It's a regular Sunday tradition but let me be the first to point to Frank Rich's essay trashing the campaign tactics of the McCain-Palin ticket. Now that everyone from Rep. Lewis to Susan Estrich to David Brooks and to The Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini is getting in on the act of calling out the despicable depths to which the campaign has deliberately sunk to, perhaps another smack down isn't even needed.
Oh, but it is, as Frank Rich lays out one astonishing fact that I feel has been swept over, if not just missed entirely.
Rich writes:
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an "only in America" affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.
No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was "regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man." In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: "Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls."
This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.
Palin quoted a right-wing lunatic in her convention speech? How has this gone unnoticed and uncommented upon? Obviously, the speech was written with any generic Republican in mind and certainly Palin would not be bright enough to recognize who she was quoting if she gave a few lines from the Gettysburg Address, but this is simply outrageous. My mind is so completely blown that it takes me straight to the SNL level of "Oh My God, Are You Serious?!? With Seth and Amy."
I am confident that Obama is going to win this election but my goodness, the next few weeks are going to be nasty.