The two weeks leading up to a presidential election are the longest two weeks in politics. This time around, it'll be no different. Although Barack Obama is leading in the polls and is carrying over 300 electoral votes (you need 270 to win), no one is breathing easy. In my view, this is because the Republican Party is capable of pulling anything, ANYTHING, to insure victory in November.

John McCain is a candidate without any real issues. Sure, he has some kind of economic plan and a health plan to speak of, but that's not his focus. His focus is attacking Obama in ways that take advantage of the ignorance of the American people and suggest that Obama is not like the rest of us.

First, as Josh Marshall points out at Talking Points Memo, "McCain himself and his top handful of advisers[] are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans. How is McCain doing this? Marshall points something out that I could not put my finger on all this time that McCain has vigorously tried to associate Obama with a former Weather Underground radical who participated in violence against American institutions during the early 1970's but is today a respected college professor in Chicago. McCain is playing to our post 9/11 fears by using the Bill Ayers connection to associate Obama with terrorism.

Marshall writes:

Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn't matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun "terrorist" in polite company in the same sentence as "Obama," over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a 'respectable' version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.

Stripped down to its components McCain's message to voters is this: "Don't forget. He's definitely black. And he may be a terrorist." That's the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting -- through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether. Smears in the air and voter suppression on the ground.

That hits the nail on the head. McCain said at last week's debate that he doesn't care about "some washed up terrorist" and that his real focus is why Obama hasn't told the truth about his (attenuated) relationship with Ayers. McCain's contradictory strategy makes perfect sense now. It's an excuse to link Barack Hussein Obama with terrorism, even if it's a different kind of terrorism that most of us think about, i.e., domestic terrorism that took place over 35 years ago.

There's another angle to the strident McCain effort to drag Obama through the mudpile. It's McCain's own associations. But no one knows or cares about them. Yet, they exist. I have written about McCain's reliance on Henry Kissinger's foreign policy advice during this campaign.
Kissinger was a terrorist by any definition. He was President Nixon's chief foreign policy advisor and as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor he orchestrated the Vietnam war and other international horrors that investigative journalists are still trying to untangle today. But who remembers Kissinger? Many Americans were not even alive when Kissinger last held public office. Kissinger is not an issue.

Thanks to David Letterman, however, this late night comic (of all people) brought up another comparable McCain association: G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy is a very dangerous man who actually carried out the crimes of the Nixon administration in the course of intimidating political opponents. Liddy went to jail for this. Letterman asked McCain about Liddy, and McCain gave a lame answer and was clearly unconfortable. McCain showed the face of a pathetic man who got caught in a major contradiction. There is no difference between Ayers and Liddy. Yet, McCain is getting away with the outrageous Ayers connection. Cheers to Letterman, who called out McCain on this issue in a manner that no investigative journalist that I am aware of has attempted.

The effect of McCain's attempt to link Obama with terrorism has produced some very ugly video footage from McCain campaign rallies. But here is some footage OUTSIDE a McCain campaign rally that is quite unsettling. It's hard to imagine that we all live the same country as the idiots and racists who openly spoke up on videotape. Take a look at the ass with the Obama monkey.