
Othering crosses a line. Especially when it arouses loathing and hatred in one's audience. Othering is one of those clumsy terms academics came up with to describe the strategy of accentuating differences between people, stigmatizing and denigrating the "other." It divides the world up between "us" and "them." Othering Obama reinforces the notion of him as unAmerican, less than human, or, worst, an enemy that needs to be gotten rid of.
From the Washington Post:
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."Making one's opponent out to be not just a political opponent, but an enemy of the state and scapegoat for all that's dangerous and terrifying about the world crosses over into something akin to evil. Painting Barack Obama as arrogant and a foreigner, a Muslim, and not a Christian as he alleges, someone who pals around with terrorists, and married to a woman who hates America, can not be tolerated. It's race-baiting, fear-mongering, and xenophobia at its worst.
...
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Where have we come as a nation that such tactics are tolerated? Someone yells out "Kill Him" at a rally and the speaker who claims to be a Christian doesn't bother to stop and morally condemn such sentiments. It's one thing for a campaign to use smear tactics to take votes away from the opponent, but stirring up hate and cries for murder is going over the line. No matter how pretty the face saying it, "he is not like us" is the sort of comment that has the potential to bring out the worst in people and catapult into some of the most despicable crimes against humanity.
Enough with "this is the way politics is." Things have gotten dangerously out of control.
I say, Enough is Enough.
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And Democratic leaders hinting at race riots or riots in general isn't dangerous? Denying human rights to newborn infants like Obama has done, isn't crossing a huge moral line either?
For someone to actually assert that Obama is pro-life in light of that is absurd and a complete denial of biblical truth, in that we are created in the image of God.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/10/08/james-carville-hints-riots-if-obama-loses
http://whyimnotademocrat.blogspot.com/2008/10/if-obama-is-pro-life-then-evil-has.html
Yes Blue Collar...let's kill everyone who supports abortion, shall we?
Thank you for showing us the true face of conservative Christianity.
What concerns me as I have watched and read the news this week is the fact that the behavior we're seeing looks and feels a lot like some of the irrational behavior seen during the Great Depression. People are angry and don't know who to blame right now. Or better yet, they do know who to blame: the candidate that they target.
This is what I know. A group which becomes angry can then become a mob. A mob is a faceless entity. No one man or woman sees himself or herself as the culprit of any crime committed by such a mob of which that person is a member. "I didn't do it--the mob did" you see. The faceless, heartless, mindless mob.
Surely, we have all read of this phenomenom in literature. To Kill a Mockingbird has a good mob scene which actually ends with a child--Scout--putting a face and a name on a man in the crowd, thereby disintegrating the collective identity of the mob, and the "dark deed" they had come to do is left undone.
What I have seen this week reminds me, too, of the crowds, the masses, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Surely, we have not come so far in our rationalization of what is acceptable behavior as a nation in the throes of a campaign season that the life of a human being might be put in grave danger for the sake of his opponent winning. If so, who is responsible? The man, the woman on the stump who first incited crowds by commission or omission?
STOP this craziness NOW! Let me put it another way: When the smoke clears, we might be able to see the fire, and the real fire is the economy.
Sarah Palin as vice president? I really have a hard time with that. There is her professed Christianity that doesn't seem to hinder in the least the kinds of remarks she makes in spite of the commandment about bearing false witness (not only about Ayers, but so many other remarks as well proven to be false by Factcheck--oh! but there's the nasty media again, isn't it?); or Jesus' own admonition about casting the first stone when she herself is currently under investigation for the Troopergate affair and McCain's own career came close to taking a nosedive after the Savings and Loan scandal and his association with Keating.
But in a way, I'm even more bothered by her appearance as the shallow snide, snarky, kid we all remember from school who made a school career out of putting down--or "othering" those with more depth, if not actual intelligence--the nerds, bookworms, geeks, or whatever. It may have been funny for some of us as sophomores, but sophomoric behavior from a vice president candidate makes it impossible for me to take her seriously.
Remember, Palin comes from a tv media background herself, and I hope that that broadcaster's poise allows her to cover up some deep-seated feelings of conflict over being called upon to be so nasty and sarcastic. I hope she doesn't enjoy it nearly as much as she appears to be doing. If I can hope this, then maybe I can avoid seeing her as the totally spoiled school girl with no social conscience.
ds0490,
Nice ad hominem response. Read what I say not what you want me to say.
Blue Collar
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