The True Face/Mindset of Today's GOP

UPDATED: Blogger Interrupted has some video footage from a McCain/Palin rally in Strongsville, Ohio, that is truly scary in terms of revealing the nuttiness of the McCain/Palin supporters who seem to have lost any tether they might have had to reality. Please go to the site and watch the video which the cameraman describes as follows:

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It’s no wonder that the slightest incitement from Sarah Palin or John McCain will turn one of their rallies into a lynch mob. Just talk to the folks who attend. My camera was rolling for literally seconds before people happily said to me, on camera, that Barack Obama is a terrorist. If I hadn’t spent most of my time at the event inside, waiting for the candidates to show up, I could have gotten dozens of these people on tape. . . . I’ve been doing blog video for a while, and presidential rallies a lot longer. And this is the most strange, ignorant, uninformed, angry, up-to-no-good, and gullible group of people I’ve ever seen at a political rally. Ever.

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Increasingly, the members/supporters of today's GOP are showing their true faces and the picture is anything but pretty. If anything, it underscores the need to politically defeat a party and party platform that increasingly has as it hallmarks hate, bigotry and ignorance. In fact, if these forces are not defeated on November 4, 2008, I truly despair for the future of this country. A few examples demonstrate my point. The first, example comes from Media Matters and involves Chris Baker, a broadcaster who, during the October 7 broadcast of his Minneapolis radio show, promoted an Internet video featuring the Rev. James David Manning of ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem making derogatory remarks about Sen. Barack Obama's mother. Here are highlights of the disgusting remarks:

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Manning repeatedly refers to Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, as "trash," saying: "The difference between Obama's mama and Bristol Palin is that Obama's mama was trash. I mean, she was dirt. She was a bag of trash sitting on the sidewalk waiting there in Honolulu on one of those streets for the garbage truck to come by and pick her up and take her to the dump." Manning later said: "[M]y mama told me back in the '50s and the '60s, the only kind of white women that would take up with a black man back in the '50s and the '60s was a trashy white woman. . . . the kind of woman that Obama's mama was."

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Pretty disgusting in my opinion. But then there's the example of Wade Williams (pictured above) down in Louisiana who was arrested this morning on a felony terrorizing charge after allegedly calling the Registrar of Voters and warning that he would come to the state office and empty his shotgun unless he got his registration card. Williams told a state official "about needing to vote to 'keep the nigger out of office." Here are more details from The Smoking Gun:

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Though the document does not name the candidate to which Williams is so violently opposed, it seems likely he was referring to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. After being arrested at his Monroe home, Williams was booked into the Ouachita Correctional Center, where the below mug shot was snapped. En route to the jail, he "continued his 'tirade' about niggers and also stated that he had a shotgun, but had it hidden at his residence," reported Lt. Michael Judd.

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In addition to bigotry, what is equally frightening is the GOP's increasing revelry in ignorance and disregard for knowledge and objective facts. Belatedly, even conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times has awoken to the horror that today's GOP has become. The Huffington Post has coverage of an interview Brooks had with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg at New York's Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine's redesign. Here are some highlights of Brooks' comments:

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[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

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I truly hope that American voters will realize the importance of blunting the GOP's assault on decency andknowledge and vote to reject McCain/Palin and other GOP Neanderthals at the polls.