This is sure to be a controversial post, and I fully understand why. I don’t wish to wander into the deep, dark waters of intrigue and hatred, nor do I want to think of anyone on the national stage as having such naked and blind ambition as to take such a harmful tact. However, the events of the past weeks have come to pass, and they have not been imagined–they are as real as the throaty calls for death from McCain’s and Palin’s audiences. This is an unfortunate post to have to write, and I loathe the mere thought of my question being answered in an honest manner.
The day after the Vice Presidential debate, a new direction was given to the battered and languishing campaign of John McCain. They were awash in bad news on their most vulnerable issues, and this necessitated a move to refocus the electorates attention. Instead of confronting the issues at hand, or finding another legitimate issue with which to fight, they decided to use an old, haggard issue that had been beaten in to its grave months upon months ago. The Bill Ayers connection.
Hillary Clinton had used it, or tried to, anyway. It hadn’t worked. What was found out by hundreds and hundreds of reporters and opposition researchers was that no actual connection existed. Bill Ayers had been part of an educational challenge board supported by a grant by the Annenberg Foundation, a board on which Barack Obama sat. The connections ended there. There were no secret meetings, no ties to each other beside an interest in giving awards to children who performed at high levels in academic pursuits. Not exactly a smoking gun.
This couldn’t dissuade the conspiracy theorists and the rabid extremists. They knew there had to be more to it, something sinister and anti-American. After all, his middle name is Hussein. Such people are not rational. They don’t use Occam’s razor, or pose questions that may dismantle their theories, they only create more and more intricate reasons why something must be true. This has been going on for almost a year, and the cult of John McCain was ready to be exploited with the theory.
It was Sarah Palin who was first ordered to make the tactic official. She stood silently by as introductory speakers emphasized Senator Obama’s middle name, a reference meant to convey only one image—Arab terrorists. Make no mistake, there is no other reason to do it, and if you think the speakers did it on their own, well, you’ve never been involved in a federal campaign at any level worthy of mention. The crowds were prepped to think of only one thing while Sarah Palin spewed her hateful diatribes over the massive speaker systems, and it wasn’t hope, and it wasn’t change–it was a vehement wrath.
It’s not the mere connection they are trying to push between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, it’s the words they are using, and the psychology they are misusing. Bill Ayers is referred to as a domestic terrorist, and Obama as ‘Barack Hussein Obama’, these aren’t disconnected ideas, not in the minds of Americans still fearful and mourning seven years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. These words and ideas are intimately connected, Hussein, as in Saddam, and terrorist, as in the evil men who guided those massive planes to crash into the soul of every American that fateful morning.
The McCain campaign isn’t just wondering whether Barack Obama has larger connections to Bill Ayers, they are provoking people into something else. They are provoking Americans to be afraid of a man who hangs out with terrorists named Hussein, and to be scared for their lives because of this man. They are provoking audience members at their rallies to shout “Kill him!” and “Traitor!” They are provoking something greater than merely curiosity. They are provoking a violent reaction to a manufactured fear.
What is it that the McCain campaign wants those that feel this imminent terror to do? The conservative pundits would have you believe that they are only looking into to who Barack Obama really is, but some of us know this isn’t true. Some of us are scared they want something else to occur. Something outside the bounds of decency and patriotism, something outside any civilized democracy’s limits.
By inciting fear, a fear of a terrorist named Hussein taking control of their lives, the McCain campaign may very well be inciting action on that fear. What are those that believe McCain and Palin supposed to do? They cannot stand around and wait for the terrorist named Hussein to win the White House, they must act…
The question is whether that action is only a vote on November 4, or whether the act they want to occur should happen before that time. I never would desire to question the intentions of a man or an entire campaign in this manner, but the events of the past week have left us no choice but to wonder as to the true intentions of John McCain.
