Is Obama in Danger from Palin's Words?

Here's something Sarah Palin and her neo-con handlers need to consider. The incendiary language Palin has been using to insinuate links between Obama and terrorists may be creating an atmosphere in our country similar to what was found in Israel just before a crazed right wing student murdered then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

Is it perhaps time for her to cool the rhetoric? This is dangerous stuff.


From Andrew Sullivan's excellent blog, The Daily Dish, on the Atlantic website.

The Danger to Obama

An Israeli reader writes:

Your post on "The Danger of Obama" immediately brought to mind what happened here in Israel in the period leading up to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. Even allowingfor the differences in political culture between the two countries, some of the sounds we're hearing in the public debate around the election have a haunting echo.

Here no one would have thought it possible that an Israeli Jew would take the life of a high official. There's little doubt that the crescendo of demonization toward Rabin – including accusations of treason, flyers picturing Rabin as an SS officer – and the difficulty, in a society guaranteeing free speech, of 'civilizing' the public debate before it creates a fertile bed for actual violence, all helped create the context in which Rabin's murderer decided to take matters into his own hands.

I'd like to see which Republicans will denounce this turn towards demonization. And if there are no takers – maybe Joe Lieberman?

Sarah Palin: Unleashed and Unhinged

I've been disturbed by a whole lot of things related to the Sarah Palin candidacy. But this has got to be the most disturbing. She's now inciting crowds with her mindless accusations and overblown, ill-informed rhetoric.

This woman is dangerous.

Here's why:

from a Washington Post report by Dana Milbank:

The self-identified pit bull has been unleashed -- if not unhinged.

Barack Obama, she told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.

McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."

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."

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