Cultural Cuisinart

Perhaps some of my elders can correct me on this, but has there ever been a more disgusting show of dirty politics than what Sarah Palin and John McCain have been pitching on the campaign trail lately? The language they're using in their speeches (particularly Palin, who is revealing herself to be a Very Bad Person) is dangerous, because it's inciting their frenzied crowds into some pretty scary behavior. From the NY Times editorial condemning the McCain campaign:

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Now, any decent human being would have stop what they're doing and call out their supporters for that. But the McCain campaign has yet to address that behavior in any form. What I find most appalling is the thought that they just don't care, that they truly don't realize that they are directly responsible for fostering that sort of sentiment out in the public sphere. That sort of hate-mongering is plain evil. That fact CANNOT be denied.

I won't even bother going into the irony that this is the same campaign that did so much hanky-clutching and hand-wringing over alleged "sexist" comments.