I’ve said it before.   Over and over.  The shit doesn’t really start hitting the fan, until the republicans start loosing power…

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Some of the anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is mostly letting it flare. A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Barack Obama. They’re making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

Everyone is starting to notice now, the frenzy of hate the republicans are whipping themselves into.  From Sullivan:

The Dangerous Panic On The Far Right

To some, a president Obama is simply unimaginable. From a McCain supporter in Wisconsin yesterday:

"We’re all wondering why Obama is where he’s at. How he got here. Everybody in this room is stunned we’re in this position."

There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannot be president – because he’s black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O’Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a "secret" terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies – not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

But Garrison Keillor was right…they’re republicans first, and Americans second.  And they have a history of this, which goes right back to Kennedy.  When King was assassinated in Memphis, they were calling him a traitor too…

The Unthinkable

And really the unsayable. But I’ve been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn’t just that they disagree with liberals on race–it’s they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King’s murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King’s murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.

This was not some notion bandied about by conspiracy theorist, but an accusation proffered by men who were the pillars of the modern Republican Party:

As late as 1964, Falwell was attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs" legislation. He questioned "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations." Falwell charged, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."

Falwell was not alone. These men didn’t kill Martin Luther King, but they contributed to an atmosphere of nationalism, white supremacy and cheap unreflective patriotism that ultimately got a lot of people killed. Confronted with Aparthied South Africa, men like Helms and Falwell used the same "communist" defense. While Mandella wasted away in prison, they dismissed the whole thing as a communist plot.

Let me be clear–This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield.  The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today’s red-baiting, and it is what it was then–a cover for racists. You may say I’m overreacting, and I really hope you’re right. 999,000 out 1 million times we’ll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.

Let me smack the subtext here out into the open: they’re trying to get him killed.  As recently as a few days ago I was content to believe they just wanted to lay the groundwork for the scorched earth campaign against President Obama and a democratic congress.  But that’s naive and anyone of my generation should know better…really…

I still remember vividly the day president Kennedy was assassinated.   I was home from school, very very sick with a flu and a high fever.  I was drifting in and out of sleep with the bed stand radio on, playing soft music.  I woke up, to the sound of a man’s voice saying over and over again, "The president has been shot…The president has been shot…The president has been shot…"..

Two days before President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, right-wingers began circulating around the city some 5,000 anti-Kennedy handbills.  Entitled “Wanted for Treason,” these leaflets were designed to look like a police “wanted” poster, with front and profile photographs of Kennedy’s head.

The handbills shrieked:
    “This man is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States:
    1.  Betraying the Constitution (which he is sworn to uphold):
         He is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.
         He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
    2.  He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations-Berlin wall-Missile removal-Cuba-Wheat deals-Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
    3.  He has been lax in enforcing Communist Registration laws.
    4.  He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
    5.  He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
    6.  He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office:
         Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings.
         Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
    7.  He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”

On the very day JFK visited Dallas and died, the local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, featured a full page, black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement prepared and paid for by persons affiliated with the John Birch Society, one of the most infamous right-wing extremist organizations of the 1960’s.  The ad claimed to be the work of “The American Fact-Finding Committee,” in reality a nonexistent organization.  Bernard Weissman, listed on the ad as the chairman of the Committee, however, did exist; he was the person who actually placed the ad.  Weissman later testified before the Warren Commission.  He was one of the few witnesses before that body who deemed it prudent to appear accompanied by an attorney.

The ad began with a sarcastic “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” a city which had been the victim of “a recent Liberal smear attempt” and which had prospered “despite efforts by you and your administration to penalize it for non-conformity to ‘New Frontierism’.”  The ad then posed a series of belligerent, insulting loaded questions, including:

• “Why has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced that his party will endorse and support your re-election bid?”
• “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
• “Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the ‘Spirit of Moscow’?”

Later that morning there were disparaging protests by right-wingers against JFK along the route of the presidential motorcade as it traveled from the airport to downtown Dallas.  As the motorcade drove through the suburbs, with President Kennedy only minutes from death, an unfriendly-looking man in a business suit stood on a sidewalk in an aggressive posture holding a protest sign which screamed: “Because of high regard for the presidency I hold you JFK and your blind socialism in complete contempt.”  (A photograph of this right-wing protester with his sign, taken by Dallas newspaper photographer Tom Dillard, is reproduced on p. 438 of Richard B. Trask’s Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (1994).)

In Dealey Plaza, at the time of the actual assassination, there was at least one right-winger present publicly expressing his scorn for the president.  On the sidewalk near the Stemmons Freeway traffic sign, only a few feet from the slow-moving presidential limousine during the very moments rifle bullets were slamming into JFK’s body, a mysterious man stood wearing a suit and, unlike anyone else there, holding up an open, black umbrella on this warm, sunshiny day.  (The “Umbrella Man,” as this enigmatic character soon was dubbed, is visible in the Zapruder film.  He also can be seen in a famous still color photograph of the assassination taken by amateur photographer Phil Willis.  The Willis photo is reproduced on p. 190 of Robert J. Groden’s The Killing of a President (1993).)

The identity of the Umbrella Man remained a secret for 15 years.  Then, in September 1978, a man named Louie Steven Witt appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and admitted that he was the Umbrella Man.  He told the Committee that he been there in Dealey Plaza to heckle JFK, and that he displayed the umbrella because he was under the impression that brandishing an umbrella would irritate JFK.  He testified: “I was going to use this umbrella to heckle the President’s motorcade. … Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him [JFK] in the liberal camp, and I was just sort of going to kind of do a little heckling. … I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys. … I was carrying that stupid umbrella, intent [on] heckling the President.” Witt denied that the umbrella he had in Dealey Plaza symbolized the appeasement practices of English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who often sported a black umbrella), or that the umbrella was intended to suggest that JFK was appeasing Communism the way Chamberlain had appeased Hitler.  This denial is not credible.  Among right-wingers, it was an article of faith that JFK’s supposedly soft, weak-kneed policies against the threat of Communism were the equivalent of Chamberlain’s futile attempts to appease Adolf Hitler.

Not even Kennedy’s death at 1 p.m. at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas stopped right-wingers from publicly displaying their loathing of JFK.  As William Manchester notes in his classic The Death of a President (1967): “At 3:05 p.m., when 80 percent of the American People were in deep grief, an NBC camera panned toward a group of spectators outside Parkland’s emergency entrance and picked up a young man with a placard that read, ‘Yankee, Go Home.’”   (In a wealthy Dallas suburb, Manchester reminds us, “pupils of a fourth-grade class, told that the President of the United States had been murdered in their city, burst into spontaneous applause.”)
-JFK Blown Away-Hooray! – D. Wilkes, University of Georgia

If you think the McCain campaign is playing with fire you are sadly mistaken.  They Are of the fire.  America, and the American Dream, lives or dies depending on how many of us are left, who still believe in it, and will defend it against the mob.  Democracies don’t die at the hands of foreign enemies.  They die when the mob overwhelms the dream of freedom and liberty and justice for all.  The gutter cannot tolerate and will not willingly endure a world, where they have to witness what free men and women are capable of when the chains are cast off, and their dreams take wing.  They will burn it all down if they have to, so they don’t have to know what humanity is capable of, that they might have been…