Just a little fascism, for effect

We all expected the presidential campaign to get ugly in the last month. No surprise there, and both sides share responsibility. But here’s what really worries me about Sarah Palin’s recent attacks against Barack Obama in John McCain’s campaign. It’s not her inexperience and sneering contempt for anyone who isn’t a Joe Sixpack or (name of sport) Mom, though that’s troubling. It’s the dog whistle fascism. Here are some observations by Dana Milbank in his Washington Post column today.

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.”

But it’s not like this misplaced anger at minorities could be exploited for anything worse:

… 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.

I’ll be fair. I don’t believe that John McCain or Sarah Palin would agree with what their supporters said, but they’re leading them to those conclusions with their choice of words and attacks. These are the emotions that Palin has been deliberately stoking as part of McCain’s fourth quarter strategy. It’s the equivalent of Democrats telling radical liberals to set police cars on fire. If this works, what do we tell our kids about America?

I am comforted by the strong likelihood that this attempt to scare people into submission will ultimately fail.

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