On October 10th, the civil rights movement veteran and Congressman John Lewis, wrote: “I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing today reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.” Severely beaten by state troopers during his participation in the iconic 1965 march across the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Lewis recalled how then Alabama Governor George Wallace’s words had created “the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. . .Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all.”
Responding to Lewis’s concerns on an NBC Washington affiliate, McCain claimed he had repudiated harsh partisan invective “on several occasions,” without citing any instance. Then he cast himself as the victim of allegedly insulting tee shirts worn by Obama supporters. He called John Lewis “an American hero who I admire,” and then characterized his words as “the worst, most unacceptable statement a couple days ago that I have ever heard. He accused me and Sarah Palin of being involved in segregation, George Wallace and even made reference to a church bombing where children were killed. Senator Obama has not repudiated that statement. Senator Obama should do so immediately. It’s the most outrageous thing that I have heard since [I’ve been] in politics. . .it is disgraceful.”
The following Tuesday during a Palin rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, after Republican Congressional candidate Chris Hackett sharply attacked Obama, someone yelled, “Kill him.” Again the threat went unchallenged from the platform.
Perhaps a clue why such comments are uncontested by candidates who claim to be putting “country first,” lies in Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention. She quoted “a writer” who extolled the virtues of small town citizens. That writer was Westbrook Pegler, for decades an anti-black, anti-Semitic nationally syndicated columnist with ten million readers. Pegler had a penchant for “white patriots” and a bitter hatred of people who opposed white supremacy. [Frank Rich, New York Times, October 11, 2008] He was noted for his lament that Giuseppe Zangara, the deranged gunman who shot at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in 1932 had missed and killed the Mayor of Chicago instead. Pegler found it “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara hit the wrong man. . .” In 1965, two years after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Pegler said of his brother Robert Kennedy that he hoped “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.” [Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2008]
Westbrook Pegler died in 1969, the year after two of his choice targets, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. But his specter haunts the 2008 campaign.
The past—never quite dead and buried—warns us that political threats of violence are serious matters. Gunmen have taken the lives of four U.S. presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan narrowly escaped assassination attempts. Candidate Robert Kennedy was slain, and candidate George Wallace was severely wounded.
You don’t have to be in the Secret Service to know that, with a black candidate in the field, any open threat of assassination requires a stronger response than silence or mild reprimands. After the Civil War, dozens of African American office-holders in the South, along with many of their white political allies, were slain, beaten or driven from office by Ku Klux Klan nightriders. A dozen years after Emancipation massive intimidation and murder had nullified civil rights laws enacted by Congress and eviscerated three Constitutional Amendments designed to protect the lives and liberties of former slaves. In the middle of the 20th century, murders of white and African American civil rights workers in the South aimed to block the path of those marching toward justice and equality. If we factor in lynching, violent opposition to African Americans’ pursuit of either public office or other citizenship rights has left a body count in the thousands. Talk about acts of terrorism against Americans!
In the wake of the 9/ll tragedy, the current administration chose a catastrophically violent response, one that played into the hands of terrorist recruiters even as it abandoned the pursuit of bin Laden. The Bush Doctrine justified invasions and violence as first responses, fired wildy at several targets, and created fear at home to justify its massive civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Labeling a Presidential candidate a traitor who “pals around” with terrorists fits in with policies that prefer war, especially the “preemptive” kind, to negotiation and compromise, and uses torture and extraordinary rendition. In domestic debate this approach normalizes over the top political language that ranges from incivility to incitement.
A political campaign that includes or encourages calls to bigotry and murder invites the ugly face of war into the democratic process. This kind of barbaric language has to be vehemently opposed during the campaign and beyond. Two young armed skinheads who believe they are pursuing “the existence of our people and the future of white children” are in federal custody. But who else is out there prepared to act on such distorted notions?
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