One Choice: Obama

     I’ve been thinking a lot about the McCain/Palin crowd incitement of late, painting Obama as practically a card-carrying terrorist. After the havoc the GOP White House has wreaked over this land in the past eight years, I’d be slow to label anyone a domestic terrorist. Couldn’t the pillaging of working-class Americans’ retirement savings in the past week be construed as a form of domestic terrorism, too?
     They seem to think because Obama has served on a board with former Weather Underground member William Ayers, that somehow that association links him to Ayers’ radical actions (when Obama was eight years old!). Ridiculous!
     My pastor was involved with radical activities during the Sixties. Berrigan brothers and the like. So if you use the same pretzel logic of the McCain/Palin squad, then I’d be branded a terrorist because I know him and go to his church. Right? Doubly ridiculous!
     Be sure to read Frank Rich’s powerful column Saturday on the real threat emanating from this crowd stirring by the GOP. He notes Palin’s “use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess.” Lovely. Will she be handing out pamphlets on eugenics next?
     And in regard to the lilywhite-ness of their crowds, Rich shares this anecdote: “There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.”
     All this negative behavior at their rallies smacks of desperation. The polls continue to rise in Obama’s favor, so it’s also being proven as ineffective. Thank God.