Kooks enter the mainstream

There’s nothing quite as boring as morning-after coverage of a presidential debate that you’ve seen. So this morning I listened more intently to reports from the campaign trail, like the interesting one about Sarah Palin’s energizing the Republican base. (Note: The post has yesterday's date on it because the image was uploaded Tuesday night).

One woman interviewed at a rally yesterday in Florida said she was “excited about [Palin], but also scared.”

One thought perhaps that her enthusiasm for someone who others see as hopelessly out of her depth might be tempered with a dash of realism. Would Palin, for instance, be able to take on the onerous duties of the presidency at a moment’s notice?

Well, that's not quite what the woman meant. It was the Democratic candidate that troubled her sleep. “He scares the bejesus out of me,” she said frankly.

That’s the least of it. In recent days reporters have heard and television crews have recorded riled-up voters at Republican campaign events shout “terrorist,” “kill him” and “treason.”

It was Samuel Johnson who said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s also, he might have added, the last recourse for the desperate. As Barack Obama builds a lead in the polls in the campaign’s final weeks, the xenophobic and racially-coded rhetoric from the other side has gotten increasingly dangerous.

There was a time when questioning a major-party candidate’s patriotism and commitment to the constitution was beyond the pale. But recent days have seen a barrage of attacks against Obama by the top and bottom halves of the GOP ticket that do precisely that.

Undoubtedly one factor at work here is the far-right fringe, which has become rather more mainstream over the decades.

A half century ago, John F. Kennedy didn’t have to face the kooks and lunatics until after he was elected.

JFK told one right-wing newspaper publisher visiting the White House that was an easy thing to call for war, but rather harder to send young men off to fight it. The publisher in question owned the Dallas Morning News. That was the paper that when the president visited Texas ran a full-page ad accusing him of treason, among other things. Some blamed the publisher’s nephew for accepting the ad (he was temporarily in charge of the News), but its contents weren’t that much different from the paper’s editorial position. In any case, the president left Dallas in a coffin.

Sober commentators who believed that Oswald, and Oswald alone, shot Kennedy, suggested that the atmosphere in that bastion of the radical right pushed him over the edge.

Fast forward 45 years to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. His “Hannity’s America” on Sunday night advanced the view that Obama’s community organizing in Chicago was actually about overthrowing the federal government.

The main source in this “documentary” was one Andy Martin, who was introduced as an “internet journalist.”

The watchdog group Media Matters for America has a little more background on Martin – like his Selective Service record from 1973, which refers to his “moderately-severe character defect manifested by well documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."

Also well documented is Martin’s long history of anti-Semitic pronouncements. Media Matters reports in this regard that he called a judge a “slimy, crooked Jew.” A real charmer, obviously, is Hannity's source.

But then Hannity, who boasts an Irish Catholic background, had no problem with “Obama Nation” author Jerome Corsi’s history of anti-Catholic comments. (Nor, hardly surprisingly at this point, did William Donohue of the Catholic League.)

A gap is growing, though, between right-wing commentators like the syndicated Charles Krauthammer and the likes of Hannity. And maybe that’s a hopeful sign. In a column a few days ago, Krauthammer quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. saying that FDR had “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.'" The right-wing columnist added that Obama has “got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."