Tonight, if I ponder the phrase “Is this really happening?” at least a couple substantial thoughts pass through my mind, and by the time I’m finished with this post probably there will be more. First, back to my disbelief as I drove home from the doctor’s office last week and I was pretty sure I thought I heard John McCain refer to Barack Obama as “that one” while listening to debate #2 on my car radio. I mentioned that if I was correct (and since then I have actually seen footage of him doing it, and I was correct) that was maybe the precursor of McCain referring to Obama in the next debate as “boy.” My shock that he actually said this, remembering that McCain led the fight against declaring a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and since learning that he has been on the board of at least one anti-semitic and racist organization, has only been surpassed by my shock that I have seen virtually no commentary on this on our so-called mainstream media. At first, I thought maybe they just didn’t get it – maybe they haven’t paid attention to all the ways white racists code their comments – maybe they’ve already forgotten the Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears add, and maybe they never “got” that one either. However, events of the past few days should take any doubt about where McCain stands on the issue of race away from any impartial viewer’s mind.

I have heard several instances in the last couple of days where McCain surrogates have referred to Obama as “Barrack Hussein Obama” right before they accuse him of “hanging out with terrorists.” Obviously, they are trying to plant the idea in people’s minds that Obama is in cahoots with Arab terrorists. John McCain and Sarah Palin are inciting crowds with hateful rhetoric that is bound to leave scars that will be difficult to heal once this election is over. On several occasions Palin has accused Obama of flat out hanging out with terrorists. The result has been some very inappropriate responses from members of the crowd she’s talking to including one person shouting out “Kill him.” What is worse, there has been nothing coming from the McCain campaign denouncing those kinds of “blurts” that are received with shouts of approval from others. I wondered today if McCain wants to put himself in the position of leading the fight in the senate against a holiday for Barack Obama. Keep in mind that it is no secret that Palin has been directly associated with an Alaskan successionist organization which is connected directly with successionist groups in the south who would like to rekindle the confederacy and also connected to the John Birch society in addition to some fringe militias. We hear little about this in the mainstream media – can you imagine the uproar if Obama was connected to some kind of fringe group such as this?

McCain/Palin are throwing more than the kitchen sink at Obama in a desperate attempt to invigorate the racist fringes of this country, somehow thinking that this strategy will lead them to victory. As a school teacher it appears to me that they believe a majority of Americans are uneducated and will look the other way as the policies of the republican party, supported by McCain 90% of the time are destroying both our military and our economy. Talk about a national security crisis! McCain is much more culpable in this meltdown of the financial sector of our nation than is being discussed publicly. Finally, Obama and/or his supporters are bringing the Keating Five scandal into the debate. McCain demonstrated, during that fiasco, that his mantra of “putting country first” is nothing but a bunch of hot air. He chose money in return for him pressuring authorities to look the other way as Charles Keating was stealing hundreds of millions through his Savings and Loan, leading to the previous government bailout of the banking industry less than 20 years ago. McCain’s participation in the deregulating of our banking industry is undeniable if one looks at the facts and his chief economic advisor, Phil Gramm – who called us a nation of whiners as both he and McCain stressed that our economy was “sound, led the charge that allowed for the greed of the banking system to overpower the ability of the Fed and the Bush administration to funnel “good money after bad.” We are all now in for a “ride” that looks as if it may be very unpleasant to say the least.

The good news is that I firmly believe the American public is not as stupid as McCain and Palin are counting on. Their insistence on one lying smear after another is going to backfire. They are trying to switch the topic from the issues on which they have no place to stand. The country is going bankrupt and their ideas and policy decisions have led us there (their economic ideas are bankrupt). There is no guarantee that Obama is the statesman that can pull us out of this downward spiral, but it is certain that McCain/Palin have no clue as to what needs to be done. The scary part of this is that the fringe base they are appealing to with this subtle racist rhetoric may be very dangerous. Remember that the Bush administration has pretty much thumbed their noses as to the idea that this is a nation of laws and they have set terrible precedents by refusing to answer supeonas and to cooperate with oversight investigations. Remember also, the republicans were in control of congress for the first six years of Bush’s administration and there were virtually no investigations of things like illegal wiretapping (wiretapping that we find every day was much more wide spread than initially feared), torture, treason (outing a CIA agent), and lying us into a war (among other things). Additionally, they have their own private army that is heavily armed (Blackwater). Losing this election may only slow them down and they have proven over the previous 8 years that there are no parameters as to what they might do to keep power.

This inciting of extremists on the right with racist rhetoric should be of concern to all law abiding (and God fearing) Americans. We are a nation that rose to a leadership position in the free world by projecting an image of “moral authority” that has been privately abused by republicans for the last 30 years. A large majority of Americans have no idea what these people have been up to. However, the rest of the world has caught on and they are about to classify us as a rogue nation. Should McCain prevail on November 4th, the crisis of confidence in this country will only accelerate from the standpoint of our supposed allies not to mention on both Wall Street and Main Street here at home. Europeans have one foot off the ship and they will complete the jump should we prove that our voting public is as stupid as McCain/Palin are hoping. Should Obama prevail, as I believe he will, the secret service and whoever else is given the job of protecting our leaders need to be working overtime. The republican faithful have been spewing hate with such intensity you have to believe there are a few sickos out there that may try to become infamous.

I have been voting for over 40 years and paying attention to politics since I was a kid and my Mom was for Stevenson and my Dad was for Eisenhower. I still remember Dwight D. Eisenhower warning the American public of the consequences of letting the “Military Industrial Complex” get out of control. In the first debate with Obama, McCain suggested a freeze on all parts of the economy except either military spending or the defense department, I can’t remember exactly how he stated it, but the message is clear – he is beholding to the military industrial complex. That would make sense because I have heard him referred to many times as a “war monger” and that is a hard generalization to refute based on his rhetoric. In a McCain administration, while everything else goes in the tank, the large defense contractors would flourish. The McCain/Palin message has become very focused of late. So, there are a couple things which seem to be “under the radar” and are somewhat incredible that have happened in the last few days. McCain/Palin are trying to imply that Obama is a Muslim by having surrogates repeatedly refer to him as “Barrack Hussein Obama,” and their racist attitudes are becoming more and more apparent (although not yet part of the mainstream debate) as they use coded language to remind the racists in this country that a N*%#@$ is about to win the White House. 40 years ago this kind of stuff wouldn’t have been so surprising to me – although just as disgusting then as now – it’s just that as I ponder the supposed gains we have made in my lifetime I keep thinking – Is this really happening?