Jumping Ship…

McCain is on a quick trip to the bottom and he’s shedding Republicans and supporter’s as he goes along.

First, it was educated conservatives like George F. Will, as he cringed at and reviled the choice of Sarah Palin as vice-president and resumed the culture wars.

Now, repeatedly providing the red-meat to the lowest common denominator, with accusations that Obama is both a socialist and a terrorist sympathizer, inciting both fear and hatred of Obama in his base instead of mere disagreement on this issues, John McCain is sinking to a new low.

His crowds have been hostile and insistent in their case that Obama is Muslim, terrorist, socialist, and in many cases treasonous.

This sentiment is no longer just limited now, to the McCain campaign, as hatred seems to be spilling over into other Republican down ticket races. In a rally for the Republican Senator from Georgia’s relection, shouts of “Bomb Obama!” were heard. The Republican party is careening out of control in the absence of leadership. George Bush is toxic, John McCain, Boehner and Mitch McConnell were unable to command the Republicans into passing the first bail-out, and now even the crowds are taking on the character of unruly mobs. Crowd members here lecture McCain, telling him to “stand up” against socialists Pelosi and Obama. Does McCain do anything to silence the crowd, hush them back in to reasonableness? No, he agrees with the man.

Some Republicans are jumping ship.

Take Frank Schaeffer, who campaigned for McCain in 2000 and who wrote a book, which was endorse by John McCain.

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us,” I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, “Kill him!” At one of your rallies, someone called out, “Terrorist!” Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee – an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

Or the former Governor of Michigan, George Milliken, who rescinded his endorsement today.

“He is not the McCain I endorsed,” said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. “He keeps saying, ‘Who is Barack Obama?’ I would ask the question, ‘Who is John McCain?’ because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

“I’m disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.”

and former Senator Lincoln Chafee:

McCain campaigned for Chafee’s unsuccessful re-election bid in 2006, but Chafee said he is concerned McCain has swung to the right, a divisive strategy that could make it difficult for him to govern.

“That’s not my kind of Republicanism,” said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. “I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what’s happened now. In eight short years they’ve taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they’ve torn it into tatters.”

Will McCain listen to these voices within his own party, or merely run it into the ground as the sad end of a lost Republican brand and a Bush legacy?

-Marc-