The Blood Dimmed Tide: McCain’s Reckless Dance With the Beast

Kevin Roderick, at LA Observed reported that, on Friday, the folks in the Los Angeles Times mailroom opened a hand-scrawled letter that read “Kill All Obama Supporters.”” The letter was addressed to LA Times reporters Ralph Vartabedian and Richard A. Serrano and, among other things, demanded a retraction of the reporters’ Oct. 6 article , about John McCain’s Navy flying record, which the mailer perceived to be critical of the candidate.

The envelope contained a suspicious light brown granular substance, and the FBI and a HAZMAT team were called to investigate. The substance turned out to be harmless.

The day before, HAZMAT and the LAPD bomb squad were called to Obama headquarters to the Obama Campaign office in Palms due to another suspicious envelope. (The cops declined to say what was in the thing.)

A third threatening letter and package, which also contained a suspicious substance, was sent to the McCallum Theater in Palm Desert where Bill Maher was scheduled to perform on Saturday night, reports CBS. The letter contained specific threats against Maher. Concern over the letter, which contained “specific threats” against Maher, according to mydesert.com, was such that the theater was shut down for nearly five hours while HAZMET and various law enforcement teams moved in. The Boz Scaggs concert scheduled that night was cancelled, but Bill Maher went ahead with his performance on Saturday.

Also on Friday, a university colleague of mine reported that a friend’s housekeeper had shared a taxi with a group in Orange County when the subject of politics came up. The taxi driver told the group what he had in mind doing to Obama if he got the chance. I won’t repeat it in detail here. Let us just say it was more than merely a deadly threat and had I been in the taxi my next action, after taking down the driver’s cab number, would have been to call the FBI.

The rhetoric at the McCain and the Palin rallies has gone past simple hard-ball politics, past even dirty politics, into a dark realm that call up the very worst in some of our fellow Americans. Sarah Palin appears to have no conscience at all about the possible consequences of her behavior. But everything we’ve seen about John McCain in his decades of public service suggests that he knows better than this, is better than this.

Or at least he was.

Now, McCain seems caught in a Faustian drama of Shakespearian proportions, that would be fascinating if it weren’t so potentially dangerous.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich is eloquent and unequivocal. I’ve posted a few clips below, but the entire piece is absolutely required reading:

At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

[SNIP]

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.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Former McCain supporter, author and reporter, Frank Shaeffer, laid it out straight in his column in Thursday’s Balitmore Sun:

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post- 9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

John McCain, you’re walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out “Terrorist” or “Kill him,” history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

Oh, yeah, and by the way, as the random threats of the last three days in Southern California make clear that, if this mob mentality continues to be stoked, the danger is not limited to the democratic candidate for president.

People of decency and good conscience on both sides of the election, both sides of the red/blue divide, have to call on McCain to stop the hatred train in its tracks—while it’s still possible. As Frank Rich said, doing nothing is not an option.

He made an effort at rallies on Friday to correct the pitch fork wavers who called Obama, among other things, an “Arab.” Some of the press suggested that McCain’s change in tone was simply another campaign tactic.

I’d like to think that, instead, it was that the decent side of John McCain was genuinely horrified at what rough beast that he and his running mate have now loosed.

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NOTE: The video above showing McCain/Palin supporters waiting in line to get into a rally in Bethlehem, PA, was recorded on Tuesday, October 8.