Plus ça change...

I'm smiling (albeit somewhat bitterly) at the outrage generated by the latest ugliness coming out of the Republican campaign. The cries of "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" in particular.

In 1996, just after the Republican Convention in San Diego, Tim and I were asked to travel with the Dole campaign for "a few weeks". Those few weeks ended up being until Election Day.

I'm here to tell you that the lynch mobs crowds attending the Palin or McCain rallies are really, seriously, no worse than the bunches of True Believers who attended the Dole rallies in 1996. And they hated us, The Press, and blamed us for the downfall of their candidate.

I remember during the Dole campaign's desperate 96-Hour Non-Stop Victory Tour Tour-From-Hell, landing at a rally in New Mexico around 3 AM. The local press practically fell on their knees in thanks, because the crowd had gotten so hostile that local cops were standing betwixt them and them, as the Dole Faithful faced the head-on press platform and chanted, fists pumping, "Liars, liars. Tell the truth!"

I lost count of how many cretinous assholes got in my face about how horrible we were and how we should all die painful deaths and, on one memorable occasion, a lovely, foaming-at-the-mouth, wild-eyed creep screamed at me that it was too bad he didn't have his gun - at which point I climbed up the barricade between us and went off until my favorite Secret Service agent escorted him off the premises whilst explaining to him that death threats were uncool.

I've worked a lot of political rallies, a lot of political events in general. I've been at this for (eek) 20 years now. And I can say that in my experience, the *only* times I've been threatened by The Left were at the first big anti-Iraq war rally in San Francisco (where some young intense thing also tried to argue that the Mainstream Media *never* covered these kinds of things, then started chanting at me, "Press go home!" - aroo?), and outside San Quentin the night Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed. I wrote about that night here.

Honestly? According to my own, internal, unscientific, anecdote-laden polling? The Far Right is suffering from a collective sociopathic disease, and the tenor of Republican campaigns for the last 30 years does nothing but feed that sociopathy. It's nothing new. I simply think that the 24-hour news cycle and the plethora of cable news networks and their voracious appetites for content, and the explosion of Internet blogs and political websites, means that this sort of thing is covered more.