Kill, Baby, Kill!

Roger,

Lol. Tommy is up today. You'll have mine soon enough. Have a good one.

hey knowles, you'll be sorry if Obama is elected, freedom of speech will be one of the first things to go. Already we are not allowed to use his given middle name: Hussein. Sounds like marxism to me.

surfchik,

Thanks for your comment. You ride a short board or long? I took up the sport a couple of years back. It's a blast, no?

David - well put. It's weird that anyone could think that pointing out the implosion of this fringe Republican element shows a knee-jerk support of all things Obama.

Although a strong Obama/Biden supporter, I'm a Republican - at least for now - and I recognize the appalling state of this Republican campaign and the danger it's creating.

Obama has done a remarkable job of trying to stay above the fray - what a tightrope, having to address this, yet hanging on to his dignity and staying issue-focused - and his wife is equally admirable. What a stark contrast to the recent behaviour of the two 'ladies' in McCain's life. I'm stunned to see these people I always considered normal turn into hatemongers capable of this garbage.

The onus is on McCain to stop it, to denounce it, to show a little class and common sense. Anything less makes him complicit in a truly ugly situation. He appears to have lost every last vestige of that much-vaunted honor.

david knowles10:05AMOct 10th 2008

surfchik,

Thanks for your comment. You ride a short board or long? I took up the sport a couple of years back. It's a blast, no?
*****************************
David,

Surfchik rides a short board, and she rides the short bus to the beach.

How are these people not being arrested that shout such vile intentions for a presidential candidate? Could you imagine people yelling about killing Mccain? Although I might add I do believe that George Bush is the biggest international terrorist of the generation. On his command countless innocent civilians have been murdered in the name of war. Way way more than the US lost on 9/11.

You know you're doing things RIGHT when all the Neo-Conservative Republican Fascists are "up in arms"....Obama's campaign is building momentum while the "train wreck" that is commonly called the "Johnny-Wheezer/Caribou Barbie" Express is fast moving towards "train wreck" status. When you spend every campaign stop "bashing" the opponent and NOT offering solutions, when you spend your advertising dollars promoting Lies and Hatred, you know you're in DEEP Trouble. It's inevitable...the wheels are coming off "that one" over there....the Neos are out in force....promoting hatred and spewing venom...Come on November....Obama/Biden '08

I apologize for re-posting the following but it does not seem to lose its relevance.

To me, the real issue is: is Mr. McCain a true LEADER?

In my opinion, being a courageous man, a highly decorated Veteran and, especially, a maverick (as we have been told so many times) do NOT NECESSARILY add up to being a LEADER. The ‘maverick’ thing certainly plays well with popular imagination. We have all seen Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun’; haven’t we? Now, ask yourself “Do I want “Maverick” in the Oval Office?” I, for one, don’t.

Let me explore the McCain myth a bit more. I find it somewhat intriguing that Mr. McCain left the Navy at the rank of Captain. Yes, I know, the official biography tells us that, guess what, ‘Mr. McCain was already a maverick!’. The logic then goes 'Well, because he was such a maverick, he displeased the higher ups and did not get the promotions he probably deserved.'

I don't think that this argument really 'cuts the ice'. American History as well as the history of other nations is replete with the cases of real mavericks who eventually rise to the top of the military hierarchy because their genius or foresight is eventually recognized and their leadership acknowledged. Some, but not all, of those military leaders have then become political leaders.

So what has happened to Mr. McCain? This is entirely speculative on my part but I do think that, in fact, the Navy did NOT see a LEADER in Mr. McCain. To me, that is the simplest and most plausible reason for Mr. McCain’s lackluster career in the Navy. Knowing his future in the Navy to be bleak, Mr. McCain probably decided that politics might be a better venue for his skills and personality.

The point is: Mr. McCain is possibly not the leader he would like us to believe he is. If he had been that kind of leader, he probably would have had a very nice career in the Navy. The 'maverick' thing, that's just 'sand in the eyes', in my opinion.

By now, I have watched two presidential debates. I will not comment on the substance, only on the ‘form’. Does Mr. McCain’s demeanor, attitude and focus show leadership? In my humble opinion, not really. Being rude, condescending and showing your inner anger for all to see (regardless of whether it is justified) is neither a sign of maturity nor indicative of a superior grasp of the issues. I have found Mr. McCain to be very narrowly focused on specific points, all related to his personal battles with the political establishment in Washington. Mr. McCain seems to be stuck in some ‘past’, the past of his personal ‘glory’. Another contributor, a Veteran, likened Mr. McCain’s approach to the Presidential debate to that of the proverbial ‘old general’ who likes to tell everyone about his battles. It is almost as though Mr. McCain sees his political career as a surrogate for the military career he did not get. I digress; let me come back to the point.

I have found Mr. McCain to be lacking in ‘breadth of view’. I don’t feel that he sees the ‘big picture’. I don’t see a man capable of compromising for the common good, especially if it requires listening to people who do not share his agenda. The current presidency is an example of the ‘my way or highway’ approach to government. Judging by its current popularity it would seem that most people realize that that approach does not yield a very high ‘return’. As far as I can see, the specifics of a McCain administration might differ from those of the Bush administration but I strongly feel that the philosophy of, the approach to government will be exactly the same; in a nutshell, it would be “Take it or leave it because, I, John McCain know better than you what needs to be done.”

Dictators think like that, not respected leaders.

Incidentally, as the message from the Republican base becomes more and more strident, it behooves Mr. McCain not to let things get out of control. “Kill” is NOT PART OF THE ACCEPTABLE POLITICAL VOCABULARY in a civilized Democracy.

One final comment. I do think that Mr. McCain is needed. I believe that he should continue to do what he does best; go after ‘pork barrel politics’. If it important to him to see himself as a ‘maverick’, so be it, as long as we all benefit from it. That is why I think that it would be best FOR THE COUNTRY that he remains a Senator. It is in the Senate that he would probably be the most useful, keeping a watchful eye on our behalf. If he were President, who would be in his shoes in the Senate? We NEED him in the Senate!

RogerWebb,

Thank you for your comment. I'm not sure if you saw my post yesterday on this issue:

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2008/10/09/taunting-prospects/

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree as to the level of the anger.

While watching the news here in Milwaukee last night, they showed coverage of the McCain & Palin rally (town hall style)in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Some of the crowd were rather disturbing. One older gentleman in particular, yelling about Obama being a "hooligan" and yelling about the country being taken over by "socialists." (Even though the gentleman looked to be of an age where he collects social security, which is a "socialist" program if there ever was one, and I doubt he gives the money back to the government) Frankly, a lot of it echoed McCarthyism, which was not exactly Wisconsin's most shining moment. Equally disturbing was the glee in the faces of McCain and Palin at these over-the-top outbursts, rather than inviting more rational discourse. These are the actions of a "divider," not a "uniter." How does he expect to work across the aisle when he is deliberately stirring up all this vitriol?

HEY DAVID, HOW ARE YOU TODAY? JUST THINK YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE A JOB TOMORROW IF OBAMA TAKES AWAY YOUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

AMERICA IS GOING TO CHANGE AFTER THIS ELECTION AND IT IS GOING TO CHANGE OVER NIGHT. I QUESTION WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING. EVERYTHING I HAVE READ SEEMS TO BE POINTING AT NATIONALIZING THE BANKS. WE WILL BE A SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT OVERNIGHT.

I CAN'T BELIEVE THE BAILOUT WAS GIVING ACORN 20 BILLION DOLLARS. I THINK THE GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO NEED THE MONEY TO PROSECUTE THIS ORGANIZATION. OBAMA DENIES HIS INVOLVEMENT WITH THIS ORGANIZATION BUT HIS NAME IS ATTACHED TO EVERYTHING FROM COMMUNITY ORGANIZER TRAINER TO COURT CASES AGAINST BANKS IN ILLINOIS.

AMERICANS I IMPLORE YOU TO CHECK THE FACTS.

A DEMOCRATE VOTING FOR McCAIN / PALIN 2008!!!

I could be wrong, but I suspect that Obama's "to my face" remark was not a surrender to "mob mentality," but a challenge to McCain to allow Obama to respond, with his usual "cool," to the smears and accusations. It's called "calling his bluff," and you don't do it unless you think you have the winning hand. So I suspect that if McCain *did* bring things like Ayers up "to his face," Obama would do both a lot more and a lot less than "releas[e] a bit of pent up aggression." He would calmly point out that when he worked with Ayers, he wasn't the only one who "assumed [Ayers] had rehabilitated himself." So did the University of Illinois*; so did the Republicans who put up the money for the Annenberg Challenge; so did the many Republicans who worked on the same boards as Obama and Ayers. It's easy for the WSJ types to say in hindsight that some of the things they came up with were "radical," or that they "didn't work." But what they neglect to mention is that in the Chicago schools in the 1990s, *nothing* was working, so they *needed* (or thought they did) "radical" ideas of some kind.

(*BTW, something that's been misstated more than once, on both sides, possibly including by me: Obama and Ayers did not teach at the same university. Obama taught at the University of Chicago, Ayers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. If you want to go around confusing or conflating the two, make sure there are no UC grads around (;-). Which I'm not, but I've seen one respond to the conflation.)

He might even clarify the infamous Ayers quote from September 2001. (And of course it's coincidental that that's when it came out; it was in conjunction with a memoir that he had presumably been working on for years). First of all, it was not in an Op-Ed in the Times, it was in an interview, but hey, why let an inconvenient fact or two get in the way of a good smear. Ayers said in a letter soon after the quote was published that it was "not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion." He claimed (and I haven't seen a refutation) that what he meant by "we didn't do enough" was nothing to do with bombing, but that protesters in general (i.e. not just the Weathermen) didn't do enough to stop the war, as after all it kept going on.

Obama probably won't point out (as it can't do him any good) that as awful as the Weathermen were, they deliberately set out *not* to harm people, civilians or otherwise. They set their bombs to go off at night, when buildings were empty. The only people Weatherman bombs killed were one bomb-squad cop trying to defuse one (which certainly makes the Weathermen responsible for his death, but OTOH, bomb-squad cops obviously know that might happen when they take the job, so it's not exactly the equivalent of randomly killing civilians), and three Weathermen when their own "bomb factory" blew up. This doesn't justify them in the slightest, but it does distinguish them from the kinds of people usually called "terrorist" (or even "freedom fighter" by their own side, e.g. in Algeria), and in the Weathermen's minds at the time, made them "not as bad" as the American military in Vietnam.

Also, the McCainites and affiliated neo-McCarthyites don't point out another appearance by Ayers in the press in 2001. (Again, he had a book to promote, and it apparently was no means a justification of his earlier activities.)

>Chicago Magazine reported that "just before the September
>11th attacks," Richard Elrod, a city lawyer injured in the
>Weathermen's Chicago "Days of Rage," received an apology from
>Ayers and Dohrn for their part in the violence. "[T]hey were
>remorseful," Elrod says. "They said, 'We're sorry that things
>turned out this way.'"[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ayers

(Yeah, I know, Wikipedia is "totally in the tank for Obama." If anyone really believes that, I've got a former bomb factory in Greenwich Village to sell you.)

RogerWebb,

Mark posted a story about Acorn on our pages last night. And I never called McCain or Palin a Nazi.

There were clashes with police in Denver and St. Paul. Most of the trouble came from groups that support neither party.

Besides, what I'm writing about are the crowds who are attending McCain's rallies, shouting things that McCain can hear, and seems to encourage. I think that's a salient difference.

Alysaras,

Thank you for your comment. Why on earth would I think that freedom of speech would be curtailed under Obama? That's utterly ridiculous.

DAVID KNOWLES, ANALYZE THIS ONE
MCCAIN LEADS IN INDIANA AND MISSOURI
VERY CLOSE IN OHIO AND FLORIDA AND A POINT OFF IN NC.
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Daily Poll Summary - October 9, 2008
Texas, American Research Group 10/5-8: McCain 57%, Obama 38%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Texas-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Florida, Rasmussen Reports 10/8: Obama 50%, McCain 47%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Florida-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Ohio, American Research Group 10/4-7: Obama 48%, McCain 45%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Ohio-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Michigan, Rasmussen Reports 10/8: Obama 56%, McCain 40%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Michigan-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

New Jersey, Rasmussen Reports 10/7: Obama 50%, McCain 42%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/New-Jersey-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

North Carolina, Rasmussen Reports 10/8: Obama 49%, McCain 48%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/North-Carolina-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Indiana, Rasmussen Reports 10/7: McCain 50%, Obama 43%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Indiana-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Missouri, American Research Group 10/4-6: McCain 49%, Obama 46%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Missouri-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Minnesota, American Research Group 10/4-7: Obama 47%, McCain 46%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Minnesota-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

West Virginia, American Research Group 10/4-8: Obama 50%, McCain 42%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/West-Virginia-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

New Hampshire, American Research Group 10/6-8: Obama 52%, McCain 43%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/New-Hampshire-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

Montana, American Research Group 10/6-8: McCain 50%, Obama 45%.
http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/polls/Montana-Obama-McCain-October-2008.html

BABY STEPS, DAVID KNOWLES..
YOULL BE OFF THE AIR ON NOV 4TH..ANGRY AND RIPPING YOUR HAIR..
BABY STEPS..
IT TOOK HIM 5 YRS IN THAT VIETNAM PRISON CAMP BUT HE MADE IT HOME.. THEY WROTE HIM OFF B/4 BUT HE GOT THERE
MCCAIN TAKES BABY STEPS...

These supposed unbiased media are probably getting money from Obama to distort the truth. How could anybody predict that Obama will win because Candidate John Kerry was leading just before the election and then lost to Bush.This is a concerted effort by the Democrats to give the perception that Obama is winning when there are more independents and republicans combined than democrats. The progressive liberal democrats reflect the decadence of the younger hollywood movie stars whose lips should be sutured close because there is nothing in their brains but are human baby killers,drunk drivers ,drug abusers,promiscuous,spends 1/4 of their lives in alcohol and drug rehabs.

The people in the crowds yelling "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" are likely GOP staffers planted there to incite mob mentality and appeal to the lunatic "BASE" of the NEW republican party. Remember the Dade County election board debacle? These NeoCon brownshirts pose a very real danger not only to public safety but to democracy as we know it! What is law enforcement doing about it?

RogerWebb10:27AMOct 10th 2008

Liberals may want to also stay away from the phrase "Kill Baby Kill"...just sayin'.
_____________________________
Good one, Roger, especially knowing Obama's support of infanticide.

Knowles, you are a "salient" nitwit. Yesterday, your column spawned more than 160 pages of rabid, partisan responses.

You don't need to look any further than your left-wing opinion pieces for hateful speech. You constantly incite hate speech while masquerading as a concerned opinion writer.

David, you are a pathetic, disingenuous kneepad Obama pawn.