Most people have probably heard that Palin pulled the old 'Obama Knows Bill Ayers!' line out of the garbage, today. The press extensively covered her comments at a rally in Clearwater, Florida, but Dana Milbank revealed the even uglier side of the rally-- the audience.
Not only has Palin discovered the New York Times, she was even able to extract a few small misleading facts from an article. Citing her source like a fifth grader giving her first book report, she told the audience that Bil Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground and that Barack Obama knew him forty years later. Her audience responded with the conditioned Booos required to recieve more winks and nuggets of hate. But they went a bit further than that:
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
Rabid hate of the media by extreme right wing voters isn't new, of course. But I think racist insults hurled at a sound man is a new low for them. Then it got worse:
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.
Yeah. That's where this Palin thing is going. Sure, these were just a few voices. But they evidently felt comfortable enough at a Palin rally to openly advocate assassination. McCain-Palin seems ready to associate with the lowest of the low (and if you read the article, they are promising to get even uglier in the future).
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
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Also, Ekaterin points out in the comments below: Not only is the press barred from asking Palin questions, the press is also barred from asking her audience questions:
Press kept under a watchful eye
CLEARWATER -- Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn't permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, "Can I help you?'' and turn the person around.
When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn't allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.
-- Times staff writer Eileen Schulte