The Danger of GOP Ticket's Hate Speech

   John McCain, Sarah Palin and the double-digit IQ types who introduce them at rallies should remember that there are a lot of guns out there in America, many of them belonging to mentally unstable right-wingers. Telling GOP base voters day after day that Barack Obama is a traitorous terrorist tends to encourage gun nuts already hopped up on Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly to start stalking the Democrat.
   Considering the Republican campaign's lynch-mob atmosphere, agents on Obama's Secret Service detail should be nervous and extra-aware right now.
   Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 in large part because Dallas and all of Texas were awash in overheated right-wing rhetoric terming Kennedy a traitor (on what grounds, I've never understood). Oswald was an unstable fish immersed in a watery sphere of hate, extremism and violent threats. In an omen of trouble to come, not long before Kennedy made his fatal trip to Dallas UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was struck on the head by a protest sign as he entered a Texas hotel. "I don't want to send them to jail," Stevenson quipped. "I want to send them to school."
    McCain, Palin, Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis and the rest of the GOP campaign leadership should be more careful not to stir up the basest instincts of an excitable base.
    McCain hates to be called dishonorable. Out of sensitivity to the frequent charges these days that his campaign has descended well past the point of dishonor, he is running ads turning the epithet against his opponent. But there's no other word for what the desperate, all-Ayers-all-the-time Republican campaign is becoming: Dishonorable, as well as mortally dangerous and a disgrace to politics in our country.