The Unthinkable

TNC hits this one out of the park, using a light touch on a subject that should give us all pause:

We remember Martin Luther King's murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King's murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist. This was not some notion bandied about by conspiracy theorist, but an accusation proffered by men who were the pillars of the modern Republican Party.

Let me be clear--This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield. The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today's red-baiting, and it is what it was then--a cover for racists. You may say I'm overreacting, and I really hope you're right. 999,000 out 1 million times we'll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.

Alma Powell, my parents and a number of folks who came of age in the Jim Crow South can not be written off as paranoid. They all lived the ugliness of those times, hold the chilling memories of those days in their hearts and know where this sort of rhetoric could lead us.

You can see echoes of those days at some of the GOP's most recent rallies. The Secret Service is taking this stuff very seriously; shouldn't McCain and Palin, too? Have they no understanding of the forces they're playing with here?

Let me recommend a book, if you're not clear about the danger here: Without Sanctuary.