There is a scene in Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide where an angry man stokes up the mob. At some point, the mob gets uglier than the man intended, and he unsuccessfully tries to calm it down. Then, the mob goes off and does something pretty awful, and the man feels bad. The lesson was that he wasn’t using the mob, the mob was using him.
McCain’s campaign reminds me of that story. His crowds have been getting uglier after such things as Palin repeatedly saying, “He’s not like us” about Obama, and that he “pals around with terrorists;” along with associated ads.
Josh Marshall suggests that there is no real contrition in McCain, just a realization that the attempts at Obama character assassination aren’t playing well.
He’s John McCain and he approved those messages.
And Rick Davis doesn’t know who these people are.
Which is, really, all you need to know about the current, utterly debased state of our politics. John McCain’s campaign manager can come out and suggest that the very people the Republican party has based its forty-year ascendancy on are unrecognizable, and possibly moles. And not immediately be struck by lightning.
I’m repeating myself, I know, but when young people ask “why does everything have to be about Vietnam?” they’re welcome to these people, and to begin accounting for them, and stuffing them down the garbage disposal of history, on their own. The simple fact is that the Republican party took leave of its senses forty-five years ago, abandoned respect for opposing viewpoints, abandoned decency, abandoned the very idea of truth itself. It did so because in Vietnam, and in the struggle for Civil Rights, it was not simply on the wrong side–generally, at the time, uniformly in the aftermath–it was wrong at the top of its lungs. And it has behaved ever since like a pathological liar who imagines he’s hiding a deep dark secret, except there’s nothing secret about it.
If the Republican party is determined to become a minority party again, fine. Perhaps it’s time to realize, however belatedly, that it can do so without continuing to pander to spite-filled idiots who have little business walking around loose, let alone pulling the strings of a major political party.
Ah, but it’s important to pander to the right spite-filled idiots. I sincerely doubt that the people driving around with “Nobama” stickers and making racist comments on the news contributed all that heavily to McCain. Lacking the funds, there’s not much left to do but attack and hope for attention. Got to find the ones with deep pockets –
I like Damian’s term in a post above ‘willfully ignorant’.That means we will accept only facts leading to conclusions that support what we already believe.The undecided voters are a precious few with 70% of all November voters already probably having made up their minds long ago to go with who ever each party’s candidate would be.
It’s all due to ‘willful ignorance’,and I include myself.I was decided to vote for Obama before he was even nominated. So both liberals and conservatives and in-betweeners sift out those facts we are willing to accept as cogent.
Lou –
This is “confirmation bias” (Wikipedia, but this is a fairly neutral topic, I think).
It helps to be aware that it exists – but the concept can also be misused, as in being the basis for ‘pandering’ for example.
Not so much a matter of willful ignorance as willful blindness, I think. And it is no respecter of political affiliation, as far as I can see.
Parker,
In my view willful blindess and willful ignorance are two steps along the same path,and become set from we ‘believe’. As I understand american pragmatism says that we determine a plan of action after examining a situation,and then we prioritize our options accordingly. American core belief is based on the sanctity of our constitution and the rule of law.Of course the constitution can be interpreted in ‘liberal( or permissive) ways and ‘conservative’ (or restrictive ways).
While I support Obama, I do have to say that I think McCain has had a good deal of level-headedness with some of these mobs. I saw a clip this morning where a woman was talking about how bad of a person Obama is, and McCain corrected her, saying something like:
“he is a good man, a good family man as well. We just have very different ideas about what is best for this country”
Honestly, both sides are holding back quite a bit. I don’t see near the amount of mud being thrown as there was in previous years.