McCain slandering Obama: Agreement in the press

I found this article from the NYT's Op-Ed column. It relates to and expounds upon a lot of what I was saying in the posts below.

I hadn't heard about this before the article:

"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."

Frank Rich makes a good point. The media still seems reticent to pick apart Sarah Palin as ruthlessly as they could, lest they be accused of being unfair. Her lack of experience and disagreement with McCain on several issues should have precluded her from the nomination, but it doesn't seem to matter.

Following one of the links from the Rich article, I found this campaign ad from the McCain camp:



Despite the lack of evidence that Obama has used Frank Raines as an advisor, the juxtaposition of two African American faces with sinister lighting plays on latent racial fears. I haven't seen this ad on TV, and I hope I won't, but at this point, I wouldn't put it past McCain.