from November 3:
Anyone refusing to follow politics would have missed a subtle event with enormous implications: a presidential candidate said his opponent was "a decent man", and the crowd booed. This is the nation-scale equivalent of finding a fire in your basement. The core of one of our major parties is turning into a lynch mob that can no longer be held in check by its leaders, and one of those leaders is actively encouraging it. Here's a smart but long-winded article about it, McCain-Palin and the Lucifer Effect.
We're very lucky that Obama came along to build a coalition of many races, classes, and political perspectives, to hold us in a calm and positive emotional space, and to organize us well enough to possibly defeat an alliance of religious fundamentalism, racism, belligerent nationalism, class resentment, vote rigging, and apocalyptic despair. These people are a minority, but remember that Hitler came to power with only 37% of the vote. America is like a giant bomb that we have to disarm, and tomorrow we have to make sure we cut the red wire and not the blue wire. But even then, the explosive charge will remain. I'm tempted to say this is the most important election you'll ever see, but I think there could be even more at stake in 2012.
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Related: McCain's Shameful Slur on Rashid Khalidi
