10.13
The Race Card
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
– Frank Rich, from the op-ed “The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama”
10.8
The Gloves
Yes, folks, it, indeed, appears that the gloves are coming off in the waning hours of the 2008 race for President of the United States. These final weeks are a test of character, sort of a national Milgram experiment where we see, when given the chance and the implicit permission to do whatever needs to be done, the real ugliness comes out for all to see. All of the base and mean thoughts held at bay, in the hopes that one will be victorious at this point and therefore able to hold the victor’s pose and have no need of making a tool of one’s hatred, are let loose on the public in the hopes that those base and mean thoughts will touch on people’s fears and prejudices and so turn around one’s flagging campaign for the highest office in the land.
And so it goes in Virginia, where McCain’s campaign chair in Buchanan County, Bobby May, shows us what he, and, by extension, John McCain, are really made of. This exploitive, bigoted, ignorant and hate-filled piece, published in a local paper in Buchanan County, Virgina should have never seen the light of day but now that it has, it is easy to see why McCain represents a past we should all be happy to leave behind.
Update: Bobby May has been relieved of his post inside the McCain campaign.
10.6
Edification
Two take-away quotes from an article in The New Yorker entitled “The Choice”. The negative:
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.
The positive:
At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
Regardless of how you are leaning, weather you still need to make up your mind or, as in my case, simply like some buttressing, some reinforcement to your already strongly held opinion as to who would make the better president, regardless of these things, an edifying read.
9.15
