The Legacy of McCain-Palin: Hate

This kind of thing is what makes me both sad and scared for my son, growing up in a world with people like this. I don’t want him to be a hateful person. Whatever happened to “love thy neighbor?”

I question whether it is worth giving this kind of thing air on the grounds that it may only serve to further empower those who would do evil.

Without wanting to be as prejudicial as the McPalin campaign, this was inevitable. We can perhaps be grateful that McCain (so it would seem) kept away from this. It was Palin, drunk with popularity and craving a greater level of FameCrack that brought us here. The public slaughter of Palin that Fox and the GOP are currently mounting should eventually make her disappear. Maybe, as the Republican Party reinvents itself, they’ll remember fear and hatred are not ideals that attract the young or Latino or Af-Am or the under $50k or over the $100k or the work at homers,or the work at workers or the…

Good post. Sad topic. I found myself often referring to right-wing talk shows this year as “hate radio” and to Palin Politics as a “hate campaign.”

The H word is not one I’ve ever liked and we have always tried to avoid it in our house. That’s why a random line from Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, A Novel, struck me: “Hate was such a melodramatic emotion, so blustery and silly.” I agreed with that statement when I wrote about it in a book review dated Aug. 28th. Ironically the review was written the day before Palin was nominated.

Thanks to Palin I now have a whole different view of the word “hate.” Hate is not melodramatic, blustery and silly. It’s monstrous, ugly and dangerous.

Thank you for writing this succinct critique of Palin’s role in stirring up extremist responses to Obama. It is very important to call out politicians and other public figures who indulge in rhetoric like Palin’s. Palin’s hate speech is not an isolated phenomenon; it is part of a general mainstreaming of extremism, which has been very well described and documented by David Neiwert.

I have argued at length in “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism” that extremists are increasingly taking up the rightward flank of mainstream conservatism. Alliances that 10 years ago might have been unthinkable between the GOP and the far right have been forming at a rapid rate in recent years.

One of the chief dangers of this, of course, is the rightward gravitational pull this exerts on the mainstream, dragging more and more conservatives into radical positions. The other, and perhaps more serious, problem is the way it enfranchises extremists, giving them real power in the political structure they might not have otherwise — and, rather than mitigating their extremism, encouraging it.

So, yes: expose it, oppose it, call the so-called “conservatives” racist hatemongers, make sure the public knows what the Sarah Palins of the world actually believe and stand for.

I also read a frightening report about gun sales spiking after he was elected. WTF are people afraid of, really?

I’m stunned. I don’t believe McCain and Palin had that much power, power to influence others to make such horrible threats.

And just who you are classifying as the “legacy” of McCain-Palin. Anyone who voted for them? All Republicans?

I understand your anger at the McCain campaign for the negative attacks that were made, but please do not alienate the good people of the Republican party. We are not all “whackos”. Some of us are trying hard to unite with Barack Obama, to give him the chance he deserves. Some of us are ready to change our country for good.

I’m appalled at the threats made at the Obama family. There is no excuse for that behavior.

I find it abhorrent that you are still promoting hate and vitriol even after your guy won. The Telegraph article is inflammatory and shoddy journalism. What the Newsweek article actually says is:

“I’m worried,” Gregory Craig said to a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. He was concerned that the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin rallies would encourage someone to do something violent toward Obama. He was not the only one in the Obama campaign thinking the unthinkable. The campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October. Michelle was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. “Why would they try to make people hate us?” she asked Valerie Jarrett.”

The Other McCain actually bothered to find out the truth before propagating yet another lie.
“Except for the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, there is no reason to connect (a) Sarah Palin with (b) assassination threats against Obama. You’ve got Democratic operative Craig (whom we remember from the Clinton impeachment) who’s worried about the “atmosphere” at Palin rallies. Then you’ve got a post-Labor Day increase in threats against Obama. And . . . that’s it?

Newsweek clearly is trying to peddle a disgusting smear by the Obama camp, and in the process take out a potential future rival. Tim Shipman merely makes explicit what Newsweek implied, but it’s like Oakland — there’s no “there” there. The Secret Service did not — repeat, did not — blame Sarah Palin for threats against Obama, and Shipman’s story is thus a lie.”

This post and associated comments carry some heavy charges - that McCain and/or Palin engaged in “hate speech” that this is somehow responsible for increased death threats against now President-Elect Obama.

The most inflammatory thing Palin said was that Obama “palled around with terrorists.” But - that’s objectively true. Obama did, in fact, freely associate (for political gain, no less) with Ayers and Dohrn, who, in fact, committed terrorist acts against the United States.

If anything, the McCain/Palin campaign held back. Unlike the Clinton campaign, they refused to bring up anything have to do with Rev. Wright.

McCain even went so far as to tell people at rallies that “Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States.” Hardly. Hate. Speech.

And the left had plenty of it’s own “hate” issues you seem happy to glance over. This campaign saw Biden saying undecided voters were racist. We witnessed Obama-supporting Congressman John Murtha explicitly calling all of western PA racists. The Associate Press took every opportunity to denounce any attacks from the McCain/Palin campaign as being “tinged with racism.” The press as a whole was happy to run story after story that if McCain actually won it would be solely due to racism.

Obama supporters were happy to joke we should “Abort Palin,” wear t-shirts calling her a “c*nt,” and in Philly, yell “Let’s stone her! Old school!”. Madonna used a video tying McCain to Hitler on her latest tour. A Columbia professor hung a Sarah Palin effigy from a noose.

This is nothing new to the right. We’ve been listening to Bush=Hitler (or worse) for 8 years. The Obama assignation plot that got so much press a few weeks ago is worth denouncing as loud as possible, but it really had no chance of succeeding. In contrast, George W. Bush has survived two actual assignation attempts - not just failed “plots” but two actual real attempts involving real weapons being used. I would bet you and your readers can’t actually name these events though.

There are haters on both sides. They should all be denounced. But McCain and Palin didn’t create them, and the legacy of their campaign is not “Hate.”

It’s sad that their tactis were effective. I don’t think they realized what they were doing or that their comments could in fact incite the insecurities in a group of people. There is in my mind a direct correlation.

Erin, you’re trying to describe the color yellow to someone who has been blind all their life. They do see it and never will. Partly because they agree with the hate speech but are too proud to admit (at least openly) that their fears are racist, and partly because they don’t want to admit that someone with a prominent place of power on their side could ever be the bad guy. Palin could have stood up there, gun in hand, and called for his death and they would white wash, side step, and argue against logic all day long to defend her. And, in turn, defend themselves. Take hope that each new generation born is more progressive, tolerant, and hopeful than the next. Someday they will be a fringe movement only read about in history books.

You would not even believe the stuff my seven year-old is hearing at school. The first thing was that Obama is going to “take away Christmas”. It just gets worse from there. I wrote about it on my blog because it is just so alarming how crazy some people are post-election.

i find it amusing that sarah palin’s being dragged through the proverbial mud and labeled a hate-mongering, religious lunatic by folks who apparently feel no compunction whatsoever in labeling their own candidate the ‘messiah’.. priceless. and what was the grave transgression that palin is being accused of?? oh that’s right.. merely voicing some extremely disturbing facts shared by a huge proportion of this country’s voting population concerning obama’s past.. namely his 20-plus-year-long ties to unrepentant racists, domestic terrorists, communists, and black panther extremists.. or the fact that the mainstream media willingly ‘forgave’ obama for all of these glaring ‘character’ failings and looked the other way without a care in the world, in essence enabling the so-called ‘messiah’ to use the race card (i.e., anyone who disagrees with a black man, must automatically be deemed a kkk-affiliated, bible-thumping, racist lunatic fringe member) to further his campaign… after all, why spoil a good ‘messiah’ buzz with facts, right?? how dare sarah palin think she could tell the truth? who does she think she is?amusing to the extreme.. obama=good and pure, opponents=evil, racist nutniks.. nifty how that works. the facts is that obama was ‘never’ taken to task by the media, as everyone was all too happy to dismiss his ’sordid’ past or nonexistent experience/record as a mere trifle completely unworthy of the slightest mention.. i mean, it’s not like obama was running for president or anything, right? oh wait… he actually was.. umm. never mind.. i’ll simply close by saying that for all the boastful predictions that obama/biden would simply obliterate mccain/palin, they only won by 52% of the vote.. not exactly the landslide victory that had been predicted for the great ‘messiah.’ and just think.. even with the media’s full propagandist support, as they were clearly in the tank for him from day one, the landslide never materialized.. perhaps this had a little to do with the demonization of sarah palin.. yes, it would appear that the shameless way in which this brave and most pupolar governor in the country, a woman with more executive and administrative experience than both obama and biden put together, was raked through the coals for merely attempting to expose obama for the fraud that he already represented to millions of americans long before she joined the republican ticket, had something to do with offsetting the so-called messiah’s landslide train.. sarah palin is the future face of the republican party.. she singlehandedly revived the republican ticket.. and the more liberals attempt to dismiss and demonize her, the stronger her grassroots support will be… so, i say: keep demonizing her, folks.. in fact, never stop.. you might just help get her elected our first female president one day…—> 2008 presidential campaign: never has experience (or the lack thereof) counted for so little.