I like Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo, and think he has done an excellent job covering (and in many cases uncovering) the issues arising over the 2008 election.
I don’t always agree with him, but I think he has a good grasp of the difference between reporting hard news and editorializing, and he rarely mixes the two.
I also appreciate that he has established a real news organization that uses its own sources, and is a good model for citizen journalism.
But his latest posts on the negative cast of the McCain/Palin campaign have been breathtaking.
When he does editorialize about the dog-whistle smearing that has been done by McCain and Palin, his fury and contempt is clear, and because he’s not usually a ranter, that fury is more compelling in the contrast.
His latest post, McCainism is a doozy:
For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I’m under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don’t think that’s realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It’s part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many of us have for the issues at stake in our elections.
But McCain’s campaign has devolved into something altogether different … what with its increasingly open appeals to racial conflict and aggressive invocations of blood hatred of Arabs and Muslims. As The New Republic phrases it, McCain’s “subtle incitements of racial warfare and underhanded implications of foreign nativity.” Over the months we’ve become desensitized to the moral depravity of McCain’s campaign.