Karl Rove Bigotry Takes Over McCain Campaign

[Election 2008]


Republican Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and his Vice Presidential candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, have realized they are losing this election and in an attempt to stay afloat, they have sunk this year’s presidential campaign to become the trashiest campaign in recent memory.

Angry that other Americans are heavily supporting his opponent Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin have now employed rightwing Ku Klux Klan hatred, racism, bigotry and have even encouraged their supporters to kill Sen. Barack Obama with rhetoric that’s clearly meant to incite.

In one of her campaign rallies this week, Gov. Palin called Sen. Obama a domestic “terrorist” who should be rejected prompting one of her supporters in the crowd to yell loudly “kill him.” Palin had not denounced the remarks and her boss, McCain has not said a thing.

Another Palin supporter raged at an African-American cameraman who was in the media team at the rally ordering him to “sit down boy.”  The local “terrorist” they are referring to is a former member of the Underground Weathermen Bill Ayers, who in the 1960’s protested American involvement in the Vietnam War, a war that left 58,000 Americans dead, by bombing federal buildings. Sen. Obama was only about 6 years old then.

This week, the Sen. McCain campaign together with his Chihuahua attack dog, Gov. Palin, have been repeating time and again Sen. Obama’s alleged link with the former member of the Underground Weathermen group. “Our opponent,” Palin said, of Obama, “is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” Obama happens to now live in the same Chicago neighborhood as Bill Ayers, the co-founder of the 1960’s-era Weather Underground, and they once worked on an education project together that was funded by Chicago’s Annenberg Foundation; the Annenbergs, ironically, are also friends of John McCain.

So maybe Palin should also note that, using her theory of “guilt by association,” McCain has also been “palling around” with a friend of a terrorist, since Annenberg funded the project Ayers was involved in.

The problem with this allegation is that it is not true because Sen. Obama was only six years old at the time this organization operated. Obama has condemned the actions of Ayers, and many media organizations have discounted any strong links or ongoing relationship between the two.

The Republicans have brought back the racism widely practiced in America during the civil rights era of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which African-Americans and other people of color were hated and treated as sub-humans in America. In April 2008, the media reported that members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina declared their support for Sen. McCain.

Even Gov. Palin is now embraced by racists who now want to use her as a vicious attack dog in the same fashion in which those police dogs used to terrorize African-Americans protesting racism in the South during the Jim Crow days.

The McCain campaign has secretly employed Karl Rove’s dirty tricks of "swifboating” as used against Sen. John Kerry, MA, whose campaign was destroyed by Rove’s dirty campaigns in 2004. Ironically, McCain himself was knocked out of the presidential race by George Bush when Rove’s hit squad circulated rumors that McCain has fathered a Black child with a prostitute. Now, he’s employed the same hit squad to go after Obama.

This year, Rove has reportedly advised the McCain campaign to destroy Sen. Obama’s credibility and character to provoke Sen. Obama’s African race as the reason why Americans should not elect him.

Wayne Madsen, a Washington DC-based investigative reporter who writes the Wayne Report, www.waynemadsenreport.com summed this up: “It is Rove's plan to turn the 2008 election into one that features race baiting on the same scale that ‘Swift boating’ was used against Senator John Kerry in 2004. It was no mistake when Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) used the term ‘uppity’ to describe Barack Obama and Representative Geoff Davis (R-KY) referred to Obama as ‘boy.’ Both terms were calculated and will be followed by increased racial vitriol by Republicans across the country as the election nears.”

This is exactly what is happening with the McCain campaign and the Republicans have vowed to intensify the mudslinging throughout this campaign.

It should be remembered that Sen. McCain has always been against campaigns to free people of African descent including the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. McCain’s voting record in the US Senate is abysmal when it came to divestment in South Africa and this greatly undermines his lofty campaign rhetoric and moral platitudes.

In 1985, Sen. McCain voted to Recommit Anti-Apartheid Act to Foreign Affairs Committee Postponing Sanctions against South Africa. McCain voted to postpone for one year the imposition of any sanctions against South Africa, permitting the president to waive the sanctions if he determined that the African National Congress had not renounced violence.

In 1985, Sen. McCain voted to allow US firms to continue investing in South Africa. In 1985, he voted Against Requiring Immediate Withdrawal of US Investment from South Africa: McCain voted against imposing a total ban on US exports to South Africa. In 1985, he voted Against Establishing a Commission to Study Apartheid in South Africa and to Recommend Sanctions.


Similarly, Sen. McCain voted against establishing a commission to study apartheid in South Africa and to recommend what sanctions the United States should impose on the government. In 1985, he voted Against Imposing Sanctions against South Africa: McCain voted against imposing sanctions immediately against South Africa.

In 1986, the Arizona Senator voted Against Considering Imposing Economic Sanctions against South Africa: McCain voted against providing for House floor consideration of the bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa. 

Finally, and this is very insulting to African Americans and all Americans who fought for equal rights and treatment of African Americans as equal citizens of America: Sen. McCain as a young congressman in 1983 voted against a federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Most Republicans in the House voted for the holiday (89 voted for the holiday, 77 opposed). But Sen. McCain’s best friends and colleague, all three Arizona House Republicans were opposed. Reps. Dick Cheney, (current US Vice President) R-Wyoming, and Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, voted for the holiday. (Cheney had voted against it in 1978.)

McCain keeps asking: “Who is the real Barack Obama.” It seems like we now know who is the real John McCain.

On Tuesday October 7, 2008, Jerome Corsi, the racist rightwing author of his new book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” was deported from Kenya where he had traveled illegally to go and promote his new book. The Kenyan authorities said Corsi was in the country illegally and had no work authorization to sell or promote his book. 

Regardless of whether Corsi was illegally in Kenya or not, his book is meant to insult Sen. Obama and degrade his Kenyan African roots. The book carries wild and false allegations about Sen. Obama including the allegation that Sen. Obama –his father was from Kenya’s Luo ethnic group-- is a secret Muslim.

There is nothing wrong with being a Muslim in the first place. The truth is Sen. Obama is not a Muslim; he is a devoted Christian. Secondly, the book is an insult on the Luos in Kenya and millions of others who live in Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Uganda from where Sen. Obama derives his ancestry.

The Luos are very honest and exemplary citizens of their countries and a trashy book like Corsi’s is an insult to Luo ancestry. In fact, the book is an insult to me as a Luo myself.

It is this racist rightwing bigotry promoted by people like Corsi that has been promoted to undermine the good work and exemplary leadership that Sen. Obama represents. It is the same bigotry that has been used by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a racist African dictator supported by Christian right in America and the Bush Administration. He once told a reporter for The Atlantic Monthly magazine that Black people who were captured by whites into slavery centuries ago were “stupid,” and that’s why they were captured.

In Uganda, this U.S.-financed dictator has detained over two million Acholi Luos into concentration camps with over 1,000 Luo people in northern Uganda are dying every week. It is the same people like Corsi who promoted bigotry in Kenya in the recent violent election that led to the questionable power-sharing deal between defeated Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and the victorious Raila Amollo Odinga, who settled for the prime minister’s post to avoid further ethnic bloodshed. 

Corsi’s book claims Sen. Obama and Odinga are both Muslims who should not be allowed to lead. The truth is both Prime Minister Odinga and Sen. Obama are not Muslim. Their only crime in Corsi’s eyes is their Luo ancestry.

The 2008 presidential election in US presents a clear choice of either keeping an ugly past that Sen. McCain, President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Corsi represent or moving forward to a promising future that Sen. Obama wants to usher.

It is because of bad choices and swifboating tactics that Americans ended up with President Bush in the White House in the first place--a man who has not only dipped America into a $11 trillion national debt, but also loss of jobs and 5,000 deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

The dirty campaign and hatred that Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are propagating is very dangerous for this country and it must stop. Their call to demonize, kill or cause Americans to hate Sen. Obama just because of his color and ancestry must be rejected by all sound minded Americans.

Sen. McCain and his Republican Party are happy with all that is going on today in the country and they want another four years of the same.

No We Can’t.


Peter Otika is an Activist and Social Entrepreneur. He can be reached at peterotika@hotmail.com



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