McCain-Palin's Very, Very, Very Bad Week

It's been a tough few days for John McCain and Sarah Palin. The Republican duo is slipping in the polls and their desperation is showing.

From the national accounts we've seen, the outlandish, negative GOP mud-slinging machine is backfiring. Many independent and even some conservative voters are deserting the McCain-Palin ticket, turned off by its high-octane attacks and hyperbolic partisanship.

Where to start?

First, there's Palin's demagoguery, claiming this week that Barack Obama "sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She was talking, of course, about William Ayers, a confessed bomber and Sixties radical who has had a past and brief association with Obama.

But to hear her tell it, Obama and Ayers are the best of friends. Worse, they supposedly share an ideology of violence and revolution, a claim never substantiated by a single shed of evidence.

Palin's suggestions are erroneous and morally wrong. What's more, they incite people in anti-social and anti-democratic ways. Not surprisingly, Palin's charges led a supporter in Florida to shout "Kill him!" at a GOP rally this week. Elsewhere, overzealous GOP supporters called Obama a "traitor," another bogus charge unsupported by evidence.

But Palin keep feeding red meat to the right-wing carnivores of her party: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America," Palin claims, her paranoia showing with every wag of her tongue.

But there's nothing to this vacuous statement expect an implication that somehow Obama is scary and different and evil and not to be trusted. It's the politics of fear and it's beneath John McCain and his campaign to make such charges.

But Palin—and now McCain himself—continue to spout such nonsense, ever more desperate to enflame the voters.

As the New York Times wrote in an editorial this week, McCain and Palin "have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember."

No wonder they keep losing public support.