McCain and the Mob Mentality

Barack Obama has become a metaphor for those who are considered culturally different. Disturbingly, we have been down this road of hatred and divisiveness before. Who can forget the chilling memories of America's civil rights leaders being slain, segregation being fostered, synagogues being burned, black citizens being lynched, and law-abiding Muslims being shot and killed after 9/11?

This is the dark side of America that I'd rather forget, but once again has reared its ugly head through the campaign discourse of John McCain and Sarah Palin. McCain and Palin’s campaign rhetoric directed against Barack Obama has fueled the basest instincts of many misguided Americans.

McCain's effort to link Obama to a terrorist Muslim script is rooted in the most despicable form of hatred and bigotry. The fire has been stoked, and now his supporters are cheering McCain and Palin with chants of… "Obama is a terrorist, kill him!" Having crossed that ugly line, even the candidates themselves have been unable to stave off the damage they have wrought.

This pattern of inflaming the bigotry of the masses through divisiveness and venom is frighteningly reminiscent of the Nazi regime during World War II. Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis, under the elitism of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, sought and successfully slaughtered those who they perceived as ethnically and racially different. As Germany fell on hard economic times during the global depression, they looked for scapegoats to explain their financial decline. It wasn’t long ago that the Jews, those associated with Jews, Russians, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, artists, and the intelligentsia were sent to concentration camps and murdered. The mob mentality had worked and "cleansed" Germany of those who were perceived as funny looking and different.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have sought out the politics of personal destruction. They have willingly tried to demonize Barack Obama by painting him as an evil outsider who is a threat to the security of our democracy. Amazingly, some Christians have made this a personal vendetta by suggesting that Obama is the anti-Christ. On the other hand, other so-called God-fearing Christians have suggested that he portrays himself as a messianic figure.