John McCain, please put country first and calm your supporters.

I'm starting to become more and more fearful of what could happen between now and election day. The videos that are coming out from the campaign trail are terrifying - some are posted below. McCain and Palin are stoking a fire that they don't identify with and don't believe in - I don't think that either of them to be racist or believe Obama to be some kind of Manchurian candidate.

But some of their supporters believe all of these things and more. You see the real fervor of "true believers" in some of these folks - people who actually believe that Obama is a terrorist with some kind of hidden agenda to destroy the country. These are exactly the kinds of people that have the potential to do something crazy and violent - true believers who see themselves as patriots acting in defense of the country.

Jonathan Martin reports on the atmosphere on the most recent campaign rallies, since McCain has fully devoted himself to the William Ayers non-story. Some key quotes:

"...voters this week have shouted out insults at the mention of Obama, pleaded with McCain to get more aggressive with the Democrat and generally demonstrated the sort of visceral anger and unease that reflects a party on the precipice of panic...

**

With McCain passing up the opportunity to level any tough personal shots in his first two debates and the very real prospect of an Obama presidency setting in, the sort of hard-core partisan activists who turn out for campaign events are venting in unusually personal terms.

"Terrorist!” one man screamed Monday at a New Mexico rally after McCain voiced the campaign’s new rhetorical staple aimed at raising doubts about the Illinois senator: “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

"He's a damn liar!” yelled a woman Wednesday in Pennsylvania. "Get him. He's bad for our country."

Was it reasonable to bring up Ayers as a connection that needed to be explained? Perhaps - I can grant that to people who want to fully vet Obama's connections to people in his past. But this has been asked and answered. McCain knows this - it is why he didn't bring up any of these issues to Obama's face during the last debate.

McCain also knows this doesn't play to the middle. McCain has made an overt shift to play to prejudice and ignorance.

Ta-nehisi Coates at the Atlantic connects the McCain campaign's shift to Jerry Falwell invoking fears about Communists in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an excellent post - he correctly notes that using Obama's middle name is "nothing more than today's red-baiting, and it is what it was then - a cover for racists."

Andrew Sullivan draws a comparison to Israel in 1995, noting that the atmosphere McCain is helping to create in the course of his campaign is similar to the emotions raised before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. His role in the creation of the Oslo Accords incensed radical elements within the Israeli Jewish community, those who believed any deal with the Palestinians was simply unacceptable. From Wiki:

On 4 November 1995 Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a radical right-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords and believed he was saving the country from a dire fate. The shooting took place in the evening as Rabin was leaving a mass rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo process. Rabin was rushed to the nearby Ichilov Hospital, where he died on the operating table of blood loss and a punctured lung.

Daniel Lubetzky at the Huffington Post examines the same corrollary, directly looking at the similarities in the run up to Rabin's assassination and the current climate that John McCain is helping to further:

This eerily reminds me of the atmosphere before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel. Far-right Israelis had been engaging in a campaign of vilification against Rabin for months. Right-wing politicians had done nothing to discourage extreme incitement or death threats against Rabin. Posters filled the walls across Israel with horrifying statements and dehumanizing captions against Rabin. Extremist Rabbis said Rabin was betraying Jews and was cursed to death.

Then came Yigal Amir, the assassin who shot Yitzhak Rabin at point blank. When asked, he said he was inspired to kill Rabin to avenge the Jewish people and prevent him undermining Israel.

Suddenly after Rabin's chilling assassination, everyone was against dehumanization and incitement. Everyone had condemned such vitriol all along. Everyone loved Rabin, the martyr and hero. It was unclear how all those posters got posted on the walls, or who had made all those calls into radio stations with threats against Rabin.

What exactly were people saying about Rabin? Take this article from the New York Times, published November 6, 1995, in which some of these attacks on Rabin are described:

There was a sense that the killing of the Prime Minister by a right-wing militant had exposed the real, terrible scope of the division among Jews, in Israel and abroad, over the peace he had tried to achieve.

Though the level of invective had been rising steadily since the peace agreement was reached, and Mr. Rabin was frequently denounced by ardent foes as a "traitor," or pictured with an Arab head scarf or a Nazi swastika, most Israelis seemed to assume that the passions would never reach to murder.

"People who didn't agree with him said all sorts of things, but nobody ever believed that this could happen, that a Jew would kill another Jew," said Toby Wolf, a graphic artist, standing with hundreds of Israelis who gathered to light candles and chant psalms outside the Prime Minister's official residence here.

This is exactly the same type of rhetoric occurring at McCain/Palin rallies today. Calling someone a terrorist today in the United States is no different than calling someone a Nazi in Israel in 1995.

We cannot allow it to stand.

This is an exceedingly dangerous part of this campaign. John McCain owes it to all of us to step up to the plate and speak out against irrationality, against those who indict Obama the man, against those that would use race and xenophobia to fan the anger and fear of the worst parts of our society.

The fact that McCain hasn't stepped up to say or do anything to temper these types of feelings - to emphasize that this is a campaign about ideas and not identity - is just flat out wrong. If you're a McCain supporter and can't see or admit that, then you're worse than any Obama supporter that you've ever called a Kool-Aid drinker. If you stand by and tacitly endorse this type of campaign, then you've sacrificed your integrity along with John McCain.